In Defense Of Witches: The Legacy Of The Witch Hunts And Why Women Are Still On Trial Quotes
"You are one of the primary causes of the downfall of our beautiful American family and society today." - TV audience member to Gloria Steinem.
"I can’t mate in captivity." - Gloria Steinem's response to a journalist asking why she wasn't married.
"Some people still assume that, because we got legally married, he was the love of my life—and I was his. That’s such a misunderstanding of human uniqueness." - Gloria Steinem.
"It’s finally becoming possible to be both single and whole." - Newsweek, 1973.
"Marriage as the ‘strongest anti-poverty weapon’." - Robert Rector, architect of US social care reform.
"Be the doctor your parents always wanted you to marry." - Classic feminist slogan.
"The institution of motherhood has ghettoised and degraded female potentialities." - Adrienne Rich.
"‘Damned clever, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.’" - Erica Jong's novel, Fear of Flying.
"The dictionary defines ‘adventurer’ as ‘a person who has, enjoys or seeks adventures,’ but ‘adventuress’ is ‘a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.’" - Gloria Steinem.
"I remember while we were having sex, saying ‘This is how men feel!’ There was just not the remotest possibility that I was going to get pregnant." - Woman after tubal ligation.
"By virtue of an apparent paradox that’s easily disentangled, concern for humanity’s well-being and respect for life are actually to be found among those who accept or promote limiting births."
"A pro-birth policy is about wielding power, not about care for humanity."
"Choosing to break the chain of the generations offers a way of bringing a fresh perspective to your own circumstances."
"One person’s motivations for parenthood—such as wishing for a role, or for influence, identity, intimacy, pleasure or immortality—can be another’s reasons for not becoming a parent."
"When you die, you will leave behind nobody birthed by you, partly moulded by you and to whom you would have handed down a sense of family and the enormous, sometimes overwhelming baggage of stories, situations, sorrows and treasures accumulated by previous generations."
"Men don’t age better than women, they’re just allowed to age."
"The message young women get from the youth culture is that it’s wonderful to be young and terrible to grow old."
"In the West, at least, contraception is widely available, and a child can no longer be considered an indispensable economic advantage—quite the opposite."
"There are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world."
"Not having a child means knowing that, when you die, you will leave behind nobody birthed by you, partly moulded by you and to whom you would have handed down a sense of family and the enormous, sometimes overwhelming baggage of stories, situations, sorrows and treasures accumulated by previous generations."
"We cannot make people find the signs of a woman’s aging beautiful, you will be saying. How can we be so oblivious to our conditioning, to the prejudice and the long history of imagery that shapes our gaze and forges our ideas of what is beautiful and what is ugly?"
"Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth."
"Every minute. Every second. Growing older is a wonderful thing because it means that we get a chance, every day, to live a full, happy life."
"The greatest ambition we may foster is to be ‘well preserved.’ Of course, celebrities feel the pressure more than most."
"But Nixon is interested in these women as subjects, not just as images, and he’s committed to documenting the passage of time, not defying it."
"The inequality between the sexes on issues of age is both one of the easiest to spot and one of the hardest to challenge."
"Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier—and remain active adults, enjoying the long erotic career of which women are capable, far longer."
"To age is to lose your fertility, your seductive powers and your role as the care provider for a husband and children—at least according to the dominant criteria; it makes you a rebel, however unintentionally."
"To go on forever playing out the helplessness and vulnerability of early youth allows us to pass in a society that condemns confident women—but this forces women to give up the greatest sources of potency and pleasure in life."
"Denied most outlets for sexual energy permitted to men, it takes many women that long to wear out some of their inhibitions."
"The human being emerges here as a decisively separate entity, no longer continuous with the universe with which it had once shared a soul."
"I am not this assemblage of members which is called the human body."
"The witch, symbol of the violence of nature, raised storms, caused illness, destroyed crops, obstructed generation and killed infants."
"We must not believe that the inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden."
"A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land."
"The practice of shaving those suspected of witchcraft from head to toe can be seen as a harbinger of this requirement that everything be visible, the better to be controlled."
"The notorious phenomenon of cabin fever and the need for decompression, perennially trotted out to justify the sexual harassment of female doctors by their colleagues and managers."
"The doctor can argue that all he’s doing is saving the woman from an evil to which her fragile nature makes her peculiarly vulnerable; this evil used to be called the Devil, but these days goes by 'disease'."
"The medical realm tends to perpetuate the impulse to dominate and subjugate."
"The wellness industry specializes in creating safe, welcoming, amber-lit spaces that make people feel cared-for and relaxed."
"Despite showing the same symptoms, a female patient who complains of pressure in her chest will find herself prescribed anti-anxiety drugs, whereas a man will be sent to a cardiologist."
"Some studies point to the unconscious sexism of doctors, to their tendency to interrupt and cut women short more often than men."
"We must once again turn the world upside down."