Be Mothers, etc.

From The Female Man by Joanna Russ:

"Anyway everyboy (sorry) everybody knows that what women have done that is really important is not to constitute a great, cheap labor force that you can zip in when you're at war and zip out again afterwards but to Be Mothers, to form the coming generation, to give birth to them, to nurse them, to mop floors for them, to love them, cook for them, clean for them, change their diapers, pick up after them, and mainly sacrifice themselves for them. This is the most important job in the world. That's why they don't pay you for it. 

I cried, and then stopped crying because otherwise I would never have stopped crying. Things come to an awful dead center that way. You will notice that even my diction is becoming feminine, thus revealing my true nature; I am not saying "Damn" any more, or "Blast"; I am putting in lots of qualifiers like "rather," I am writing in these breathless little feminine tags, she threw herself down on the bed, I have no structure (she thought), my thoughts seep out shapelessly like menstrual fluid, it is all very female and deep and full of essences, it is very primitive and full of "and's," it is called "run-on sentences." 

Very swampy in my mind. Very rotten and badly off. I am a woman. I am a woman with a woman's brain. I am a woman with a woman's sickness. I am a woman with the wraps off, bald as an adder, God help me and you. 

II. Then I turned into a man."

~ page...(oh shoot, closed the book / forgot to mark it....)