Women Activists From The United States

"We are living in the midst of a social revolution in our society. My heart's cry is wake up, wake up America, before it's too late."

"On the talk-show program, Ed showed the duplicity of Ken Kelly in trying to make me look anti-Semitic. Kelly had made it appear that I hate Jews and that I had singled out and assigned them to hell. The Bible teaches that those who reject Jesus Christ are lost and doomed to separation from Him in heaven. There is a heaven, and there is a hell. The idea did not originate with me. God has provided a way of salvation, and if men choose to reject this plan, then they are going to have to pay the penalty- non-Jews, as well as Jews. It has nothing to do with a person's ethnic background."

"We have a determined foe. It calls for a mighty show of strength by the hitherto silent masses. We believe that the silent majority in America will not allow this destruction of either me or this nation to take place."

"God makes people this way... What could be more erroneous than to blame God for the sin of homosexuality? No one can lay that charge to the Almighty. Research data consistently show that homosexuals must make a choice whether to act out their sexual preference or to keep it under control. Jerry Kirk in his book The Homosexual Crisis in the Mainline Church states that righteousness, not research, will decide where the church must stand. As of now the claims of scientists and researchers are contradictory. Either the church stands on the claims of the Word of God and faces up to the fact that God calls for moral responsibility, or it will be held accountable for failure to hold up the standards of righteousness."

"In the final analysis, we are accountable to God. I may not have the media or the entertainment industry backing me, but I know I do have the backing of the majority of the American people. It is not anything I sought or asked for; but what the militant homosexual community has meant for evil, God has meant and used for good. And that is biblical."

"When we started in January 1977, I didn't realize the Dade County situation would lead to a national organization to help other cities. The response has been staggering. I pray that when you, the reader, read news articles or hear news about my public and private life, you will not let the liberal press slant your view."

"God's blessing and gratitude... To all those others who served with us during the campaign in Miami, many of whom we disagree with on many issues, political and otherwise, but, who are united with us in the preservation of the American family unit and the attacks on this unit by certain militant segments of our society."

"I repeat my belief: Homosexuals do not suffer discrimination when they keep their perversions in the privacy of their homes. They can hold any job, transact any business, join any organization- so long as they do not flaunt their homosexuality and try to establish role models for the impressionable young people- our children. I will continue to fight the attempts of Metro, and the attempts of a few Congressmen who on February 2 presented a similar type of bill in the Congress of the United States to legitimize homosexuality. Homosexuals cannot reproduce- so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America. I shall continue to fight against that recruitment. Those who do not share my conviction may continue to blacklist my talent- but with God's help, they can never blacken my name."

"The hurt in my heart and the agony in my soul were of such intensity that when I was home and first got the news of a national homosexual bill similar to the one in Dade County, all I could do was cry. This bill, HR2998, would have the effect of making it mandatory nationwide to hire known practicing homosexuals in public schools and in other areas. With all the thousands of other letters I received from groups all over the country dealing with pornography, abortion, TV violence, ERA, and various other things, all I could do was weep for America. There are no words in the English language strong enough to describe the grief I felt."

"To talk about the "rights" of someone who has chosen to rebel against responsible living is nonsense. It is simply not true that all human beings have the same rights."

"The militant homosexuals in this country and their sympathizers don't realize the extent of my Christian convictions. They don't comprehend what my commitment to Christ really means. They think that my priorities are where their priorities are- in money, careers, power, doing what makes one feel good. It is not even within their realms of thinking that someone would sacrifice her career to stand for what she believes. But this I have been willing to do. The "gay" activists cannot comprehend that we have been the happiest in our lives since all this began, because we know we are doing what God has asked us to do. There is no satisfaction that equals it. The Lord and our family come first. This is what, in the idiom of the world, "turns us on." We have not been destroyed because of this; we have been strengthened. Through it all I was working as if everything depended on me, but I was praying, knowing everything depended on God. And it did! And it does! And He does not let down those who trust and obey Him."

