Her life is a hell, vacillating between an allconsuming need for male love and approval to persistent feelings of inauthenticity when she does achieve his love. Thus her whole identity hangs in the balance of her love life. She is allowed to love herself only if a man finds her worthy of love. In a male-run society that defines women as an inferior and parasitical class, a woman who does not achieve male approval in some form is doomed. To legitimate her existence, a woman must be more than a woman, she must continually search for an out from her inferior definition; and men are the only ones in a position to bestow on her this state of grace.
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
Little Bristling Soul 