Women Academics From The United States

"The two revolutionary societies I’ve lived in are Cuba, during the second decade of its revolution, and Nicaragua during the first four years of Sandinism. In both places, I learned an enormous amount, mostly about what it means to attempt to construct a truly egalitarian life for people. Access to universal healthcare, decent housing, free education, a fair justice system, and experiments aimed at improving life for all members of society was important as I raised four children and watched them go through school and become self-sufficient adults. In Cuba, there were shortages, and food and clothing rationing was pretty severe in the years we were there. But I can’t remember ever feeling this was a problem. Rather, it felt good to know that what was needed was spread among everyone."

"revolutionary processes, like all civic experiments, are made by human beings, some notably more interested than others in true equality. So, I also learned how easy it is for problems to arise and for revolutionary ideas to be sidelined."

"Activism and feminism both draw on the imagination, requiring taking risks and thinking outside the box. This is the very definition of poetry."

"I discovered feminism in Mexico, at the end of my time there, when the first articles from US and European feminists began to appear...Feminism wasn’t academic theory to me, but something to be lived. I needed it."

"my mothering was circumscribed in two ways: as a revolutionary involved in trying to make the world a better place for all children, and as a feminist who demanded from my partner equal involvement in household tasks, and wanted to imbue my children with those values as well–my son as well as my daughters."

"all in all, I think we revolutionaries of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s gave our children love and a sterling set of values."

"Jewish women in second-wave feminism helped to provide the theoretical underpinnings and models for radical action that were seized on and imitated throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led the way into new arenas of cultural and political understanding in academe, politics, and grassroots organizing. Even a partial honor roll of Jewish women's liberation pioneers must include such figures as Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman, Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Susan Brownmiller, Marilyn Webb, Meredith Tax, Andrea Dworkin, Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Ann Snitow, Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Vivian Gornick. Despite historians' acknowledgment of the salience of Jewish women in earlier social movements, their prominence within radical feminism failed to attract much attention."

"My first article, published in 1970 in a movement journal entitled Women: A Journal of Liberation, was focused on the first historical figures that caught my attention: Sarah and Angelica Grimke. From there, I moved on to Seneca Falls and the early women’s rights movement and Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (to whom I have remained attached ever since)."

"Feminism was an entirely political movement then. Those of us in gradate school who began raising these issues in fields (history, anthropology, literature, etc.) did not think of ourselves as entering or even pioneering an academic field but rather producing serious intellectual resources for our movement. At the time, it hardly seemed like a smart academic move: there were no positions, no recognition from our profession. When it came time to get jobs, those of us who found them did so because women students pressed their colleges and universities for a different kind of education and some of those institutions–mostly public ones–reluctantly gave in. That’s how I got my first job at the State University of New York at Buffalo, as part of one of two or three women’s studies programs in the country."

"The new book – Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote – is the first comprehensive, evidence-based history of the American suffrage movement to appear since 1959. That book [Century of Struggle] was written by Eleanor Flexner...Since Flexner wrote her superb book–on which I and virtually every other suffrage historian has relied–there has been tremendous amounts of new research that has enhanced our picture of the suffrage movement, or I might say, suffrage movements, particularly on the activism of African-American women, who were segregated out of the white-dominated movement in the late 19th and early 20th century."

"My goal here is to make it clear that the campaign for women's suffrage was part and parcel of every era of American history. It wasn't something happening over here. In the beginning, it was part of the radical changes surrounding the campaign to end slavery. In the middle, in the late 19th century, it was part of a very conservative historical period and in the early 20th century it was an important part of the progressive movement. It can't be told separate from American history."

"Rose remembered Tom Paine, who was in danger of being forgotten for his radical hopes for the American Revolution. In a similar spirit, we remember Rose, in honor of those aspects of her vision of a free womanhood that have not yet been realized and that continue to inspire. To remember our ancestors is an act on our own behalf as well as theirs."

