Lori

“Now, by all accounts, you have the perfect life: you have the high-earning husband, the rosy-cheeked children, and the Buick in the driveway. But something isn’t right. Household tasks don’t seem to hold your attention; you snarl at your children instead of blanketing them with smiles. You fret about how little you resemble those glossy women in the magazines, the ones who clean counters and bake cakes and radiate delight. (Looking at those ads, a housewife and freelance writer named Betty Friedan “thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor.”) Everything and everyone confirm that it’s just as you suspected: the problem is you. You’re oversexed, you’re undersexed, you’re overeducated, you’re unintelligent. You need to have your head shrunk; you need to take more sleeping pills. You ought to become a better cook—all those fancy new kitchen appliances!—and in the meantime be content and grateful with what you have. The cultural pressure of the 1950s was so intense that some women, in order to survive, killed off the parts of themselves that couldn’t conform.”
― Maggie Doherty, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s

“Ignoring the treatment of the most marginalized women doesn’t set a standard that can protect any women. Instead it sets up arbitrary respectability-centered goalposts against which all women are supposed to measure their behavior. That’s not freedom; that’s just a more elaborate series of cages that will never be comfortable or safe. Any system that makes basic human rights contingent on a narrow standard of behavior pits potential victims against each other and only benefits those who would prey on them.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“One paradox is that on matters of sex and family, working-class Americans tend to believe in traditional values even as they don’t necessarily adhere to them. Frustrated and overwhelmed by difficulties, they sometimes don’t show the discipline that they believe in. In contrast, educated liberals are less judgmental and say in polls that they accept premarital sex and various living arrangements, but they have relatively few lifetime sexual partners and are less likely to divorce. In short, while the educated don’t profess traditional values, they are more likely to live them and to try to get their children to live them. Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia who runs the National Marriage Project, calls this “talking left, walking right.” In contrast, young working-class conservatives disapprove of hookups even as they engage in them. Effectively, they talk right and walk left.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“However, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” only works as clichéd shorthand; in reality the enemy of my enemy may be my enemy as well. Being caught between groups that hate you for different aspects of your identity means none of you are safe.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot