"The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education"

Jane Rule’s words recognize both the challenge and promise within the struggle for women’s liberation. Her message foregrounds the importance of solidarity and self-love as acts of resistance. The phrase underscores that in societies shaped by patriarchal norms, the education women receive, whether formal or informal, often reinforces images of inferiority or competition among women, sowing seeds of self-doubt and animosity. Such education degrades not only by limiting women’s aspirations but also by distorting their relationships with themselves and with other women.

By emphasizing love for each other and ourselves, Rule challenges this ingrained mentality. She advocates a deliberate, conscious rejection of narratives that teach women to mistrust, envy, or undermine one another. Instead, fostering connection and mutual support becomes a revolutionary act. To love ourselves is to embrace worthiness in the face of systems that dismiss our value. To love one another is to foster genuine community, prioritizing care, empathy, and upliftment over competition and judgment.

This notion of collective and self-affirmation is integral to the wider project of women’s liberation, which is not only about social and legal rights but fundamentally about reclaiming agency over self-perception and relationships. The act of loving in defiance of degrading messages becomes a form of personal and collective empowerment. Rule thus frames love, not as a mere emotional state but as an intentional, countercultural practice that can disrupt internalized oppression.

Women’s liberation, then, is as much about unlearning harmful lessons as it is about enacting new social possibilities. By loving ourselves and each other, women nurture an environment where growth, confidence, and freedom are possible, despite living in a world that too often teaches the opposite. Rule calls for a transformation rooted in solidarity and self-respect, which remains essential for real and sustained liberation.