As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part of any narratives of their own…women will be staving off destiny and not inviting or inventing or controlling it.
Interpretation
Women need to connect and share their experiences to shape their own narratives and destinies.
This quote emphasizes the importance of women sharing their personal stories and experiences with each other. It suggests that isolation prevents women from forming a collective narrative, limiting their abilities to influence their own destinies and recount their lives meaningfully.
In practice
During a women's empowerment event to encourage sharing personal stories.
Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]
Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.
Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.
Only then does he realize what he has done to Mirabelle, how wanting a square inch of her and not all of her has damaged them both, and how he cannot justify his actions except that, well, it was life.
I'm not an analyzer. I've got a son that analyzes everything and everybody. But I don't analyze people.
My feminist training was that this was your goal, to be a self-sufficient woman, but that is a miscalculation. It's just not the way we work. We work in dialogue with the community.
Anybody who's been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they've thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major.
If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family.
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