from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

At 29 years old, encouraged by her sister-in-law, Lenù reads for the first time Carla Lonzi’s 1970 feminist pamphlet, Let’s Spit on Hegel:

Every sentence struck me, every word, and above all the bold freedom of thought. I forcefully underlined many of the sentences, I made exclamation points, vertical strokes. Spit on Hegel. Spit on the culture of men, spit on Marx, on Engels, on Lenin. And on historical materialism. And on Freud. And on psychoanalysis and penis envy. And on marriage, on family. And on Nazism, on Stalinism, on terrorism. And on war. And on the class struggle. And on the dictatorship of the proletariat. And on socialism. And on Communism. And on the trap of equality. And on all the manifestations of patriarchal culture. And on all its institutional forms. Resist the waste of female intelligence. . . . Restore women to themselves. . . . How is it possible, I wondered, that a woman knows how to think like that. I worked so hard on books, but I endured them, I never actually used them, I never turned them against themselves. This is thinking. This is thinking against. I — after so much exertion — don’t know how to think. . . . Lila, on the other hand, knows. It’s her nature. If she had studied, she would know how to think like this.