"Women are controlled by lashing us to our bodies. In an early and classic essay, Susan Griffin pointed out that “rape is a form of mass terrorism, for the victims of rape are chosen indiscriminately, but the propagandists for male supremacy broadcast that it is women who cause rape by being unchaste or in the wrong place at the wrong time - in essence, by behaving as through they were free…The fear of rape keeps women off the streets at night. Keeps women at home. Keeps women passive and modest for fear that they be thought provocative.” In a later development of Griffin’s analysis, Susan Brownmiller suggests that enforced, indentured motherhood may originally have been the price paid by women by the men who became their “protectors” (and owners) against the causal violence of other men. If rape has been terrorism, motherhood has been penal servitude. It need not be ."
~Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born
Painting by Elisabeth Slettnes
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