"The attempt by homosexuals to label this as a civil-rights issue was nothing but camouflage. If we as a nation eventually came to the place where this is sanctioned as a legitimate civil-rights issue, then what is to stop the adulterer from claiming "adulterer rights," the murderer from shouting "murderer rights," the thief to claim "extortioner rights," and a rebellious young person to insist on "rebellious-child rights"?"

"The media misquoted me, saying that I called homosexuals garbage. That was not what I said. As I talked about our concern for the health and diet of our children and other people's children, I said, "If they are exposed to homosexuality, I might as well feed them garbage." I think there is a difference, but I leave it to the reader to interpret as you wish- we did not resort to name-calling at any time during the campaign in Miami."

"I truly felt (and feel) a strong sense of God's leadership in pursuing the thing I loved best- singing. I believe God gave me a voice to be used for His glory. He carefully guided me, constantly providing opportunities for each step of development in a career. I simply had to do my best, practice, prepare, and follow Him. In fact, my whole career is simply a study of God's plan and leadership. As long as I trusted Him for guidance, He miraculously showed me one step at a time. Every time I began to take things into my own hands or began to walk over people, or became too ambitious, God had ways of putting me in my place."

"My cooking days began in Mother and Grandma Berry's kitchen. They allowed me to try all kinds of cooking "experiments." Then Grandpa and Grandma would taste the new dish and brag just like it was the tastiest meal ever. It never occurred to me that they might be speaking more out of love than out of truth."

"Nowadays many intelligent young women attempt to establish good homes on mere social and psychological precepts. They turn to well-meaning advice you find in popular magazines. I don't knock it. Much of it is good. However, it never goes far enough. It will leave you stranded every time. If you truly are serious about life, nothing short of Jesus can suffice."

"A Christian home never comes about by accident. I believe it must require more grace and hard work than any other organization on earth. Bob and I receive letters every day from Americans who express deep yearnings and real concern for the quality of life in their homes. They know they need God in their lives. How do you find this? They ask us. Where do you begin? To establish a Christian home, you must begin with the individuals in it. More accurately, you must start with yourself- wherever you are, whatever your role. The initial step is to make sure your own relationship with God is right by accepting His Son, Jesus Christ, as your personal Lord and Saviour. Nothing else can happen until you do. But when that right relationship is established, anything can happen. I mean it. We get so many letters telling about miracles that happened within four walls of a home. You can only praise Jesus for them! However, a "good" home will never be good enough."

"In many times and places, mine eyes have seen the glory, I thought. And sometimes, when our eyes are opened to Him, the glory seems particularly bright- at home."

"Bob and I began to relax. To our children, the President wasn't the President, but a very nice granddaddy. When he pulled out a drawer and gave them candy, there was immediate rapport. During a nice, chatty visit, the President also presented our youngsters with pens, and gave Bobby a tie clasp and Gloria a charm. There were mementoes for Bob and me, too: cuff links with the presidential seal for him, a perfume atomizer and a charm with the presidential seal for me."

"President Lyndon B. Johnson reminded me of my dad. Genial, full of homespun humor and stories about Texas, he is really down-to-earth and genuine, very much his own man. One episode in particular illustrates to me the special thoughtfulness of President and Mrs. Johnson. Bob and I were visiting them informally in their White House living room when the President invited us to bring Bobby and Gloria to call on him in the White House. "When would be a good time?" we asked. "You'd better make it before Easter," Mrs. Johnson suggested. She must have known at that time that within weeks her husband would surprise the world with his announcement that he did not intend to seek reelection. President Johnson received us and our children in the anteroom to his White House office. I imagine Bob and I felt as apprehensive as any other parents might have felt, wondering if their youngsters would do or say anything unpredictable during a call on America's chief executive! "You sure look like somebody I know," President Johnson said, stooping low to meet Gloria's eyes. "And you look like your daddy," he told Bobby."