"Women’s liberation hadn’t really gotten started outside of New York City or Chicago in 1968. Instead I (and other soon-to-be feminists) was involved in anti-war and civil right activism. At Wellesley, although a women’s college, we worked hard on draft resistance and anti-war mobilizations. And, of course, responded to the incredible events of that year: Johnson’s announcement that he would not run again, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Women’s liberation was not on our radar, although I do remember noting to myself that women were basically running the office of the Boston draft resistance group behind the scenes. I was deeply involved because I had a draft resister boyfriend. That’s how most of us were involved..."

"By the middle of my second graduate year, I was committed to writing the history of early woman suffrage, which became my first book Feminism and Suffrage, as my doctoral degree. I had two professors: Christopher Lasch (while recognizing my ability, disparaged the topic) and Robert Wiebe (an historian of American democracy, gave me great support). I soon connected with two senior women doing women’s history, Anne Firor Scott and Gerda Lerner, and with about a dozen other young scholars, all graduate students, following their women’s liberation inclinations into history."

"I hasten to mention that I have never actually solicited a catalogue. Although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money. One of the pleasures, or horrors, of the direct-mail business is that you never know to whom your name will be pandered. My friend Ross Baughman, a photographer who once accompanied a group of American mercenaries to Nicaragua, inquired before the trip about a mail-order night-vision scope that would allow him to take pictures during midnight commando raids without using a flash. Ever since, he has been deluge with catalogs for pamphlets on how to make rifle silencers out of old car mufflers and napalm out of laundry detergent."

"Over time, my crush on Balder the Beautiful was converted into a crush on Ross, Franklin, Nares, Shackleton, Oates, and Scott. I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure."

"These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen."

"I don't by any ways believe that we are the chosen people—but what is so amazing is how we have blossomed in the diaspora and that we are still here as a people in spite of centuries of discrimination and genocide, even from the expulsion of Spain or even before the destruction of the second temple. And I think what has kept the Jews together is the idea of home and the idea of memory, which is the ideas that I write about: home as an inner center, and memory as giving voice to the invisible and becoming a witness."

"I grew up in a secular Jewish home. What was so important for us was the ethical values of Judaism and the central principle of our lives, Tikkun Olam (a Hebrew phrase that means “healing the world”). My father did not believe in organized religion, so we did not belong to a synagogue, but we led a Jewish life filled with traditions and meaning in a more unconventional way. Almost my entire family on my mother’s side came from central Europe, especially Vienna. All of them perished in the Holocaust, with the exception of my great-grandmother and her son. Also my grandfather, because he had arrived to Chile much earlier. For me as a writer, the stories of the Shoah are very important. They are central to my writing, which you can see in Dear Anne Frank and also I Lived on Butterfly Hill, in which one of the principal characters, the grandmother, is a survivor of the Holocaust. I also try to invoke in the readers the universal importance of social justice and tolerance. I believe these are not only Jewish teachings but fundamental human ideals. Yet I feel I was and continue to be shaped by growing up in a Jewish home that emphasized these values."

"a beautiful poet of the soul"

"I think that too many people are thrown into history, but remain accomplices, which means [they] are silent. I think what I like to say, and this is something I am the most proud of, that I made the choice to become a witness of those times. I made an absolutely conscious choice that I was going to be that, and I continue to look at the world with the same passion and commitment for social justice as when I was 17 years old, and sometimes people cannot believe it. They think I am this crazy idealist, but I am the same, even more now."

"you can be a Jew so rooted in your history and in your values that in a way God becomes secondary. And I think that's an amazing thing that Jews have been able to say. But what has linked my Judaism to my experience as a writer are two fundamental things. I think that Judaism has always understood the world from an ethical point of view, and I'm not talking about contemporary Israel or politics, but I'm talking about the Ten Commandments and the necessity, this old Talmudic concept where the title of the book comes from, "to mend to world": to create justice, if you save one life you save the world, is basically saying if you are a decent human being, you are really doing decent things in the world. So the ethics of Judaism and the struggles for social justice have been what I have wanted to take from that Judaism."

