Women S Rights Activists

"In Puerto Rico, racism was subtle. There wasn't the kind of separatist racism like in the US. I wasn't used to this."

"We got a lot of flack from White women who had private doctors and wanted to be sterilized,” she said. “They had been denied their request for sterilization because of their status (unmarried), or the number of their children (usually the doctor thought they had too few). They therefore opposed a waiting period or any other regulation that they interpreted as limiting access . . . While young white middle class women were denied their requests for sterilization, low income women of certain ethnicity were misled or coerced into them"

"I saw that anybody who could afford an abortion could get a perfectly fine one. It would be written up as an appendectomy. Women from the US used to go to Havana to get abortions."

"The US and their allies claim to be fighting a war on terror whenever they drop bombs and kill people. Here they have taken out some of the people who have done more to fight ISIS than anyone else that we know. They have been asked to get out of Iraq, are they going to get out of it? Are they going to recognise the democratic decision? They claim to have brought democracy to Iraq; are they going to respect it now?"

"El-Sisi is a brutal dictator. Do the French have any problems selling him weapons? No. Do the French have any problems selling weapons to the Saudis who are committing genocide in Yemen? No. Does the EU do anything about it? No. This European Union has sanctions, which are a form of terrorism, against Venezuela, Syria, Iran. You do business with murderers. What’s going on with you?"

"Meanwhile, the EU and our friends are immune from criticism and when you have armed contracts with totalitarian regimes, who carry out terrible atrocities, you look the other way. I will take seriously the concern expressed in here for US-paid journalists imprisoned in Vietnam when you deal with the millions of starving and dying children in Yemen and demand they be free from Saudi-UAE aggression and free from the fear of the weapons of the US, Canadian, UK, French, German, Swedish Spanish and Belgian countries blowing them to pieces."

"We know who is increasing the tensions in the Persian Gulf. It isn’t Iran; the Saudis, with the nice backing of Israel and, of course, the US. Why don’t we call it as it is and stop playing footsie with words? They have a problem with the powerful nature of Iran, with the independence of Iran, and Europe does need to put its arm around Iran and be more welcoming. Iran is not feeling the love from Europe. You have the potential to do more and welcome them more into the international community."

"A watershed in my life was getting divorced in Puerto Rico—that was my second marriage—and leaving Puerto Rico to become part of the women’s movement. In my formation as a professional, there was always a kind of pressure to deny or not use a lot of your personal experience. The science of medicine, to some degree, negates the human, feeling, experiential part of it. But I was now discovering a whole other world out there through my personal experience of a deceptive marriage. That triggered quite a bit of growth in me toward understanding what happens internally to people, what happens in their lives and what they can do or not do…So I went back to New York and I got very involved in reproductive rights. I began to join in the women’s movement. At Barnard College there was a conference called the First International Conference on Abortion Rights that was attended by a few thousand women…We organized one of the first consciousness-raising groups of Latino women…A number of incredible things emerged from women talking about their experiences…We shared and we became very bonded. That was the beginning of my identification with women’s issues and reproductive health."

"APHA has always provided a home for people in public health with a broad view of what public health is. Public health is really about people's life conditions and how these conditions do or do not promote health. APHA is committed to equity and ending all barriers, and has always been committed to civil, human and health rights. It's a wonderful place for women to be."

"If we care about human rights we will suspend relations with the criminal apartheid state of Israel until they stop the genocide of the Palestinian people and until Palestine is free."

"Is the US a functioning democracy? Well, let’s have a look at it. It cost 2 billion to become president. They have 25% of the total prisoners in the world. They spend over 800 billion a year on arms, which is more than most of the world put together. They’ve been at war for 250 years since their state was formed 275 years ago. But they can’t afford universal health care. They can’t afford a 1.7 trillion debt forgiveness for students. They can’t afford for a programme for the 17 million children that go to bed hungry. Is this a functioning democracy? What’s your idea of a democracy? Bernie Sanders wasn’t even allowed to win the nomination for the Democrats. The Americans couldn’t spell democracy."

"What is democracy anyway? Is it having a vote every four or five years? No, it's not. It's your people having a say in the society they live in. And most of the American people have no say in the society they're living in."

"The G7 and NATO-aligned countries, which collectively represent a minority of the world’s people, want to contain Russia and China and stop EU-Asia integration. The BRICS countries, which represent a larger portion of the world’s people, are not calling for this break – for isolation or for containment. They are clear that they want to maintain a world where multilateral institutions such as the UN are respected. The EU seems to want world domination. The Global South really wants genuine multilateralism. We should listen to them."

"We all know exactly what NATO is: a post—war mechanism designed to maintain US dominance and control over Western Europe, advance US geostrategic interests and violently suppress socialism. To pursue these aims, NATO has partnered with right—wing terrorists and fascists to conduct long campaigns of bloody terror and destabilisation, both in and outside Western Europe. Everywhere it conducts operations, it leaves a trail of destruction and destabilisation behind it, and persists often for decades after the initial act of aggression."

"Mr President, of course we should legislate to stop all forced labour. But how many times have we had to listen to accusations about China, backed up by nothing more than the say—so of weapons—industry—funded think tanks and groups on the payroll of CIA cut—outs like the National Endowment for Democracy? Where are the full and rigorous investigations, the evidence? Screaming, unsupported accusations is not how to conduct international relations. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has just visited Xinjiang, has had discussions with many groups and representatives there, and hopes this is the start of a fruitful process towards transparency and high human rights standards in China."

"We need more diplomacy, not less. We have two powers. The US and Russia have an awful lot in common. Both are run by monopoly capital, run by oligarchs on both sides. We have two imperialist powers fighting each other in Ukraine, and only working-class people are dying."

"Why are we choosing an aggressive position with China? Why are we not choosing cooperation instead of aggression? Why are we not respecting the principle of state sovereignty and non-interference? We should be working for peace with China. It's in our interest. But you know what? I can't help feeling that we are being led along by the nose by the Americans who have a vested interest in challenging China at the moment not because China is a threat to the security of the American people... But China is a threat to their financial supremacy"

"Energy poverty is first and foremost a political failure which requires an adequate political response which tackles the root causes of injustice while ensuring a fair and sustainable future for all. Energy is a public good, but we need to start treating it as such – because we haven’t been doing so."

"We must question, as the Pope has done, the wisdom of sending arms to Ukraine. We must stop executing the war on Yemen. We must stop the use of sanctions as a weapon of war in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. These medieval weapons are killing women and children, the sick, the old and the vulnerable the most. We must end Fortress Europe and extend the compassion we rightly have for the Ukrainian women and children to all refugees and internally displaced people. Selective humanity is not humanity at all."

"Many people are asking, what is democracy? Democracy is where the people have a say in how their society is organised. There isn’t much of it around. In Member States, it’s been watered down dramatically by the weakening of local government – one of the best vehicles that the people had for connecting with those that were ruling them."

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"Where Luisa Capetillo truly acquired her vast culture was through the independent reading that she did during her lifetime, beginning in childhood. She read the works of the French writers, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, the Russian Romantics, Leo Tolstoy and Turgenev, and the French astronomer, spiritualist and freethinker Camille Flammarion, whose research on astronomy and psychical studies she avidly read. Her own work reflects the ease with which she handled the theories and texts of influential authors such as the French doctor Paul Vigne, of Hugo and Tolstoy, the writings of anarchist educator Madeleine Vernet, and the philosophical-political essays of Peter Kropotkin and John Stuart Mill."