"I stood only three feet before my audience. As we began the "Battle Hymn," I sang with great concentration, my eyes half closed. Suddenly I felt the power of the Holy Spirit within that room. As the hymn gathered force, I knew the Lord was speaking to me and to everyone else there. Then the President of the United States and all the other people in that historic room rose to their feet, applauding and cheering. For a long, unforgettable moment, the great American hymn held us close to one another. Certainly, for me, it was an awesome moment. But the awe I felt within the White House that night surpassed everything I might have felt about the world figures who were gathered there. What each of us felt that night, I am convinced, was the unmistakable authority of Almighty God."

"The last three tours abroad with Bob Hope took my husband and I to Viet Nam. There was distinct danger those times, and more than once Bob and I discussed the wisdom of our flying together so much. With two small children to consider, we knew we should not take unnecessary risks. Still, something continued to draw us on, as Bob Hope said it would. That something is the incredible courage and stamina of the American fighting man, and still more, respect for all the good and decent things he stands for as an individual. We soon learned that these men wanted good, wholesome entertainment, not just cheap laughs. They wanted to look at a real woman from back home, not just what Bob Hope called the "sexpot type." And Bob and I learned that these men, who often lived and worked just moments away from death, very much cared about God."

"For years, as I've said, Bob has worked hard for our family's sake to cut traveling to a minimum. But there are some 300,000 miles that he and I shared that we wouldn't take back for anything. I mean the world-famous Bob Hope Holiday tours to the armed forces stationed in remote posts overseas, on behalf of the U.S.O. "Go with us one time, Anita, and it will get into your blood," Bob Hope suggested in 1960, the first year Bob and I were married. "You'll never play to a greater audience.""

"I'm convinced that when you turn your business over to God entirely, He not only will send you exactly the type work that's best for your talents and your nature, but He'll help you begin to aim higher, so your ambitions will become more worthy of Him. It becomes a matter of really trusting the Lord to provide. This has to be learned. It may sound strange to those who don't operate the way Bob and I do, but we absolutely know the Lord will open all the right doors."

"Those girls who give themselves to the man they love before marriage really succeed in cheating themselves. I know and understand how strong the temptation is, but also I know something else: there is nothing else more beautiful and wonderful than sexual love between marriage partners- when that love is entered into and blessed by God. Why would anyone want to accept anything less?"

"If homosexuals are allowed to change the law in their favor, why not prostitutes, thieves, or murderers? [...] Some of the stories I could tell you of child recruitment and child abuse by homosexuals would turn your stomach."

"If homosexuality was the normal way, God would have made Adam and Bruce."

"But the homosexual and abortion lobbies are evil twins with the same agenda. Both want the freedom to commit illicit sex without physical or moral consequences."

"she was a "she-poet." As she told her interviewer in 1972, "Anything I bring to this is because I am a woman. And this is the thing that was left out of the Elizabethan world, the element that did not exist. Maybe, maybe, maybe that is what one can bring to life.""

"she was a visionary. One of the great, necessary poets of our country and century, whose value to the present generation is only beginning to be acknowledged, like Whitman she was a poet of possibility."

"rarely will you encounter a mind or imagination of greater scope."

"Rukeyser proposes-following D'Arcy Thompson now as well as Gibbs-that the great poems are always organic, as forms in nature are organic. They grow by "clusters and combinations," through time; they find their true direction as they proceed; and they never stand still but "fly through, and over" any attempt to pin them down by analysis. They include material from the unconscious and welcome the unknown. More, "the work that a poem does is a transfer of human energy," from the poet through the poem to the fully responsible and responsive witness/reader. And now she takes a gigantic leap, tying the poet forever to the society and historical moment she or he shares with others: "I think human energy may be defined as consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions.""

"One of her favorite assignments was to ask everyone to complete the sentence "I could not tell...." For in what we cannot say to anyone, in our most secret conflicts, lie curled, she believed, our inescapable poems."

