When a family is free of abuse and oppression, it can be the place where we share our deepest secrets and stand the most exposed, a place where we learn to feel distinct without being better, - and sacrifice for others without losing ourselves.
Letty Cottin PogrebinIf the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten.
Letty Cottin PogrebinWe can remind the world that all the dead on both sides have not settled our differences, so now it is time for the living to renounce violence as a means of solving this conflict.
Letty Cottin PogrebinLifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.
Letty Cottin PogrebinIn the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin