Quotes by Activists - Page 61

Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even. There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages also fail or how nice or not their bodies are, even the movie-star bodies. They are the gender that commits the great majority of crime, particularly violent crime, and they are the majority of suicides as well. American men are falling behind women in attending college, and have fallen farther in the current economic depression than women, which you'd think would make them interesting subjects of inquiry.
Rebecca Solnit
The Mommy Wars, as they stand today, serve as an effective check on the ambitions of the American mother. The phenomenon keeps women in a perpetual state of guilt, shame and inadequacy, and does so without involving anyone but wealthy white women.
Shannon Drury
If women really choose prostitution, why is it mostly marginalized and disadvantaged women who do? If we want to discuss the issue of choice, let’s look at who is doing the actual choosing in the context of prostitution. Surely the issue is not why women allegedly choose to be in prostitution, but why men choose to buy the bodies of millions of women and children worldwide and call it sex.Philosophically, the response to the choice debate is ‘not’ to deny that women are capable of choosing within contexts of powerlessness, but to question how much real value, worth, and power these so-called choices confer.Politically, the question becomes, should the state sanction the sex industry based on the claim that some women choose prostitution when most women’s choice is actually 'compliance’ to the only options available?When governments idealize women’s alleged choice to be in prostitution by legalizing, decriminalizing, or regulating the sex industry, they endorse a new range of 'conformity’ for women.Increasingly, what is defended as a choice is not a triumph over oppression but another name for it.
Janice G. Raymond
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
Audre Lorde
I can’t remember the moment I was labeled bitch for the first time, but it sure wasn’t in the blogosphere of 2008. It was well before the blogosphere, let alone the World Wide Web, existed. The first time I was called a bitch, the home computer of choice was a Vic 20, capable of playing Pong and calculating to eight decimal points but not much else.
Shannon Drury
All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.
Alice Walker
The outrageous madonna/whore duality that we mock in Women’s Studies 101 has its subtle, and very insidious, expression in the good/bad mother paradigm that we grapple with every day of our lives.
Shannon Drury
The object, the woman, goes out into the world formed as men have formed her to be used as men wish to use her. She is then a provocation. The object provokes its use. It provokes its usebecause of its form, determined by the one who is provoked. The carpenter makes a chair, sits on it, then blames the chair because heis not standing. When the object complains about the use to which she is put, she is told, simply and firmly, not to provoke.
Andrea Dworkin
What will people say, you running off to Memphis like you don't have a house to look after?Shug say, Albert. Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.Well, say Grady, trying to bring light. A woman can't git a man if peoples talk.Shug look at me and us giggle. Then us laugh sure nuff. Then Squeak start to laugh. Then Sofia. All us laugh and
Alice Walker
A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done
Marge Piercy
For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn't allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that the identity will dictate and regulate our lives, instantaneously pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and unchanging sides, female against male, black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good against bad.
Rebecca Walker
Reproductive freedom is not just the ability not to have a child through birth control. It's the ability to have one if and when you want.
Pamela Madsen
I've learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing - though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. There's a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.
Rebecca Solnit
That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social minor to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harrassment and intimidation, online at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear). Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.
Rebecca Solnit
Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren't likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and there's no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers.
Rebecca Solnit
We conceived of the planet as female, an all-giving Mother Nature, just as we conceived of the female body, infinitely alterable by and for man; we serve both ourselves and our hopes for the planet by insisting on a new female reality on which to base a new metaphor for the earth: the female body with its own organic integrity that must be respected.
Naomi Wolf
There are as many violent women as men, but there's a lot of money in hating men, particularly in the United States -- millions of dollars. It isn't a politically good idea to threaten the huge budgets for women's refuges by saying that some of the women who go into them aren't total victims.
Erin Pizzey
Independent radical women often live lonely lives if they expect equality.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren't likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and there's no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers.
Rebecca Solnit
It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible "Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family". It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence come from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.
Rebecca Solnit
Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot."See that purple Harley out there—that big gorgeous one? That's mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn't have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attach and totaling us both. I even put 'Ms.' on my license plate—and you should see my grandkids' faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!"On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I've walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear.What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up.I tell you this story because it's the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I've come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.We have only to discover it—and ride.
Gloria Steinem
What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.
Naomi Wolf
In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up.
Gloria Steinem
Inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.
Gloria Steinem
I also noticed that humor was even more of a survival tactic here than in most women's groups. As one asked: What did Columbus call primitive? Answer: Equal women.
Gloria Steinem
I think as feminists we have a way of looking at problems that other people appear not to understand. To name names, the right and theleft appear not to understand what it is that feminists are trying to do. Feminists are trying to destroy a sex hierarchy, a race hierarchy, aneconomic hierarchy, in which women are hurt, are disempowered, and in which society celebrates cruelty over us and refuses us the integrity of our own bodies and the dignity of our own lives.... So feminists look at the society we live in and try to understand how we are going to fight male power. And in order to try to figure outhow we're going to fight it, we have to figure out how it's organized, how it works. How does it survive? How does it work itself out? Howdoes it maintain itself as a system of power?... So feminists come along, and we say: Well, we are going to understand how it is that these people do what they do. We are going toapproach the problem politically. That means that we are going to try to isolate and describe systems of exploitation as they work on us, from our point of view as the people who are being hurt by them. It means that even though we're on the bottom and they're on the top, we are examining them for points of vulnerability. And as we find those points of vulnerability—and you might locate them anatomically, as well as any other way—we are going to move whatever muscles we have, from whatever positions we are in, and we are going to get that bastard in his collective manifestation off of us.And that means we are politically organizing a resistance to male supremacy.
Andrea Dworkin
It's time to leave. There is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road, because I can come home. I come home, because I am free to leave.
Gloria Steinem
Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself.
Gloria Steinem
Now, when I talk about a resistance, I am talking about an organized political resistance. I'm not just talking about something that comes and something that goes. I'm not talking about a feeling. I'm not talking about having in your heart the way things shuold be and going through a regular day having good, decent, wonderful ideas in your heart. I'm talking about when you put your body and your mind on the line and you commit yourself to years of struggle in order to change the society in which you live. This does not mean just changing the men whom you know so that their manners will get better - although that wouldn't be bad either. It has been fifteen years. Their manners haven't gotten appreciably better, even. But that's not what a political resistance is. A political resistance goes on day and night, under cover and over ground, where people can see it and where people can't. It is passed from generation to generation. It is taught. It is encouraged. It is celebrated. It is smart. It is savvy. It is committed. And someday it will win. It will win.
Andrea Dworkin
You should write about take no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules" p.79
Gloria Steinem
Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't.
Gloria Steinem
Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.
Gloria Steinem
I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine", so we suppress it-until it overflows.
Gloria Steinem
One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is "I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart.
Gloria Steinem
I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars and young women were treated like - well - young women. {...}I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one.
Gloria Steinem
An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus Tshirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment “Thou shall not kill.”But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies.Thus the Bible is making clear, that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life.
Gloria Steinem
Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are. They all have the same vulnerability to rape, to battery, as children to incest. Poorer women have more vulnerability to prostitution, which is basically a form of sexual exploitation that is intolerable in an egalitarian society, which is the society we are fighting for.
Andrea Dworkin
Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism.In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled "Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs", and explains that it started "only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests.
Gloria Steinem
Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger - and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn't usually mean including women.
Gloria Steinem
Everyone has a home but me.
Gloria Steinem
Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more, I write to you.
Alice Walker
When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.
Gloria Steinem
Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.
Gloria Steinem
My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.
Gloria Steinem
As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism.
Gloria Steinem
Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.
Gloria Steinem
The idea that women are 'our own worst enemies' forces us to admit that we don't have the power to be, even if we wanted too.
Gloria Steinem
Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about.
Rebecca Solnit
Because I believe that deep down in woman's nature lies slumbering the spirit of revolt.Because I believe that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary child-rearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions.Because I believe that woman's freedom depends upon awakening that spirit of revolt within her against these things which enslave her.Because I believe that these things which enslave woman must be fought openly, fearlessly, consciously.
Margaret Sanger
Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding.
Kate Millett
I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.
Gloria Steinem
Feminism is a movement for change, not a changing of the guard.
Finn Mackay
But why does it matter what we call it, as long as there is concerted action to respond to and prevent such crimes? It matters because if we really want to fix something that is broken, if we want to heal these fractures in our society, then we need to understand their causes. If we do not, then we will forever continue to place giant sticking plasters over the wounds left by this violence, trying to bandage over losses that can never be replaced. As long as this violence continues, it is obviously the case that we do have to address the symptoms, but my argument is that we must also address the causes if we want a long-term reduction or even, perhaps, the eventual eradication of male violence against women.
Finn Mackay
...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look.
Laura Bates
Forget the myths you have heard about radical feminism, for only some of them are true. Instead, prepare to think about why so many lies are told about this particular brand of feminism, how it acts as a scapegoat for all that is most threatening about our social movement and how any revolutionary movement for change could really ever be anything but threatening. These are the women you were warned about; you can be too.
Finn Mackay
When will women not be compelledto view their bodies as science projects,gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained?When will a woman ceaseto be made of pain?
Marge Piercy
Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice.
Robin Morgan
Having had nothing, I will not settle for crumbs.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance,” I think I am going to strangle them. Perhaps most annoying about that sound-bite is the somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-youdidn’t” sort of way in which it is most often recited, a magnificent irony given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification, as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality, gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there’s one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it’s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It’s like a junior high school mixer, where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another, and with all the external expectations that other people place on us.Sure, I can perform gender: I can curtsy, or throw like a girl, or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn’t explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come to me more naturally than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn’t capture the very real physical and emotional changes that I experienced when I hormonally transitioned from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn’t even begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same, wore the same T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers that I always had, yet once other people started reading me as female, they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience—with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions—completely off the hook.
Julia Serano
In other words, for purposes of sex discrimination law, to be a woman means either to be like a man or like a lady. We have to meet either the male standard for males or the male standard for females.
Catharine MacKinnon