Parenting & Family Quote by Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon turns the sanctified myths of family and romance into something cooler, sharper, and far less flattering: temporary arrangements with terrible PR. The opening clause, "We shelter children for a time", reduces parenthood to a finite custodial duty, stripping it of sentimental infinity. Then marriage - "we live side by side with men" - is rendered as proximity, not communion. Not passion, not partnership, not destiny: adjacency. Weldon uses that flatness as a provocation, daring the reader to notice how much cultural machinery is required to make these bonds seem natural, permanent, and morally compulsory.

The line "and that is all" is the knife twist. It denies the idea that biology or heteronormative coupling automatically produces lifelong obligation. In Weldon's feminist universe, obligation is not inherited; it is earned. "We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing" sounds harsh until you hear the liberation inside it: a refusal of emotional debt collection, the kind that keeps women performing care long after reciprocity has died.

Then she reassigns value where patriarchy rarely looks: friendship, "especially our female friends". The subtext is a critique of how women's labor is routinely routed toward men and children, while women's sustaining relationships with each other are treated as secondary, even suspicious. Weldon elevates female friendship as the more ethical contract - chosen, maintained, and often more honest about what it costs. It's not anti-family so much as anti-entitlement: love without a ledger, except the one people actually keep.