"I hope, and believe, that every woman in this room knows that on the subject of motherhood there are no experts. What we need, in any case, as women, is not experts on our lives, but the opportunity and the validation to name and describe the truths of our lives (..)
Listen to us, then, as to four women who through certain kinds of luck, privilege, struggle, exceptional status, and at certain kinds of cost, have been able not only to live the experience of daughterhood and motherhood, but also to reflect and write about it. But listen even more closely to yourselves."

"..the daughter and the mother; the black woman and the white; the lesbian mother and the married housewife; the woman who has chosen single or communal motherhood and the woman who has chosen to use her life in ways which do not include the raising of children; the woman who has given up custody of her children and the woman who is righting to keep hers; the step-daughter, the foster-mother, the pregnant woman; the daughter who has never known her mother, the mother who has no daughters. What we all, collectively, have lived, as the daughters of women, as the mothers of children, is a tale far greater than any three or four of us can encompass"

"once a woman has borne a child she is viewed as the primary and uttermost source of that child’s good and evil,"