Quotes from Kim Chernin

It frequently happens that when the dominant culture loses a vision or actively suppresses it, this lost knowledge arises again among those excluded from that culture.

a woman obsessed with her body is also obsessed with the limitations of her emotional life.

Secretly, we wish anyone we love will think exactly the way we do.

What I wanted from food was companionship, comfort, reassurance, a sense of warmth and well-being that was hard for me to find in my own life, even in my own home.

Women practice their obsession with the body in private. Alone, with despair, we glance into the mirror and down at the scale, hopeful and anguished in our quest for the body's reduction.

It is re-enactment of the ritual feast, in which the eating of an animal's flesh, or a piece of cake shaped like a breast, signifies the coming together of human and divine, individual with collective, tribal ancestor with member of the tribe, human community with nature, or a woman with her own body and feelings.

In the case of Ellen West], whatever chance the woman might have had to grow and to express herself will now have vanished. For her obsession with her body is, fundamentally, an expression of violence towards her soul.

To me, socialism was just common sense.

We felt the one thing the system feared was angry women. We wanted milk for the children.

The sense of an unseen order, brooding attentively over our lives, restores purpose to individual acts of concern.

it is possible to study fashion the way one can study a work of art, so that it reflects significantly upon the issues and conflicts of its own day.