Men's exploitation of Mother Nature has so far been kept in check largely by their conception of the practical risk they themselves ran in antagonizing, depleting, spoiling her. (In preliterate societies, we are told, ritual apologies are offered by hunters to the animals they kill, and by woodcutters to the spirits who inhabit the trees they chop down.) As technology has advanced, and they have felt more powerful, one part of this sense of risk the fear of antagonizing her has abated. A euphoric sense of conquest has replaced it: the son has set his foot on his mother's chest, he has harnessed her firmly to his uses, he has opened her body once and for all and may now help himself to its riches.

Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur

One basis for our species' fundamental ambivalence toward its female members lies in the fact that the early mother, monolithic representative of nature, is a source, like nature, of ultimate distress as well as ultimate joy. Like nature, she is both nourishing and disappointing, both alluring and threatening, both comfortable and unreliable. The infant loves her touch, warmth, shape, taste, sound, movement, just as it loves dancing light, textured space, soft covers, and as it will come to love water, fire, plants, animals. And it hates her because, like nature, she does not perfectly protect and provide for it. She is the source of food, warmth, comfort, and entertainment; but the baby, no matter how well it is cared for, suffers some hunger or cold, some bellyaches or alarming sudden movements or unpleasant bursts of noise, some loneliness or boredom; and how is it to know that she is not the source of these things too?

Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur