Women Academics From The United States

"The veneration of the Virgin Mary defined the woman's identity as a virgin, as a saintly mother, as a wife-sex object, as a martyr."

"When was the last time you heard Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan talk about welfare rights?"

"Rape is an act of violent aggression, and it's something we have the right to defend ourselves against."

"In the middle class, the employment issue is social mobility, it's promotion, tenure. Women with Ph.D's don't want to be secretaries. The issue for the Chicana is just employment. "Give me a job. Give me a good-paying job. Let me have access to training." Again, pure class difference."

"Here's the double standard: "If I have a meeting, you stay at the house and take care of the kids. If you have a meeting, have it at the house and take care of the kids at the same time." Male privilege is, "Let's fight for equal pay for me, and maybe later on for you." Male privilege sometimes makes the Chicano movement just like a male liberation movement."

"If something in our culture that is advocating oppression is unable to be criticized, evaluated and changed, this is wrong."

"The roots of the psyche of la Chicana lies deep within the colonial period in Mexico."

"One of the most renowned feminist of the past is well known throughout the world, though she is not well known by Chicanas. Her name is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and she has been called one of the first feminists of the Americas (which is incorrect, because there were many pre-Columbian feminists). Several of the North American Indian societies were matriarchal and advocated the non-oppression of women-the non-oppression of anybody. Sor Juana was a seventeenth century genius. She was a genius who happened to be a woman and who therefore had only two alternatives: to marry, or to join the convent and marry God. She chose the latter because she felt it would offer her more flexibility and more opportunity to study. And she did study-she studied very hard. She was enthusiastic, to say the least, about learning. She spoke about women's hair-how the hair was a symbol of women's beauty, but if it covered an empty mind, it was nothing but a mask. She said that not until a woman's mind was equal in beauty to her long hair should she have her long hair, so in three months she would plan to read a certain amount, and if she hadn't she would cut off her hair. In three more months, if she hadn't achieved her goal of, say, three volumes, the hair was to go right back until the goal was reached. Sor Juana is famous for Respuesta, a letter to the bishop addressing itself to a letter he sent her praising Sor Juana for her brilliance but telling her that her duty was not to be brilliant but to serve God. The role of women was to be silent, not heard. Sor Juana very politely wrote back, "Surely you must know more than I; however, as I recall, Jesus did not say that women should be silent and not heard. You forget that the temple was a place of learning and discussion, and that women were preaching and talking to their people there, not just bowing their heads in silent prayer or absent-mindedly planning their week's activities. Jesus came into the temple and addressed himself to the people there, those who were speaking there, and those people were the women. Yes, it's my duty to be a servant of God, but how can I understand theology"-theology was a high point of learning in Mexico and in fact it still is-"how can I understand that, if I can't understand biology, geology, psychology? If the world's supposed to be a manifestation of God's great goodness, how can I understand that if I don't know anything about it? These are the prerequisites for my understanding of His great and beautiful powers." So she advocated that women have the right to education But women did not have this right until after the Revolution. During the eighteenth century they did open some convents where women could go and get educated, but the education was primarily in religious studies."

"Today, Chicana feminism is trying to rally enough women and get them to come out from behind the doors so that everybody can hear us say, "We're a legitimate body. No one can deny that any more. Ask us about our political stance, not our validity, as women fighting for women's rights within the Chicano community." Right now, we're in the process of making the Chicano movement responsible to Chicana issues, making it support issues that involve race, welfare rights, forced sterilization-making the Chicano movement address itself to the double standard about male and female workers, and making it live up to its cry of Carnalismo and community responsibility. We're saying, "Prove it! Let's carry it out! Let's support child care. Children are not our individual responsibility but the responsibility of our community." We are working to get women together to build up a base, and working to get the Chicano movement to support and advocate our issues as women."

"What is the Anglo women's movement? First, you have to understand that it is not a unified movement. There are at least three positions. There are the liberal feminists, who say, "I want access to power. I want access to whatever men have access to. I want women's oppression to end insofar as they do not have these things." Then there are radical feminists, who say that men have the power, and that men are responsible for the oppression of women. A third position is that of women's liberationists, which says that women's oppression is one of the many oppressions in the economic system of this country, that we must understand and support that system as well as correct it and unify people to end all oppressions."

"I resent the usual remark that if you're a feminist you have somehow become an Anglo or been influenced by Anglos."

"People-reactionaries I call them-sometimes define a feminist as someone who hates men. Maybe this is not totally erroneous, but the label is a tactic used to keep people from listening to the issues."

"Child care-it's not a female duty, it is a community responsibility."

"Differences between the philosophies of the "loyalists" and the "femenistas" have indeed been controversial ones. The loyalists do not recognize sexism as a legitimate issue in the Chicano movement. Femenistas see sexism as an integrated part of the Chicana's struggle in conjunction with her fight against racism."

"There is still a continuous effort on the part of Chicanas to maintain their identity and have people recognize how feminine issues have different and important facets to them when dealt with within the context of minority women, especially minority women who are Spanish-speaking and considered foreigners in their own land."