"Elsewhere her heroes are Willard Gibbs, the mathematical physicist, Albert Pinkham Ryder, painter of the sea, John Jay Chapman, man of letters, Ann Burlak, labor organizer, Charles Ives, composer on American themes; and John Brown (abolitionist) and Wendell Willkie, political visionaries who seemed, at their historical moments, to fail; Houdini and Lord Timothy Dexter, anomalies in any pantheon. How many of their stories are familiar to us, even now? Of all these she made biographies, in verse or prose or mixed media-the series of "Lives" that would occupy her to the end. All were Americans. Of the first five she pointed out, in 1939, that they were also New Englanders, "whose value to our generation is very great and only partly acknowledged." She never wanted to write extensively about anyone who had already received his or her due, and it's worth noting how rarely any of her subjects is literary. For years she worked on a book, now lost, on Franz Boas, anthropologist who studied North American indigenous tribes. Only much later would she turn to several non-Americans, the last being Thomas Hariot, Elizabethan navigator, mathematician, naturalist, astronomer, who published the first Brief and True Report of Raleigh's Virginia, the "Indians" who lived there, and our native plants and animals."

"I never came to know her well; New York has a way of sweeping even the like-spirited into different scenes. But there was an undeniable sense of female power that came onto any platform along with Muriel Rukeyser. She carried her large body and strongly molded head with enormous pride, and stood with presence behind her words. Her poems ranged from political witness to the erotic to the mordantly witty to the visionary. Even struggling back from a stroke, she appeared inexhaustible. She was, in the originality of her nature and achievement, as much an American classic as Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Du Bois, or Hurston."

"Rukeyser was unclassifiable, thus difficult for canon-makers and anthologists. She was not a "left wing" poet simply, though her sympathies more often than not intersected with those of the organized left, or the various lefts, of her time. Her insistence on the value of the unquantifiable and unverifiable ran counter to mainstream "scientific attitudes" and to plodding forms of materialism. She explored and valued myth but came to recognize that mythologies can rule us unless we pierce through them, that we need to criticize them in order to move beyond them. She wrote at the age of thirty-one: "My themes and the use I have made of them have depended on my life as a poet, as a woman, as an American, and as a Jew." She saw the self-impoverishment of assimilation in her family and in the Jews she grew up among; she also recognized the vulnerability and the historical and contemporary "stone agonies" endured by the Jewish people. She remained a secular visionary with a strongly political sense of her Jewish identity. She wrote out of a woman's sexual longings, pregnancy, night-feedings, in a time when it was courageous to do so, especially as she did it-unapologetically, as a big woman alive in mind and body, capable of violence and despair as well as desire."

"We call her prose "poetic" without referring to her own definitions of what poetry actually is an exchange of energy, a system of relationships."

"In her lifetime she was a teacher of many poets, and readers of poetry, and some scientists paid tribute to her vision of science as inseparable from art and history. But she has largely been read and admired in pieces-in part because most readers come to her out of the very separations that her work, in all its phases, steadfastly resists."

"Rukeyser's work attracted slashing hostility and scorn (of a kind that suggests just how unsettling her work and her example could be) but also honor and praise. Kenneth Rexroth, patriarch of the San Francisco Renaissance, called her "the best poet of her exact generation." At the other end of the critical spectrum, for the London Times Literary Supplement she was "one of America's greatest living poets.""

"Any sketch of her life suggests the vitality of a woman who was by nature a participant, as well as an inspired observer, and the risk-taking of one who trusted the unexpected, the fortuitous, without relinquishing choice or sense of direction."

"From a young age she seems to have understood herself as living in history-not as a static pattern but as a confluence of dynamic currents, always changing yet faithful to sources, a fluid process that is constantly shaping us and that we have the possibility of shaping. The critic Louise Kertesz, a close reader of Rukeyser and her context, notes that "no woman poet makes the successful fusion of personal and social themes in a modern prosody before Rukeyser." She traces a North American white women's tradition in Lola Ridge, Marya Zaturenska and Genevieve Taggard, all born at the end of the nineteenth century and all struggling to desentimentalize the personal lyric and to write from urban, revolutionary, and working-class experience."

