Love Quote by Jane Rule

Women’s liberation, in Jane Rule’s framing, isn’t a feel-good invitation to “confidence.” It’s a counter-education, an insurgent syllabus aimed at undoing what society has already taught women to swallow about themselves. The line turns on a quiet accusation embedded in the phrase “our degrading education”: degradation isn’t just a few bad lessons, it’s the curriculum - the daily training in smallness, compliance, heterosexual availability, and polite self-erasure. Rule’s word choice makes oppression feel domestic and ordinary, not merely legal or abstract. The harm is intimate, learned early, reinforced everywhere.

Her insistence that women “can love each other and ourselves” is doing double work. First, it legitimizes bonds between women as primary rather than secondary - not support staff for men’s lives, but real emotional and political centers. Second, it pointedly includes the self as an object of love, suggesting that internalized contempt is one of patriarchy’s most durable victories. Liberation, then, isn’t only about access to jobs or rights; it’s about retooling desire, loyalty, and self-regard.

Context matters: Rule, a Canadian novelist and lesbian public intellectual, wrote across decades when lesbian love was routinely dismissed as pathology or threat, and when mainstream feminism often struggled with how centrally to place lesbian lives. The sentence is a manifesto with soft edges: no slogans, just a radical proposition that love - between women, within women - can be practiced as resistance against what taught them not to.