"When I initiated my research, motivated by the desire to learn more about the history of Puerto Rican women, I found that everyone who knew Luisa Capetillo when she was alive, or knew about her, remembered her as the first woman in Puerto Rico to wear pants in public. At first I thought these recollections were based on an implied societal intention not to recognize this revolutionary for her important role, but rather to brand her an eccentric, remembered only by what could be considered superficial actions. I was saddened by the fact that even respected intellectuals didn't value her feminist, labor and anarchist work in its true perspective. What I found out was that Luisa Capetillo did not wear pants in public as a whim or to attract attention. She did not preach free love because she was immoral or libertine. She did not become the first feminist in Puerto Rico, both in theory and in action, because she was disappointed in love. The theories developed by Capetillo and her actions in daily life came from the legitimate theoretical political formation that ruled her life, Luisa Capetillo must be situated in her historical moment. The fact that she was a vegetarian and a true believer in Swedish calisthenics and in yoga, as ways to keep the body in optimum health, has to be discussed. To fully understand this woman, it is not enough to know her intellectual and public accomplishments; how she lived also has to be known."

"Along with theories about "spontaneous revolution" and the organization of campesinos and industrial workers into unions and libertarian federations, the anarchists also transmitted a set of ideas about everyday life that included free love and free education, which would result in men and women "free" from conventional ties. The books by Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta (who lived in Latin America for many years), significantly shaped the education of Puerto Rican workers and deeply inspired them. The educational theories of the Catalonian Francisco Ferrer and the French writers Sebastian Fauré and Madeleine Vernet (whom Luisa Capetillo called Magdalena Vernet), became the ideal of Puerto Rican workers."

"She revolutionized the role of women in Puerto Rican society and became a paradigm for the new woman."

"The defense of a woman's right to education was the motivating and uniting issue which would eventually culminate in a more liberal complete and progressive education for Puerto Rican women. Tempered by their struggle, women emerged who would lead the feminist movement in the early twentieth century. These women were the liberals Ana Roqué, María Luisa de Angelis, Isabel Andreu de Aguilar, and the workers Luisa Capetillo, Franca de Armiño and Concha Torres. A better and more complete education for women of all social strata remained the unifying cause within the feminist movement throughout the years."

"I believe that it is essential, especially for women active in the feminist movement in our country, as well as for those who are affirming their cultural identity, to know about the struggle of Puerto Rican female workers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Luisa Capetillo is a symbol and model to emulate because she was not satisfied with merely having principles and believing in them. She actually lived those principles with an indomitable rectitude, in spite of her contradictions."

"During her lifetime, Luisa Capetillo was often compared to George Sand."

"Luisa Capetillo, Historia de una mujer proscrita belongs to the contemporary cultural phenomenon of women's biographies. Only now are we becoming familiar with María de las Mercedes Barbudo, who struggled for Puerto Rican independence during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and was jailed in El Morro, the infamous military garrison in old San Juan; with Ana Roqué (often referred to as Ana Roqué de Duprey), pioneer journalist and novelist; Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo, travel writer, translator and poet; Librada Rodríguez, labor and political leader; Julia de Burgos, the poet of love and nationhood; and Ruby Black, the United States feminist and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's friend and confidante, who made a successful career writing as a correspondent for La Democracia, a Puerto Rican daily newspaper."

"A century ago Puerto Rican feminist Luisa Capetillo said, "If you don't want women to sell themselves for bread, give them bread.'"

"In looking at the Puerto Rican movement as a whole and the positive contributions that we made in the seventies and early eighties, first we need to point out that we built on our legacy of struggle. We stood on the shoulders of such Nationalists as Ramón Emeterio Betances, Pedro Albizu Campos, Lolita Lebrón, and such communists as Luisa Capetillo, Jesús Colón, Bernardo Vega, Julia de Burgos, Juana Colón, Evelina Antonetti, Antonio Corretjer, Genoveva Clemente, Gerena Valentín, and many others."

"The socialist and especially anarchist organizations in Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century launched a number of community education programs, and its leadership made literacy and intellectual activity a priority for the working class. Belpré may have been raised in a milieu similar to the environment that produced Luisa Capetillo (1879-1922), the Puerto Rican feminist anarchist who, though of humble birth, was highly literate, bilingual (Spanish/French), and became an accomplished author and activist as an adult (Iglesias de Pagán 1973; García and Quintero Rivera 1982; Ramos 1992; Sánchez González 2001)."

