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.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the struggle of workers and mothers against societal and personal pressures.
Adrienne Rich emphasizes the disparity between collective labor movements and the isolation faced by mothers in their homes. While workers can organize and protest, mothers often feel constrained by emotional ties to their children, leading to personal turmoil or mental exhaustion. The metaphor of 'wildcat strikes' suggests that their protests against these pressures often manifest in breakdowns rather than organized action.
In practice
During a women's rights rally, this quote can be used to highlight the dual challenges faced by mothers and workers.
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.
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
The end was surely near. The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.
Heroism is latent in every human soul - However humble or unknown, they (the veterans) have renounced what are accounted pleasures and cheerfully undertaken all the self-denials - privations, toils, dangers, sufferings, sicknesses, mutilations, life-long hurts and losses, death itself - for some great good, dimly seen but dearly held.
Every tiny molecule of Ash is in motion with my heat I am such a Lunatic that I am free even in Jail.
The civil rights movement didn't begin in Montgomery and it didn't end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.
Courage and comfort, all shall yet go well
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
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