Sublime

We talk fine things about women, but in our hearts we know that they are very limited beings—most of them.

Jeff,

sex distinctions?"

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

She may agree with the poet Mary Oliver that “creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration. . . . It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching,” or with Gertrude Stein, who warned, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

"Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.

These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call "femininity."