Tired as I was of conflict, I felt that I must not shrink from the fight, nor abandon in cowardice the attempt to prove, as no theories could ever satisfactorily prove without examples, that marriage and motherhood need never tame the mind, nor swamp and undermine ability and training, nor trammel and domesticise political perception and social judgement. Today, as never before, it was urgent for individual women to show that life was enriched, mentally and spiritually as well as physically and socially, by marriage and children; that these experiences rendered the woman who accepted them the more and not the less able to take the world's pulse, to estimate its tendencies, to play some definite, hard-headed, hard-working part in furthering the constructive ends of a political civilisation . Vera Brittain
About This Quote

Margaret Mead was a prominent American anthropologist and a leading authority on the study of social behavior and cultural anthropology. She was a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and was the first female president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She is best known for her controversial and influential work "Male and Female" (1943), which sought to answer the question; what roles should men and women play in society?

Source: Testament Of Youth

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  1. How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die

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