Hanadi’s Reviews > Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution > Status Update

"Until men are ready to share the responsibilities of full-time, universal child-care as a social priority, their sons and ours will be without any coherent vision of what nonpatriarchal manhood might be."

"The experience of lying halfawake in a barred crib, in a labor room with other women moaning in a drugged condition, where “no one comes” except to do a pelvic examination or give an injection, is a classic experience of alienated childbirth. The loneliness, the sense of abandonment, of being imprisoned, powerless, and depersonalized is the chief collective memory of women who have given birth in ... hospitals."

"The woman’s body, with its potential for gestating, bringing forth and nourishing new life, has been through the ages a field of contradictions: a space invested with power, and an acute vulnerability; a numinous figure and the incarnation of evil; a hoard of ambivalences, most of which have worked to disqualify women from the collective act of defining culture."

"She exists, not to cajole or reassure man, but to assert herself."

First chapter & I'm soooo into the book!