Feminists From The United States

"The measure of capacity is the measure of sphere for either man or woman."

"My friends, do we realize for what purpose we are convened? Do we fully understand that we aim at nothing less than an entire subversion of the present order of society, a dissolution of the whole existing compact? Do we see that it is not an error of today, nor of yesterday against which we are lifting up the voice of dissent but that it is against the ... error of all times — error borne onward from the footprints of the first pair ejected from Paradise, down to our own time? ... Bitterness is the child of wrong; if any of our number has become embittered ... it is because social wrong has so penetrated to the inner life that we are crucified today."

"How few women have any history after the age of thirty!"

"Faith is the subtle chain, Which binds us to the Infinite: the voice Of a deep life within, that will remain Until we crowd it thence."

"How beautiful the water is! To me 'tis wondrous fair— No spot can ever lonely be If water sparkle there— It hath a thousand tongues of mirth, Of grandeur, or delight; And every heart is gladder made When water greets the sight."

"White-winged angels meet the child On the vestibule of life, And they offer to his lips All that cup of mingled strife."

"Yes, this is Life; and everywhere we meet, Not victor crowns, but wailings of defeat."

"'Tis the summer prime, when the noiseless air In perfumed chalice lies, And the bee goes by with a lazy hum Beneath the sleeping skies."

"'Tis rushing now adown the spout And gushing out below, Half frantic in its joyousness, And wild in eager flow. The earth is dried and parch’d with heat, And it hath longed to be Released from out the selfish cloud, To cool the thirsty tree."

"... this woman, now nearly sixty, with graying hair and steel-rimmed glasses, was a monster of persistence. She was determined to become the first known human to ascend the summit of the forbidding , which she hoped would prove to be the highest in the , the "apex of America." And so she went on to reach Huascarán's summit on her sixth onslaught. Her achievement was heralded by ' as "one of the most remarkable feats in the history of mountain-climbing." Upon her death at eighty-four, the ' called her the most famous of all women mountain climbers."

"Interest was heightened by the knowledge that the 162,000 acres of land already cultivated in the , where is located, were to triple through a great irrigation project inaugurated by . In 1930 it was well under way when the project was abandoned. An American engineer, Charles W. Sutton, long in the service of Peru, was adding to his fame and usefulness by undertaking to bring from the Huancabamba River, tributary to the Amazon, by means of a tunnel through the mountains, water to supplement the service of the coastal streams."

"After years of climbing, she made New Hampshire’s her final ascent in 1932. She was 82 years old. On her gravestone in is written: “You have brought uncommon glory to women of all time.”"

"The modern position of women was inaugurated by the . The overthrew the doctrine of the . The dissolved the doctrine of the necessary and lawful supremacy of es. The Revolution of 1848 asserted the of the individual."

"A predominantly masculine type to the external genitals, and even the presence of s, is compatible with a feminine habitus of body or with entirely feminine feelings and instincts, or with both. Thus was brought up as a girl until the age of 22, when she was pronounced a male by a court of law because possessed of a complete male genital apparatus—, though small and ; with a testicle in the right lobe, the left testicle resting in the and apparently in fatty degeneration; distended by sperm, which, however, contained no spermatozoids; rudimentary . The misinterpretation of sex had been due to presence of a central cleft in the scrotum, simulating a and terminating in a cul-de-sac six and a half centimetres deep. The rectification of this mistake filled the subject with such despair that he committed suicide."

"Over the waiting congregation rolled the burdened tones of the great , and the sweet voices of the boy-choristers alternated with the monotonous chanting of the s. Three times through the s defiled the long procession, with the sacred images, and the , and the bags of money for the poor. The donned his wealthiest robes in acknowledgment of the presence of the ; the more stately s paraded their purple coats and their gold-studded canes, and quickened the circulation of the inquisitive crowd stopping to gaze at the crimson dais. Finally a great hush breathed into the room of the music and the chanting; a thousand eyes turned toward the pulpit that faced the oaken , and—as if evoked by the spell of their expectancy—the preacher arose in his place and announced his theme."

"(1st edition 1913)"

"... The conquest in 1895 of the grand old , and the unmerited notoriety attained thereby, spurred me on to the accomplishment of some deed which should render me worthy of the fame already acquired. The most feasible project seemed to be the ascent of in Mexico, its summit the highest point which had been reached in North America. This became, under the auspices of the ', in 1897, the easy goal of my ambition and gave me temporarily the world's record for women."

"Dr. Jacobi died in 1906. In recognition of her manifold services to humanity, a memorial meeting was held shortly after, at which tributes were paid to her memory by Dr. , Dr. , , Mrs. , Dr. , Dr. , Dr. , and Sara King Wiley."