"We identified as revolutionary nationalists' committed to ending exploitation and colonialism. We were inspired by the herstories of women activists in Puerto Rico. We learned about Lola Rodríguez de Tió and Mariana Bracetti, early fighters for the abolition of slavery and the island's independence from Spain; Luisa Capetillo and Juana Colón, working class organizers and women's rights advocates; and Lolita Lebrón and Blanca Canales, Nationalist Party militants imprisoned for their actions to free Puerto Rico. We studied the lives of African American women such as Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist and women's rights activist, and Harriet Tubman, who freed slaves through the Underground Railroad. Our sisters in the Black Panther Party were diversifying the image of the revolutionary, and we joined the protests to demand the release of Angela Davis from a California prison, and of Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird in New York. The long line of women activists, from contemporary social justice movements, became our role models and mentors."

"Socialista soy, porque aspiro á que todos los adelantos, descubrimientos é invenciones establecidos, pertenezcan á todos, que se establezca su socialización sin privilegios. Algunos lo entienden con el Estado, para que este regule la marcha, yo lo entiendo sin gobierno No quiero decir que me opongo á que el gobierno regule y controle las riquezas, como lo hará, pero yo mantengo mi opinión de sentirme partidaria decidida del no gobierno. Socialismo ácrata. Bien yo aquí afirmo y declaro solemnemente, que para ser socialista es necesario haber analizado y comprendido la Psicología."

"El socialismo está en el luminoso cristianismo que socavó los cimientos del poder de los Césares, por la fraternidad. Y la fraternidad universal sera la implantación del socialismo que es abnegación, dulzura, modestia, templanza, <> Seguros escalones que conducen á la perfección humana, para la libertad y el progreso espiritual indefinido aun por la pluralidad de mundos habitados superiores. Instruyámonos para purificarnos. eduquemos nuestra voluntad para el ejercicio del bien, y dejemos consumir bajo el influjo de la razón, el fuego de la pasiones, en holocausto á la emancipación humana, para la persecución del progreso espiritual."

"She had taken an active role in many strikes over her life, including the highly successful sugarcane strike of 1916 which won 13% pay increases. In addition to her anarchist activism, she caused a scandal by being the first woman to wear trousers in the region: once sensationally being arrested in Cuba and tried for it. Although she successfully defended herself in court arguing there was no law which prohibited her wearing men's clothing."

"One of the most outstanding women leaders in this movement was Luisa Capetillo...She wrote on education and the importance of women working outside the home, on the benefits of a Communist society free from oppression and religion, on love, and on the future of society. In all her writings she insisted on her affiliation with socialism, on her support for women's liberation, and particularly her defense of "free love." She never married, and had three children in open relationships. Capetillo traveled to New York, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Florida, and published the feminist magazine La Mujer. She was arrested in Cuba for wearing slacks. In Puerto Rico she is remembered in a popular song that says: "Doña Luisa Capetillo, intentionally or not, has created a tremendous uproar because of her culottes.""

"Cuando se reforme esta sociedad indiferente y egoísta por la futura, fraternal y altruista, entonces, cuando no se cometan injusticias, cuando no se castiguen inocentes, cuando los jueces no exijan "la verdad, toda la verdad, y nada más que la verdad", siendo los primeros embusteros. Cuando no haya quien robe un bollo de pon, porque carezca de él, Cuando no exista la propiedad privada, y todos nos miremos como hermanos, entonces, y sólo entonces, desaparecerán las cárceles, presidios y las inútiles y perniciosas iglesias. No habrá miseria, odio ni prostitución. Existirá el libre cambio, pues estarán abolidas las fronteras y la verdadera libertad reinará en este planeta. Procura tú ayudar con la práctica á la realización de estas hermosas ideas humanas para que no perezcan de hambre y de frío, los infelices que no tienen hogar, ni riquezas, en los tristes portales de alguna cochera ó pesebre, ó de algún palacio....iqué irrisión! ¡Qué humanidad! á dos pasos de opípara mesa y de ricos y abundantes abrigos, perecer de hambre y de frío. Cerca de la prodigalidad y el despilfarro, el hambre, el dolor... pobres niños víctimas de la miseria... Parece un sueño, ó cuento y es una realidad, que asombra... ¡Qué horror! !qué falsos son los cimientos de esta llamado sociedad, que está basada en el crímen, el error, y la hipocresía."

