Jenny Offill Quotes

I believe in the Motherhood of God.

As motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.

I wonder if that's the difference between fathers and mothers. I'm friends with people who have kids that are like 5 and under, and they're still in that intense mother-bonding phase. It might just be that. Because the dads haven't changed.

I don't think God is a gender. He presents himself as a father but he comes to us with the tenderness of a mother. In some of the parables, he is the housewife who cleans the house looking for the lost coin.

In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don't both need to. ... What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else - or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon - find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

But children, hark! Your mother would rather, When you arrived, have been your father.

... in the end, Goddess is just a word. It simply means the divine in female form.

Except that my father got a raise, and my mother didn't because she doesn't get paid for housework, and my sister stopped reading those self-esteem books because she met a new boy

It is hard directing and being a mother. The hours are terrible and you have to sort of suspend your life when you're in production. I can absolutely see why there are so few women directing, because it's physically a very demanding thing to do. Fathers can only do it because they have wives at home doing all the other stuff. I can only do it because I have a husband that helps with the kids at home.

Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.

the patriarchal family, with its division of functions between a providing and protective father and a home-making, submissive mother, however satisfactory it may have been in its time, has outlived its day. Bread-winning is no longer a monopoly of men, and home-making should no longer be the monopoly of women.

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

claims about what's 'natural' have long been used to reinforce traditional gender roles and values. ... Even the notion that women should have children at all is based on the idea that a woman's inherent and most important role is that of mother. Shockingly, men's 'innate' roles are a lot more fun than the ones bestowed on women.

The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

I hate pants. This is something I have inherited from my father. He despised pants, and my mother was never allowed to wear them at home. We're talking about a different time period now, when the man was much more the ruler of the house. But I still feel that way, and neither my mother nor Maria is allowed to go out with me in pants.

Mother is the dead heart of the family spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps, and watches the television.

Motherhood goes back in history to a time when a father had no way of knowing his children. Fatherhood only became known when class patriarchal society had established itself and imposed monogamous marriage on women. Motherhood is like sun and rain and plants, a quality and product of nature which does not require laws or systems in order to exist.

Mama seemed to do only what my father wanted, and yet we lived the way my mother wanted us to live.

Each person is entitled to some version of God that seems real, yet many versions contradict one another. The God of any religion is only a fragment of God. This has to be true, because a being who is unbounded has no image, no role to play, no location either inside or outside the cosmos, whereas religions offer many images--father, mother, lawgiver, judge, ruler of the universe.

There are some men who, in a spirit of arrogance, think they are superior to women. They do not seem to realize that they would not exist but for the mother who gave them birth. When they assert their superiority they demean her.

Holy mother!" "Hmph. More like holy father. I'd think you'd know the difference." -Hephaetus

My time in the arena made me realize how I needed to stop punishing [my mother] for something she couldn't help, specifically the crushing depression she fell into after my father's death. Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them.

Woman does not possess the image of God in herself but only when taken together with the male who is her head, so that the whole substance is one image. But when she is assigned the role as helpmate, a function that pertains to her alone, then she is not the image of God. But as far as the man is concerned, he is by himself alone the image of God just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together into one.