Reference Artist: Sandro Botticelli

The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, 1485

Aphrodite (Greek: Ἀφροδίτη, IPA: /apʰrodíːtɛː/; English: /ˌæfrɵˈdaɪtiː/; Latin: Venus) is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality.

"marriage was invented as a financial exchange. it doesn't make you whole".

Reference Artist: Sylvia Plath

sylvia plath and ted hughes on their wedding day 1956

On June 16, 1956 while her mother was visiting, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were secretly married in the Church of Saint George the Martyr in London. Sylvia wore a pink suit and held a pink rose which Ted had given her. The newlyweds spent time that summer in Paris, Madrid and finally Benindorm, Spain on the coast, where "every evening at dusk the lights of the sardine boats dip and shine out at sea like floating stars." They spent their days writing, studying, swimming and enjoying the quiet town. Some of the poems Sylvia wrote during this newlywed summer of writing include "Fiesta Melons", "Alicante Lullaby", "The Goring", "The Beggars", "Spider", "Rhyme", "Dream With Clam Diggers", and "Epitaph For Fire And Flower". There was one alleged episode which darkened the otherwise idyllic days of their summer. Years later Sylvia told a friend that one afternoon as they sat on a hill Ted was overcome by such rage that he started choking her, and she resigned herself to die. The episode made her question her somewhat hasty decision to marry him.

collected

"my aunty had a horse and carriage at her wedding. i was so jealous"

Jasmine

The Changing Role of a Mother

As times change, mothers change to meet the new roles that they are expected to play. Gone are the days where most mothers just cared for the family and the home. Mothers today are a lot of things to a lot of people. Mothers still have to fill the mother role, but it is not felt that they are the only ones responsible for rearing the family.

Mothers have always been ultimately responsible and expected to be the decision makers about child rearing, and matters pertaining to the house, in most cases. This is a role that is evolve with fathers accepting some of those responsibilities today. The reason I use most cases is because there are always exceptions to the rules, as there are with most things in life. There are some things that will never change and that is mum is still mum.

PJ Hall Bills

[Yayoi Kusama] dubbed herself ‘not a perfect feminist, but a good enough feminist’ and pulled no punches on the persistent dangers of essentialism: paraphrasing Milton, she said women should be ‘sufficient to stand though free to fall’. Such directness felt absolutely necessary. Perhaps it’s time for the masks to come off.

http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/the_feminist_future_theory_and_practice_in_the_visual_arts/

the problem that has no name

"Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. She was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question -"Is this all?" "

Anonymous. American Journal of Public Health. Washington: September 2010. Vol. 100, Iss. 9; pg. 1582, 3 pgs (Excerpted from: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963))

beach = freedom

there will be white blackbirds before an unwilling woman ties the knot

"I'm not married and I often feel sure that I don't ever want to be, but the truth is I haven't decided how I feel. A lot of the traditional male-female unions I've observed have been kind of a bad deal for the woman, but I know that's not always the case. It occurred to me that a more interesting approach might be to talk to women who know they don't want to get married and ask them about it."

Katie Haegele

the journal