“I'm ashamed to reveal that, even as a teanager, I was guilty of participanting in the mummy wars and jusging another woman for her mothering preferences. It seems that the stay-at-home mothers are still being accused of being anti-feminist and poor role models to their daughters, whereas working mothers have been accused of everything from child abuse to being selfish feminists and inflating house prices. Women are pinched against other women, and no matter where you stand in this minefield, you can't help but notice that men seem to escape the guilt and the blame.”

“Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.”

“Now, here's the real beauty of this contorting contradiction. Both working mothers and stay-at-home mothers get to be failures. The ethos of intensive mothering has lower status in our culture ("stay-at-home mothers are boring"), but occupies a higher moral ground ("working mothers are neglectful"). So, welcome to the latest media catfight: the supposed war between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. Why analyze all the ways in which our country has failed to support families while inflating the work ethic to the size of the Hindenburg when you can, instead, project this paradox onto what the media have come to call, incessantly, "the mommy wars." The "mommy wars" puts mothers into two, mutually exclusive categories--working mother versus stay-at-home mother, and never the twain shall meet. It goes without saying that they allegedly hate each other's guts. In real life, millions of mothers move between these two categories, have been one and then the other at various different times, creating a mosaic of work and child-rearing practices that bears no resemblance to the supposed ironclad roles suggested by the "mommy wars." Not only does the media catfight pit mother against mother, but it suggests that all women be reduced to their one role--mother--or get cut out of the picture entirely.”

“Oddly, I had never thought of myself as a feminist. I had been denounced by certain radical feminist collectives as a ‘lackey’ for men. That charge was based on my having written and sung two albums of songs that my female accusers claimed elevated and praised men. Resenting that label, I had joined the majority of black women in America in denouncing feminism… . The feminists were right. The value of my life had been obliterated as much by being female as by being black and poor. Racism and sexism in America were equal partners in my oppression.”

“...One of the reasons so many women say "I'm not a feminist but..." (and then put forward a feminist position), is that in addition to being stereotyped as man-hating Amazons, feminists have also been cast as antifamily and antimotherhood.”

“It makes me really sad that women have been ejected from the seat of their power in this society in terms of what happens around childbirth. In other parts of the world, there are places where women can't drive a car, but they're still in charge of childbirth... The minute my child was born, I was reborn as a feminist. It's so incredible what women do. I find it metaphorically resonant that a pregnant woman looks like she's just sitting on a couch, but she's actually exhausting herself constructing a human being. The laborious process of growing a human is analogous to how 'women's work' is seen.”