Kim Chernin quotes:

Whenever women have made any social gains, whether it's being accepted as athletes or moving into the professions, it's going to be contradicted with an image of woman as small, diminished, reduced, brought back to a childish body. The result is that a lot of extraordinary power is going to be diverted into making oneself smaller than one is meant to be.

Fortunately, the mind is restless; when it uncovers a layer of its own deception, gives up an illusion, exposes a lie, it does not stand idle for long before the collapse of its earlier assumptions.

it is possible to study fashion the way one can study a work of art, so that it reflects significantly upon the issues and conflicts of its own day.

Secretly, we wish anyone we love will think exactly the way we do.

Where hunger is imposed by external circumstances, the act of starvation remains literal, a tragic biological event that does not serve metaphoric or symbolic purposes. It is only in a country where one is able to choose hunger that elective starvation may come to express cultural conflict or even social protest.

a woman obsessed with her body is also obsessed with the limitations of her emotional life.

I fear, as any daughter would, losing myself back into the mother.

It frequently happens that when the dominant culture loses a vision or actively suppresses it, this lost knowledge arises again among those excluded from that culture.

Science is not neutral in its judgments, nor dispassionate, nor detached ...