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Adrienne Rich Quotes about Children

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We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

Adrienne Rich
Children, New Relationship, Motherhood
Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

Adrienne Rich
Children, Believe, Bad Ass
Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.44, W. W. Norton & Company

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

Adrienne Rich
Children, Newborn Child, Names
Adrienne Rich (2013). “Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

Adrienne Rich
Children, Growing Up, War

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

Adrienne Rich
Children, Feelings, Suffering
Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.

Adrienne Rich
Children, Motherhood, Identity
Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

Adrienne Rich
Mothers Day, Children, Eye
Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

Adrienne Rich
Mother, Children, War
Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

Adrienne Rich
Inspiring, Mothers Day, Children
Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to braid the hair, to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I don't know when most women sleep.

Adrienne Rich
Running, Children, Twilight

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.

Adrienne Rich
Mother, Children, Men

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

Adrienne Rich
Children, Father, Choices
Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.80, W. W. Norton & Company

Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

Adrienne Rich
Running, Children, Past
Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.44, W. W. Norton & Company

In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.

Adrienne Rich
Determination, Children, Ignorance

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