A Woman Must Wait For Her Ovaries

One Of Life's Intriguing Paradoxes Is That Hierarchical Social Order Makes Cheap Rents And Outré Artists' Colonies Possible. Raffish Bohemian Neighborhoods Flourished In The Days Of Racial Segregation; Under Integration The Artistic Poor Have No Safe Places In Which To Create.... If America Lacks A Vigorous Culture It Is Partly Because Studios And Ateliers Have Become Crack Houses.

I'm For Prayer In The Schools Because Ritual And Ceremony Are Calming And Civilizing, And The Little Fartlings Should Be Tamped Down Whenever Possible.

When Women Talk About "privacy" They Mean Abortion Rights, And The Millions Of Words Feminists Have Written About "a Room Of One'sown" Refer To Psychological Space, Rarely To Physical Solitude. For Most Women Being Alone Is Tantamount To Being Deserted.

A Woman Must Wait For Her Ovaries To Die Before She Can Get Her Rightful Personality Back. Post-menstrual Is The Same As Pre-menstrual; I Am Once Again What I Was Before The Age Of Twelve: A Female Human Being Who Knows That A Month Has Thirty Day, Not Twenty-five, And Who Can Spend Every One Of Them Free Of The Shackles Of That Defect Of Body And Mind Known As Femininity.

The American Woman's Concept Of Marriage Is A Clearly Etched Picture Of Something Uninflated On The Floor. A Sleeping-bag Withoutair, A Beanbag Without Beans, A Padded Bra Without Pads. To Work On It, You Start Pumping--what The Magazines Call "breathing Life Into Your Marriage." Do Enough Of This And The Marriage Becomes A Kind Of Banquo's Ghost, A Quasi-living Entity.