"Fortunate the traveler, who, 7 or 8 miles below Las Cuevas, has at the head of a side valley at the north a glimpse of colossal ' 15 miles away, a long ridge of snow arching into two domes, with a sheer drop of 10,000 feet on its black southern wall; and farther on a sight of ', 30 miles away at the south: both mountains first climbed in 1897 by the , though he unfortunately was compelled by to forego the satisfaction of attaining either summit himself. The first to reach the supposed apex of the , the top of Aconcagua, according to the latest measurement, 22,817 feet, was , the celebrated Swiss guide, who in almost every land has led English and Americans to the summits of noted mountains. Alone, January 14, 1897, he gained this height, and there erected a stone man as is the custom where possible. In April of the same year, the first ascent of Tupungato, 21,451 feet, was made also by Zurbriggen, and the Englishman, Vines."

"People who deal in truth themselves recognize it when they hear it, just as people who deal in diamonds recognize a real stone when they see it."

"I am American bred, I have seen much to hate here—much to forgive, But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live."

"When men in Congress come to blows at something someone said, I always notice that it shows their blood is quick and red; But if two women disagree, with very little noise, It proves, and this seems strange to me, that women have no poise."

"Mother, what is a Feminist?" "A Feminist, my daughter, Is any woman now who cares To think about her own affairs As men don't think she oughter."

"People love to talk but hate to listen....Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what’s being told us....You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer."

"It's treating a woman politely As long as she isn't a fright: It's guarding the girls who act rightly, If you can be judge of what's right; It's being—not just, but so pleasant; It's tipping while wages are low; It's making a beautiful present, And failing to pay what you owe."

"Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course,— because like freedom and democracy, many people you'll never know anything about have broken their hearts to get it for you."

"There, little girl, don't read, You're fond of your books, I know, But Brother might mope If he had no hope Of getting ahead of you. It's dull for a boy who cannot lead. There, little girl, don't read."

"If it’s very painful for you to criticize your friends—you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it—that’s the time to hold your tongue."

"We are not really senseless, and we are not angels, too, But very human beings, human just as much as you. It's hard upon occasions to be forceful and sublime When you're treated as incompetents three-quarters of the time."

"Yeah. Well, there is something about Batman – even for me growing up… I’ve always felt like he’s really troubled, you know? He’s working out a pretty massive trauma that happened to him, and I think that by keeping that alive in the story – through a nightmare or imagery like that, you feel like it’s still boiling. To me, it keeps him on point as a character. Like, if you let that fade too far into the background, you start to go, “No wait – why is he doing this again? What’s he upset about? Like, there’s police. He knows that, right?” [Laughs] You know, we have a little thing called the justice system, and it works okay."

"I think it's the sacrifice. The Superman we have now, this risen Superman, in a lot of ways his place on Earth, in my way of thinking, has been solidified. He is all things now. He is not only the sacrifice, but he is the risen. He's a man, but he's also like a god. You know what I mean? He has completed the apprenticeship in humanity, and now has his Master's Degree. To me that's what it is about. I think in the end when you see him, the way I would think about it--and look, frankly there's not enough movie, I know that sounds crazy in context [laughs], to really explore it. But that was always the plan going forward. In the end if there was two more movies, the last movie really is a Superman movie in a lot of ways."

"… was of the brooding type. He sat when he addressed his handful of students (who turned out afterwards, however, to be a not unimportant handful) and he had all the air, as has been noted by , of the typical philosopher who is engaged, at the moment, in bringing fresh truth by divination out of some inexhaustible well. He got his effect not by anything that could be called an inspiring personality, in the usual sense of the term, but rather by creating the impression that we had before us a profound, original, dispassionate and impassioned seeker of truth. No effort was made to create a connected and not inconsistent whole out of the matter of each lecture. In fact, so devious and unpredictable was his course that he once, to the delight of his students, proposed at the end of his lecture, that we should form (for greater freedom of discussion) a Metaphysical Club, though he had begun the lecture by defining metaphysics to be the “science of unclear thinking.”"

"What gives significance and value to truths is that they permit of interesting predictions."

"In their attempts to get around these artificial barriers and inconsistencies, early women scientists developed a great many strategies. These tended to be of two sorts. One was the idealistic, liberal-to-radical, and often confrontational strategy of demanding that society reject all stereotypes and work for the feminist goal of full equality. This involved writing angry letters and otherwise documenting the "unfairness" of the unequal opportunities open to men and women. The most prominent and successful strategist of this school was Christine Ladd-Franklin, a graduate of the 1860s, would-be physicist turned mathematician, psychologist, and logician, who for fifty years, worked shrewdly and tirelessly for educated women. Her greatest triumph was in opening graduate schools to women in the 1890s, and thus allowing women to earn the same doctorates as men."

