My mother was not without kindness or decency. She did not abandon her children or neglect them. But she could not forgive us our existence. (I didn’t ask to be born!) She was human, and we humans always insist that someone must pay for life’s unfairness to us. If nothing else had made me a feminist, this would have been enough: the fate of women like her, forced by society to give their lives to something they neither wanted nor were in any way suited for.
