Second-Wave Feminism Examines Violence Against Women

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – “Is this all?””

“the problem that has no name”

“a relationship of dominance and subordinance… However muted its present appearance may be, sexual domination obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its fundamental concept of power.”

“Lawrence is a passionate believer in the myth of nature which has ordained that female personality is congenital, even her shame not the product of conditioning, but innate”

“the Personal is political”

“Consciousness-raising”

“Sisterhood is powerful”

“the reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction”

“not a crime of irrational, impulsive, uncontrollable lust… but a deliberate, hostile, violent act of degradation and possession on the part of a would-be conqueror, designed to intimidate and inspire fear”