Motherhood has been the center of a culture war instead of an economic policy debate.

p. 258, For a Politics of Quality of Life, Perfect Madness, Judith Warner

Anxiety is – and undoubtedly always has been – a natural part of motherhood.
”There is an enlarged sense of vulnerability, personal and social, created by becoming a mother – and accepting the intimate mission of keeping a dependent being alive,” writes psychologist Jana Malamud Smith (Potent Spell, 2003).

p. 191, Perfect Madness, Judith Warner.

Most women, by the 1980’s, didn’t see the cynicism, or the logistical maneuverings that had gone into emptying words like “choice” and “rights” of real meaning. We accepted these words, in their bastardized forms, as the real thing. And the basic terms of our understanding of our world followed: We had choices. It was our responsibility to make good on them (or not). It was not the government’s responsibility to make sure we were able to make good on them.

p. 181, Perfect Madness, Judith Warner.

Attachment theory – with it’s focus on the problems of childhood separation and maternal absence and inadequacy – fit the bill all too perfectly at a time when many people, in the social sciences and without, we’re worrying themselves sick over the change in women’s lives (the span of years during which American mother’s reached critical mass in the workforce).

p, 106, Perfect Madness, Judith Warner

if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

It is necessary not to think of the baby as a person who get’s hungry, and whose instinctual drives may be met or frustrated, but to think of the baby as an immature being who is all the time on the brink of unthinkable anxiety.

p. 93, Perfect Madness, Judith Warner.