Status Updates From Alva Myrdal: A Daughter's M...

“To become something myself—at the age of forty-six—was therefore a temptation that I could not resist. And cannot regret— in spite of everything.”

“For her, your example has provided a sense of liberation and a source of unlimited aspirations and higher standards totally devoid of any feelings of envy, resentment, competition or inferiority. That is a wonderful effect to have had upon another human being...”

“I understood what she meant in speaking about her other; and thought that she in spite of her obedience to which she referred had arrived at what she wanted and could do. Given all that she had longed to accomplish her achievement lay in pursuing those goals with such creativity and strength in spite of obstacles that she had encountered from childhood on and show the way to so many others.”

“I let myself drift along with the dream that all would turn out well. But now I see clearly that I first became a free person in 1949...”

“My life has been filled with campaigns...”

“Her concern for these issues was so much more of a legacy than the property at stake in her and Gunnar’s wretched will, likely to leave behind only needless disputes.”

“...she saw the result of countless individual and institutional failures to take responsibility as contagious...”

“To be sure, the resistance would itself have to be nonviolent in order not to be self-contradictory, but they did not mean it could not exert force by lawful means.”

“Now in what many saw as the culminating moment of her life’s work, she was confronted with a public shaming of her role as a mother.”

“She singles out the powerful role of mass media in promoting violence, most of all among the young, who were less able to filter out or select the impressions made on them by what they viewed.”

“In turn, Western exporting of films and TV programs worked in tandem with the arms trade to satiate the Third World in patterns of brutality.”

“Like so many others, Alva had been deeply committed to such a perception of common humanity in her youth; but unlike most, she held on to it all her life.”

“...she lived her life in utter confidence that life matters, and consequently that it matters how one lives and treats others. If one trampled on their dignity, one degrade one’s own; and if one has little regard for one’s own dignity, one is unlikely to stand up for it in others.”

“Ideas are like manure. If you don’t spread them they don’t do any good.”

“Yet it led to the oddity that accounts of her life could present her views about children and child rearing at length while passing over her own children almost in silence.”

“That I have kept silent as about everything else, depends on my being proud when I am wounded. She had taken for granted that the breach would be temporary.”

“...Gunnar’s attacks seemed to him more crude and brutal, as if Gunnar, advancing in age, was losing whatever crude inhibitions he had once had in that respect.”

“Exactly when I began working full time was far les important than that I have an independent existence ready about ten years later.”

“...moral philosophy was central to all efforts to understand the world...”