"I shall adopt the convention by which particular propositions are taken as implying the existence of their subjects, and universal propositions as not implying the existence of their subjects. would infer that the two propositions The sea-serpent is not found in the water, The sea-serpent is not found out of the water, are contradictory; bur , , and would infer that the sea-serpent does not exist. With this convention, contradiction can never exist between universal propositions nor between particular propositions taken by themselves. A universal proportion can be contradicted only by a particular proposition, and a particular only by a universal. The above premises are inconsistent with The sea-serpent has (at least once) has been found. With this convention, hypothetical and categorical propositions receive the same formal treatment. If a, then b = all a is b = a implies b. (Peirce.)"

"The whole field of Deductive Logic, even when thought of merely in the terms of common language, has acquired, for the student of , a symmetry and a completeness and a simplicity which it is, apparently, far from possessing in the minds of its usual exponents. The natural repugnance which the ordinary logician felt, at first, to seeing processes of deductive reasoning made the subject of a great development by a purely mechanical process, has in great part passed away; it would have been hard for it to survive the eloquent persuasiveness of 's Symbolic Logic. It seems, therefore, to be time for the simplified ways of looking at things which prevail in Symbolic Logic to begin to sink into the elementary expositions of the subject."

"The northern Arabs of Jahiliyyah practised femal [sic] infanticide. It was prompted by one of two reasons: poverty or fear of shame (Mahmasāni; pp. 54-56). In the first case, some Arabs like Sa'sa'a Bin Najiah and Zeid Ibn Amrou Bin Nufayl, used to offer to buy these female infants from their fathers to save their lives. Sometimes, male infants were eliminated for this reason also, although only after there were no daughters left."

"We are here to tell the story of our city. Through the women who built it. The women who shape it. The women who lead it. The women who identify issues that matter and challenge the status quo. We are intergenerational. We are every race. And religion. And neighborhood. And income level. And sector. Our Miami is strong. It is beautiful. It is diverse. And it is female." The motto Fishman-Lipsey wrote for Miami Girls Foundation in 2017."

"... For three months she hiked 1,100 miles alone along the , a continuous wilderness undulating from Mexico to Canada over nine mountain ranges – the to the . ... On her epic trek, this novice hiker faced temperatures of 100 degrees in the shade on the and record snowfalls in the high sierras, not to mention bears, rattlesnakes and failed waterholes. ..."

"... a secret inside myself was that I had to be a writer. Ever since I learned how to read when I was six or seven, I just knew: this was my thing — this was my calling. This is what I was going to do in the world."

"It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. The image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I'd made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple weeks after we left the , and then, once she was admitted to the wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to others, more modest and true."

"Egyptians, for instance, might, with equal accuracy, define themselves as African, Nilotic, Mediterranean, Islamic, or Coptic. Or as all, or any combination of, the above. Or, of course, as Egyptian: pertaining to the land of Egypt."

"We all automatically assume that those who write and who put their knowledge down in texts have something more valuable to offer than those who simply live their knowledge and use it to inform their lives."

"The devastation unloosed on Muslim societies in our day by fundamentalism . . . seems to be not merely the erasure of the living, oral, ethical, and human traditions of Islam but the literal destruction of and annihilation of the Muslims who are the bearers of those traditions. In Algeria, Iran, Afghanistan, and, alas, in Egypt, this narrow, violent variant of Islam is ravaging its way through the land."

"We lived in fact, throughout our childhoods, easily and unthinkingly crossing thresholds between one place and another—Ain Shams, Zatoun, our school—places that formed their own particular and different worlds with their own particular and different underlying beliefs, ideals, assumptions."

"“One is not born but rather becomes a woman,” goes Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum. I obviously was not born but became black when I went to England. Similarly, of course, I was not born but became a woman of color when I went to America."

"The prophets in Hebrew Scripture and Jesus in the Gospels are figures in conflict with the religious establishment. They denounce the use of religion to sacralize unjust privilege and to ignore the needs of the people. Prophetic faith announces a God who is active in history, to overturn an unjust social order and to transform the world into a new social order where there will be no more war, no more injustice, where justice between people and harmony with nature has been restored and all creation will be in communion with God."

"Prophetic faith, by contrast, sets God in tension with the ruling class by having God speak, through the prophet, as advocate of the poor and the oppressed."

"Established religion sees religious faith as the sacred ideology of the dominant social order. Religion is the 'handmaiden' of the ruling class. It defines this established social order as one that has been created by God and is the reflection of the divine will. Its words for God reflect the titles of the rulers. God and the rulers are called by the same names and are imaged as looking alike. The rulers thus appear to be like God, to have a special closeness to God and to represent God on earth."

"The word of God comes through the prophet to denounce the unjust practices of the rich and powerful who grind the faces of the poor and oppress the widow and the orphan. The prophet also denounces the corruption of biblical religion itself into a religious establishment that has become purely cultic and has turned away from the social meaning of faith, which is justice and mercy."