"It is so important to learn how other people live; to become familiar with a language that is not your own; to feel like a stranger. You will have great empathy for and great understanding of the world around you."

"Anyone familiar with the vast corpus of Marjorie’s work will agree that we have lost a literary giant in the field of Latin American Jewish Studies. Without a doubt, she stood out as the most eloquent, knowledgeable, profound, and prolific Latin American Jewish woman poet and writer residing in the United States. Hers was an essential voice in redefining the border between America and América in ways that challenged all presuppositions. She was a key founder of the field of Jewish Latina writing and escritura judía latinoamericana, connecting homelands and diasporas in original ways. Long before it became commonplace, she called attention to the unique hybridity of “Jewtina” identity and built a literary community for women writers who shared this mixed heritage."

"I think food is the closest thing we have to memory—to the memory of family gatherings, the memory of your grandmother the cook, or maybe the desire for a certain food you never had. But food is really about memory: the memory of taste, the memory of when you ate the meal. I think a lot of people who left their homelands, a lot of exiles or people who were deprived of food in concentration camps, they always tie food to memory—to memory of who they were."

"My whole view of the world and my sense of language and understanding, it's informed by my understanding of poetic language... It's the poet that informs, describes, feels, and understands."

"One of the difficulties that a lot of people have is that they long for certainty and long for making sense, but few things make sense in the world. Everything is filled with uncertainty, so we have to acknowledge uncertainty in every aspect of our life and especially in writing."

"every writer – or every person that aspires to write – has to become a reader. There’s nothing more beautiful than engaging with a novel, a poem, or an essay. You should not write for others, you should write from the point of authenticity, from your own self, from what you know. You hope that others will be enriched by your writing, but you don’t write for financial reward, recognition, or hitting the “best-seller” list. If you are worried about these things, you’re a different writer, not so much committed to what I think really matters, which is to capture your own voice, to release it and to share it. The most important, what we all struggle with, but is essential, is to be ourselves. As writers, as humans, as friends – to be ourselves."

"Women and women artists are looking at a place to belong in the world and to call home in a very particular way. I think that women are looking for a place that will allow them to be visible. I think we live in very conflicted gender times, and most of it is the possibility for visibility: visibility as creators, visibility in the home. If you look at the whole scope of the human rights situation, you see how women are always hidden, even the veil is a form of hiding. So I think that home is to become visible."

"I've always struggled to retain what I have lost, and I've tried to retain it through writing, but then I realize that not even writing can hold to this tremendous loss, and that's why it's so fragmented."

"Marjorie Agosin is like an elf. She disturbs us, amazes us, she forces us to be lighter, less terrestial. In her work, the unexpected and the mysterious go arm in arm. Unique in her genre, Marjorie Agosin could well be the creator of a new fantastic literature in Latin America."

"I don’t agree that all is lost in translation, but I think a great deal is lost, especially in poetry, where every word seems to hold a universe. Especially, considering the inner-workings of language, in a poem. The musicality, the rhythm, the juxtaposition of words, all of that is very hard to convey. Maybe a short story—or a chapter in a novel—would be easier. On the other hand, we need translators and I think they’re remarkably important. I think they should occupy a prominent place in the history of literature."

"She lay hidden, as if she were the very darkness of night. (first line of "Rivers")"

"I think the decoding of things, the passionate intellectual need to understand, is part of Jewish sensibility. (2016)"

"Life is sacred, but I also think a book is sacred. The way we bury the Torah speaks in a very symbolic way of the power of words. There is a strong correspondence, and it is the sacredness of beauty and dignity. Although for me, nothing is more sacred than human life. (2016)"

"...love letters that aren't read fade away. ("Cartographies")"

"And we prepared quickly for sleep. The mist crackled in the deep heart of the travelling night. We, too, were of a cross-roads, wounded by the pleasure of watching. We were in Austria and I thought of the wounds of my grandfather and of the music of Mozart, like a stream, like a litany, like a fragrance. Then I learned perhaps to be happy in those hospitable, desolate meadows, because the war had erased every trace of scars and only in certain looks were hollow aches and the calamity of dead children still preserved. (beginning of "The Eiderdown")"

"Silence is special when you are reflecting inwardly about who you are, but silence as a tool for political behavior—I think that’s always wrong. There are many kinds of silences. (2015)"

"Quite close together, in the warmness of shared bodies, they dared to dream of the sea. Some imagined it as the deep well of the soul; others sketched it out like the face of a drowned man, weighed down with broken seaweed and shells. (first lines of "First Time to the Sea")"

"Magic is another way of looking at the world. Magic cultivates the art of intuition and appreciation for the unexpected. Magic interprets the world through signs. In Latin America people live in a state of magic so I inherited this way of being. (2014)"

"The Latin American writer of the 1970s, like the journalist, cinematographer, and photographer, is the one who prevents the truth from disappearing, the one who searches for the testimony of eyewitnesses, of the forgotten ones, offering a taste of life and validity to the word. Written literature, oral testimonies, and public performances on forbidden streets demonstrate that Latin America hums with life despite the collective massacres, book burnings, and obligatory silence."

"In the face of fear and death these testimonies say "no" to silence and to the fate of all the people missing in a subhuman and diabolical world. What would the political history of Argentina have been without the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with their white kerchieves embroidered with the initials of their disappeared loved ones? Would the world, so often indifferent and astonished, have learned about the almost 30,000 people who disappeared in Argentina during the "dirty war"? From these spoils, writers, activists, and ordinary citizens constructed a language against authoritarianism, a language that accuses, denounces, and feels; words are the fundamental weapon against indifference, fear, and forgetfulness."

"At times of great political repression, literature acquires a powerful function: It legitimizes artistic expression in a totalitarian society whose government prohibits this expression. Women writers, through their words and stories, manage to reaffirm what the greater society has denied. Paradoxically, if patriarchal societies have historically denied the presence of women writers, and also those who write about politics, the existence of extreme conditions due to political and civil violence has allowed these women writers to create and through their texts become visible."

"My activism in human rights was born from various conditions that came together: I was Jewish, female, and an exile."

"The function of the writer and journalist is to present the truth. Latin America writers have demonstrated that to present the truth is more than an ethical posture for them because they are taking risks that may result in their exile, torture, or death. Many writers have been killed by fascist forces. Others have preferred exile and contribute to the history of their respective countries from the outside. All of them continue to construct new vocabularies that rescue memory and create something beautiful, good, and noble from pain and the most terrible conditions of human existence."

"Poetry has the ability to explore subjects that are often too difficult to simply talk about — for example, torture, violence, and especially gender violence. Poetry is intimate and searches for the essential in the human condition, so topics that have to do with human rights are central for poetry. Poetry is also an art form that searches for truth and justice. (2015)"

"Almost half of the world believes in wars. Why not change that and make people believe in poetry? Believe in kindness? Believe in encounters? I think it’s our responsibility to invite others and make them feel like they can transform the world."

"For me there was happiness in churches, their wax candles giving sermons, their dim lukewarmth, their delicate twilight silence that rustles when the devout make the sign of the cross facing the figure of that barefoot, sweaty man, deathly cold. (first lines of "Wax Candles")"

"Sometimes I imagine the Torah as the great book of the world handed from person to person and generation to generation so that we may remember what unites us and to help us imagine that in all lands there is the possibility of creating a history and participating in it. Books have the strength to create a mutual complicity between writer and reader and they allow the great human family to celebrate through words the memories of other times and places."

"In literature I found the caress, the unguarded pleasure, and the voice that had eluded me in this new country. I turned to books with a passion, almost in desperation, because they consoled me. I saw myself criss-crossing the hallways of the library, ransacking in particular the Spanish section and shelves. I discovered the warmth of words, words that belonged to me alone. I paused along their hills, invented the destinies of those exiled like myself. Above all I loved dictionaries, faithful guardians of my language. Through books I crossed borders. Wasn't Latin America an immense shawl united by a free and beautiful language?"