Love Quote by Marge Piercy

Long hair, in Piercy's telling, is a wearable argument: a body-level refusal to let culture have the last word about what counts as respectable, feminine, professional, or "serious". She starts by naming the label pinned to it - bohemian - with a cool awareness of how quickly a personal choice gets turned into a social signal. "Which may be why I grew it" is the sly admission of youth, of trying on an identity the way you try on a look. Then she pivots, and the real intent shows up: she keeps it not to perform rebellion, but because it delivers something immediate and private.

The piling up of metaphors does the work. Cloak, fan, mane, security blanket: four different functions, moving from style to utility to animal power to comfort. It's not just ornament; it's climate control, armor, charisma, and self-soothing. That range is the subtext: women are trained to justify appearance in public terms (beauty, propriety), but Piercy insists on sensation and agency. The body isn't a billboard for ideology so much as a place where ideology lands.

Context matters. Piercy comes out of a mid-century American world that policed women's presentation tightly, then lives through second-wave feminism, when hair itself became a battlefield - between the office and the commune, the "neat" and the "natural". She doesn't pretend the symbolism isn't there; she just demotes it. The most radical claim in the line is almost mundane: I like it. That preference, stated without apology, is its own kind of freedom.