Mary Harrington Quotes

If you’ve grown up in a setting that modelled risk-aversion, proceduralism and institutional love as the default, the sheer arbitrariness of in-personal maternal devotion may appear less loving and more cruelly exclusionary.

No social role embodies this more completely than the 21st century’s update of the Madonna and Child: a dyad that recurs with increasing frequency in the media, comprising a ‘trans child’ whose path is smoothed by an activist mother.

Feminism against progress, then, is anti-universalist, contextual and relational. This recovery of context and relationships begins with restoring our relationship with ourselves: that is, resisting the culture of chronic dissociation.

What we need is a more critical relation to the technologies we use, lest we find instead that they’re using us. Tech determinism is itself a moral choice, that – once taken – frames every other moral choice we’re in a position to make.

while the result may sometimes benefit a subset of wealthy, high-status women in the West, the class interests of this group are increasingly at odds with those of not just many men but also the young, women with fewer resources, and women who are mothers.

That visceral wish to be close to our babies is still powerful enough to induce many Western women every year to opt for life as stay-at-home mums, temporarily or permanently, despite near-universal public messaging that valorises more or less any other life choice you care to name.

this class of women currently has the mic. I suspect many will fight tooth and nail to keep it, using every form of overt and covert political street-fighting at their disposal. In pursuit of their class interests, they’ll use weight of numbers across education, NGOs and corporate HR departments to tip the scales in favour of the legal fiction that sex doesn’t need to exist.

Being uncomfortable with physicality isn’t new. It’s not even uniquely modern: there are many accounts of medieval saints who sought out sometimes extreme physical discomfort, including self-starvation, in order to grow closer to God. But something today is very different: every generation younger than mine has grown up at least partly in a digital social world that is incorporeal by definition.

But the weakness of these proposals isn't that they're unworkable, or even that they're 'traditional,' but that they're not traditional enough. For most of history, men and women worked together, in a productive household, and this is the model reactionary feminism should aim to retrieve. In any case, half a century into the cyborg era, there's little prospect of reviving the industrial-era housewife as the principal template for sex roles—and there's no need, because for knowledge workers at least the sharp split between 'home' and 'work' that drove the emergence of such roles is blurring again. And the blurring of that divide in turn opens up new possibilities, hinting at a way of viewing lifelong solidarity between the sexes that owes more to the 1450s than the 1950s. It does so by bringing at least some work back into the home, and in the process ramping up the kind of interdependence that can underpin long-term pragmatic solidarity.

Stay-at-home parents turn up in the statistics under the dismissive term ‘economically inactive’, as though the defining trait of someone caring for dependent others is their lack of measurable contribution to GDP.

the pre-modern approach to what marriage is for: less personal fulfilment, or even romantic love, than an enabling condition for building a meaningful life.

A world of growing instability, fragmenting peace and order, resource competition and faltering subsistence is not one in which the welfare (or even physical safety) of women and children can be taken for granted.

Lucy started to disagree and then thought better of it. At least he seemed to be in accord with her about the identity of the thief. "So what should I do now?" "You will do nothing. I will speak to your father, and we will decide how to proceed." "No, you will not!" "I beg your pardon?" "You will not brush me aside when I am the one who has discovered everything!" "Miss Harrington---" She scrambled off the bed and pointed her finger at him. "You told me how much you hated being treated like a child. Now, do not do it to me!" He stared at her for a long moment and then nodded. "All right. Would you prefer it if we confronted him here together, and then made sure he confessed the whole to your father?" She regarded him suspiciously. "Are you being serious?" "I am. You made a good point. I am trying to be conciliatory for a change." "Thank you.

Robert considered the information Miss Harrington had gathered for him in the village. He suspected she was far better at getting people to talk to her than he would ever be--even if the information was disgorged in a particularly fragmented and feminine way. In his role as local magistrate, Robert had the power to affect people's lives. Such a position made his tenants and the villagers more afraid of him, and wary of giving offense. He would have to rely on Miss Harrington's haphazard methods of detection and use his more ordered male mind to unravel the tangle of information and make sense of it.

The plan was for Mr. Hathaway to invite the Harringtons to dinner and to take her papa aside and broach the idea of Lucy accompanying Sophia to London next spring. Lucy knew that her father would take more note of the idea if a gentleman he respected proposed it.