The risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her "job" is that the children's growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother's indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share Image
I find it profoundly symbolic that I am appearing before a committee of fifteen men who will report to a legislative body of one hundred men because of a decision handed down by a court comprised of nine men--on an issue that affects millions of women… I have the feeling that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn't be struggling… — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share
Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share Image
Over the years, I've found that I either live life or write about it. I can't seem to do both simultaneously - I have to do it sequentially. When I write incessantly, I lose touch with the issues and passions that fuel the work. But when I get too involved in organizations or movement endeavors, I almost forget that I'm… — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share
Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child's approval, more alert to the child's emotional state, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child's suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon, the power to disrupt the… — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share
No labourer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -except the housewife. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share Image
I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see… — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share Image
Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blueeyes or small feet. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share Image
If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share Image
If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share Image
In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes… In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year… It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law… Industrialized America… — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share
Friendships aren't perfect and yet they are very precious. For me, not expecting perfection all in one place was a great release. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share Image
Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin Copy Share Image
