Virginia Woolf on women

"And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women—but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I am."

(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 115).

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Childless German writers

..."a considerable portion of women's lives was devoted to life-threatening childbirths and time-consuming child-rearing. It is not surprising, therefore, that a disproportionately large number of women writers were childless (half of the authors in this anthology!), or that women wrote before they were married and after their children had reached adulthood."

(from Bitter Healing: German Women Writers from 1700 to 1830. Jeannine Blackwell, Susanne Zantop. 1990, p. 22.)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

A mother and daughter disagree

"Sometimes she [my daughter] tells me of the pain she felt in childhood because I was so often working and not to be distracted, or off on some mysterious pilgrimage, the importance of which, next to herself, she could not understand."

(from Anything We Love Can Be Saved by Alice Walker, p. 45--from a speech given in 1990).

"She was a part of and still is a part of the women's movement,'' Rebecca says, "and there is a sense that young women had been made dependent and kept dependent in many ways. She thought by allowing me this great, independent childhood that I would be more independent and stronger as an adult. I don't think she thought she was being neglectful. I think she thought this was a good, fine thing, to let me experience the world alone.''

(from an interview with Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker, in the Washington Post, 2001; available on her web site.)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins