Quotes from Marilyn French

Pride. You have it where you can have it.

I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes, she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.

nineteenth-century feminism was defeated by men's adamant refusal to take responsibility for maintaining themselves and their children;

What bothered her was not that the tasks that had to be done were exerting. It was not even that they were tedious. It was that she felt that the three others lived their lives and she went around after them cleaning up their mess. She was an unpaid servant, expected to do a superlative job. In return, she was permitted to call this house hers. But so did they.

Women and men. They played by different rules because the rules applied to them were different. It was very simple. It was the women who got pregnant and the women who ended up with the kids. All the rest stemmed from that. So women had to learn to protect themselves, had to be wary and careful. The way the rules had been set up, everything was against them.

Laws institutionalized men's unfounded superiority over women by defining marriage as ownership

Life felt hideously empty. But she told herself that was only because women are educated to think that marriage will be a sudden panacea to all emptiness, and although she'd fought off such notions, she had no doubt been infected by them.

I hear Martha's voice often as I walk along the beach. And others' too--Lily, Val, Kyla. I sometimes think I've swallowed every woman I ever knew. My head is full of voices. They blend with the wind and the sea as I walk the beach, as if they were disembodied forces of nature, a tornado whirling around me. I feel as if I were a medium and a whole host of departed spirits has descended on me clamoring to be let out.

men and women desperate enough to risk death to express their wishes.19

Thus capitalism, which elevated patriarchy by turning its major value, power, into the only value, also destabilized it by enabling women for the first time in history to become economically independent.

They saw women in the public sphere as whores, thieves, she-men with the audacity to carry guns and wear pants.

glass. And there really weren't any

Charlotte Bunch writes that if one ethnic national group were attacking another, killing and maiming them at the same rate as men attack and kill women (and she is speaking only of attacks by intimates), the situation would be held to constitute a state of emergency or even war. But domestic violence is only one campaign in what amounts to a widespread war against women.

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.

Even disasters -- there are always disasters when you travel -- can be turned into adventures.

Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.

there's no justice, there's only love.

It's strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman's appearance to her face.

Control over a woman is the only form of dominance most men possess, for most men are merely subjects of more powerful men.

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.