檳榔嶼

- Searching for love, I left the relationship I had been in for almost fifteen years. This common-law marriage began when I was nineteen and ended in my mid-thirties.
- Faced with making a living in the real "white supremacist capitalist patriarchal" work world, many of us began to shift our values away from the freethinking of those heady days of cultural revolution to compromise and adjust.
- As women gained greater economic power and new freedoms, the movement began to lose its force and power.
  - In the world outside the home, feminist success could be registered easily, but inside the home, traditional ways of doing things were making a slow and steady comeback.
- Women's inability to achieve the same success in the domestic household that were being achieved in the world of work actually created a different kind of rage. Many women felt betrayed by feminism.
- However, only women who made large incomes were truly liberated by work.
- Partnered women who made smaller incomes found that it was the man in the house who benefited most from these changes. He had less economic pressure and less responsibility.
- In many cases men who previously contributed income to the household held on to their money, and women's wages were spent for the household, thus eliminating the possibility that her newly gained economic clout would translate into actual freedom and power to demand equality or escape male domination.
- Newly working women with husbands and/or families often felt that life had become harder, more difficult. To them, it felt as though the feminist insistence on work as the road to freedom had been a betrayal. Their critique was justified.
- Not only were masses of women entering the workforce, but also they were embracing a newfound psychological independence. This became the foundation for women to demand more from love.
  - Balancing work and love, doing a fine job at both, many women began to expect more from men emotionally.
- When it came to the realm of heterosexual romance, we wanted to give and receive love rooted in sharing and mutuality.
- With hindsight, I can see I demanded of my partner that he give more emotionally because I did not understand what I understand now, which is the reality that he did not have more to give.
  - He was emotionally blocked. He was shut down. To many onlookers we came as close to having a caring, constructive, equal partnership as anyone could expect to have. Sadly, even though we went to therapy together and tried hard to save our bond, love did not prevail.
  - He did not want to do the emotional  work. Like many men, he was at his best giving within the traditional boundaries of male and female sex roles, adding some changes reflecting the impact of feminism and New Age masculinity (that is, sharing household chores, child care). 
- Robin Norwood, <<Women Who Love Too Much>> : On one hand, women were too concerned about love; on the other hand, in a decidedly antifeminist manner, it then "blamed" women for our failure to find fulfilling love.
  - There was no discussion of patriarchy or male domination in Norwood's book. Men were not held accountable for failing to embrace emotional growth.
  - She did not discuss the extent to which male withholding and other forms of psychological terrorism cultivated in women the desire to please and placate.
- I left when I entered midlife because I felt I had not yet known real love. And I did not want to end up like my mother, remaining in relationship for my entire life wherein I felt deeply unloved. I was not alone.
- Shere Hite, <<Women and Love>> : the reality that women involved with men felt that they had surrendered the hope of finding love, accepting in its place the pleasures and/or benefits of care and companionship.
  - "Women are suffering a lot of pain in their love relationships with men. I have always felt that 'love', perhaps because it is considered to be the center, if not the totality of a woman's life, is a risky business, and one to which feminists should address much energy and ingenuity."
- By the end of eighties, many women and men felt that the feminist movement had accomplished its most important goals. 
- In the wake of victories and triumphs, practically all feminist discussion of the meaning of love ceased.
- Without a sustained, inspired vision of mutual love, our culture revises again and again old stories.
- A passion for love had to be kept secret - unstated. To speak one's longing was to risk shame. 
  - No feminist woman proclaimed loudly that she was looking for love. All of us were encouraged to act as though the workforce, careers, and money were more important than love.