"Las instituciones religiosas, han ayudado á fomentar esos privilegios y división de clases. Si los trabajadores en general por medio de la instrucción no logran destruir los privilegios de castas, razas, gerarquías, y miles de majaderías, que nos perjudican como seres humanos. Entonces la revolución lo hará. Muchos le temen á la revolución. Pero no hay como pertenecer á ella, para que el miedo se evapore. Las cosas vistas desde lejos, producen distinto efecto. De cerca, se llegan á palpar, y desaparece lo que se llama efectos de distancia y también de apreciación."

"En vez de ir á oir misa, visitas los pobres y socórrelos, que podrás hacerlo: en vez de confesarte y comulgar, visita los presos, y llévales consuelos, algo que los instruya. No olvides que los abundan en cárceles y presidios son los pobres y los ignorantes, las víctimas de siempre de todas las explotaciones."

"Debemos explicarlos las cosas materiales como son, sin añadir ni disminuir. La verdad debe ser la base fundamental para la educación de la niñez Y los padres tienen la obligación de no engañar á sus hijos, y enseñarlos á no engañar á los demás."

"Los padres deben dirigir y educar al niño, pero no castigarlo. Es un error creer que es una forma de educar el maltratarlos y atormentarlos."

"Her progressive ideas and her lifestyle inspires amazement, then respect and admiration, because of the enormous personal sacrifices she made in order to live a different life and fight for her vision of a new world."

"Es indispensable que la "Igualdad" deje de ser una vana frase muy usada, que los derechos de ambos sean iguales."

"unas manos útiles son preferibles á unas simplemente bellas."

"No me explico por qu el hombre cr e tener siempre derechos sobre la mujer."

"El actual sistema social, con todos sus errores, se sostiene, por la ignorancia y la esclavitud de la mujer."

"Todos los que apoyan, y continúan explotando, son los que sostienen el estado de miseria del pueblo y por tanto son los sostenedores de las cárceles, presidios ó mejor dicho los creadores de ladrones. de asesinos, de locos y fanáticos religiosos y políticos. Porque si no fuera por temor á la miseria, no habría fanáticos, políticos y religiosos. El temor á la miseria ó la miseria misma hace cometer torpezas, que degeneran en crímenes, injusticias y locuras, por los cuales tenemos cárceles y manicomios desigualdades é injusticias. La Revolución Social, será la que hará desaparecer tantas iniquidades. Y la revolución surgirá por la propaganda y el estudio é investigación científica. Y la propaganda la hacemos los libertarios y el estudio está al alcance de todos. Estudiemos y preparemos nuestra generación para las luchas futuras, que se avecinan."

"yo entiendo que lo que otros consideran utópico, és en mi concepto realizable."

"¿Qué conceptos tenemos de los que se oponen a todas las ideas de igualdad y libertad humana? La de traidores y judas del Maestro. Todos los que juzgan una idea llevada á la práctica, utópica, son obstáculos, y los obstáculos deben empujarse á un lado. Son los que entorpecen las grandes iniciativas, las obras de bien. Y aun así, se llaman patriotas y padres de la patria. ¿Qué concepto de la patria tendrán? Un concepto egoista, que empieza en ellos y termina en ellos. Ellos lo son todo."