"To enter her work is to enter a life of tremendous scope, the consciousness of a woman who was a full actor and creator in her time. But in many ways Muriel Rukeyser was beyond her time-and seems, at the edge of the twenty-first century, to have grasped resources we are only now beginning to reach for: connections between history and the body, memory and politics, sexuality and public space, poetry and physical science, and much else. She spoke as a poet, first and foremost; but she spoke also as a thinking activist, biographer, traveler, explorer of her country's psychic geography. It's no exaggeration to say that in the work of Muriel Rukeyser we discover new and powerful perspectives on the culture of the United States in the twentieth century, "the first century of world wars," as she called it."

"Muriel Rukeyser, who opened much of the forbidden territory where poets can now move with ease. Here, for a new generation, the full range of the capacious poet who gave twentieth-century women's poetry its mottoes and its most audacious exemplar, and poetry of witness and moral passion its most ardent and urgent American voice."

"American self-confidence, Emerson argued, should be grounded not in a narrow chauvinistic claim about the superiority of the American way but rather in a mature affirmation of America's gifts to the world as well as candid acknowledgment of the "most un-handsome part of our condition." Cheap American patriotism not only reflects an immaturity and insecurity, he warned, but also is an adolescent defense mechanism that reveals a fear to engage the world and learn from others. Narrow nationalism is a handmaiden of imperial rule, he argues-it keeps the populace deferential and complacent. Hence it abhors critics and dissenters like Emerson who unsettle and awaken the people. His shining example of democratic intellectual work is a challenge to us today. This challenge has been taken up through the years by a stream of Emersonian voices-from Walt Whitman to William James, Gertrude Stein. W. E. B. Du Bois, and Muriel Rukeyser...Muriel Rukeyser in her classic The Life of Poetry laid bare the democratic aspirations of exploited working people in their creative expressions."

"Muriel Rukeyser loved poetry more than anyone I've ever known. She also believed it could change us, move the world."

"The radical poet Muriel Rukeyser said long ago, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." Choosing the stories you, yourself, are made of is crucial work as we enter this unfinished story of how human beings responded to the greatest emergency our species has ever faced."

"Sisyphus is not, finally, a useful image. You don't roll some unitary boulder of language or justice uphill; you try with others to assist in cutting and laying many stones, designing a foundation. One of the stonecutter-architects I met was Muriel Rukeyser, whose work I had begun reading in depth in the 1980s. Through her prose Rukeyser had engaged me intellectually; her poetry, however, in its range and daring, held me first and last. "Her Vision" is a tribute to the mentorship of her work."

"I'd say the other major influences in late adolescence were Muriel Rukeyser and William Butler Yeats. Muriel was very important to me, as a writer who wrote honestly, passionately, and well about being a woman, as a writer with politics, as a writer whose work was written to be said aloud."

"Muriel Rukeyser was always a political person and a sad loss for some of us-for all of us, but particularly for those who knew her. She was a total poet, totally involved in literature, and she took a beating as a woman and as a poet who was not part of the elite that began to develop after the forties knocked the thirties on their head. She and somebody like Meridel Le Sueur were doubly wounded. They were wounded as women by their own political men-something like black women are-and wounded again by the literary elite, who were for the birds. But on the other hand Muriel lived very deeply in literature and with literary people. She knew them from an early age; she was close to Mexican poets, American poets, and she was political at the same time. When she got to be president of PEN she went to Korea even though she could hardly walk by then; she was very brave. [Rukeyser died of a heart attack in 1980.] So there are people who manage to do the whole thing."

"One of the most important poets of our time.... Her originality, her genius, her courage illuminate our century."