"Historical differences determine the relationship between the Anglo woman and the Chicana woman. The Anglo woman is a product of Protestant and imperialistic Anglo-European capitalism. The Chicana is a product of Catholic societies which still bear the marks of Counter-reformation feudalism and colonialism. Her Moorish, Spanish, Mexican Indian-Mestizo, Southwest heritage contribute to her cultural world view. Southwest heritage contribute to her cultural world view. But it also outlines her colonized situation in an imperialistic racist country."

"It is therefore the philosophy of the Femenistas that in order for a movement to truly fight for justice for all its people (both men and women) must it also, from the beginning, identify and fight the economic oppression delivered through sexism as well as through racism. It is the double responsibility for both Chicanas and Chicanos to become politicized to the economic implications of sexism-sexist racism; otherwise, the issues of employment, welfare, and education as they pertain to the Chicana are not known and therefore ignored and not resolved."

"the Chicana feminist has been cautioned to wait and fight her cause at a later time for fear of dividing the Chicano movement. Also it has been recommended that she melt into the melting pot of femaleness rather than divide the women's movement."

"In order to establish themselves as a legitimate interest group or groups, the Chicana femenista has continually had to justify, clarify, and educate people in the political and philosophical issues of the Chicana woman. This has not been easy. They have acted at the cost of being called "vendidas" (sell-outs) among their own group, the Chicanos. At the same time the femenistas have had to pressure the women's movement with little or no solid backing from the Chicano movement. From 1968-1971 feminism was rejected by the Chicano movement as irrelevant and Anglo-inspired."

"Harassment of femenistas forced many Chicanas to suppress their convictions. The term "women's libber," a stigmatizing label, was used as a social label assigned to those who spoke out for women's rights in the Chicano movement."

"Chicana feminism shares with all women the issues that affect them as women, such as welfare, birth control, abortion, and employment. But it is in the context of the needs of the Chicano people who suffer from racism that sexual issues have a new dimension."

"There is no difference between a mental-health issue and a neurological issue."

"In order to truly understand the needs and problems of La Raza, we must include the Chicana in our study."

"As minority women, the Chicanas have had to fight racism, sexism, and sexual racism. Racism oppresses the Chicana as a member of a Spanish speaking, culturally different, non-Anglo group in a society that values only one culture, and only one race as superior over all, the Anglo-Saxon race. The Chicana encounters sexism in a society that associates social and economic power, authority and superiority with male dominance and male control."

"Even quite mild acute uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities, and more prolonged stress exposure causes architectural changes in prefrontal dendrites."

"The Chicana feminist has had to struggle to develop and maintain her identity in spite of the paternal and material tendencies of two social movements to absorb her into their general movements as their own rank and file."

"In providing adequate health programs, Anglo women contend with the cruel prejudice doctors have towards women patients. Chicanas must also contend with doctor's racism, insensitivity to the Chicano culture and the lack of bilingual medical staff."

"a feminist can be a man as well as a woman-it is a group of people that advocates the end of women's oppression."

"I am a Chicana feminist. I make that statement very proudly, although there is a lot of intimidation in our community and in the society in general, against people who define themselves as Chicana feminists."

"One of the 50 most important women in science"

"a key figure in the development of applications that run on distributed collections of computers"

"Szilard is one of a brilliant group of Hungarian émigrés, which also included John von Neumann, Michael Polanyi, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller. He believes this remarkable concentration of scientific talent grew out o( a special environment in Budapest at the turn of the century—a society where economic security was taken for granted, a high value was placed on intellectual achievement, and physics was taught so badly that serious students were thrown upon their own resources."

"... on many questions involving science and public affairs those who know cannot speak whereas those who are free to speak often do not do so for fear that their information is not adequate."

"In the strenous autumn of 1945, when scientist tried to provide legislators with a new set of facts and a new concept of military destruction, two courses were advocated. Leo Szliard called for intensive pressure on key individuals; the scientists' lobby, which helped to establish civilian control of atomic energy, was a collective exercise in this technique. Rabinowitch, while supporting this crash program, argued that the radical change in patterns of political behavior required by the new weapons would be achieved only by the long, painfully slow process of education. The education must begin with the scientists themselves for, said Rabinowitch, the scientists had a lot to learn about how to handle political and social evidence as scrupulously as they used laboratory data, and how to think politically with the same blend of imagination and rationality that they applied to scientific questions."

"Had the outcome of Los Alamos been anything less than the threat of man's self-destruction, I daresay what would have stuck longest in everyone's mind is the sheer absurdity, the general wackiness, of the whole operation."

"Data abstractions provide the same benefits as procedures, but for data. Recall that the main idea is to separate what an abstraction is from how it is implemented so that implementations of the same abstraction can be substituted freely."

"This isn’t true. Please don’t spread lies to foment or encourage political violence in our state. Or anywhere. Thanks."

"Progressive Jewishness is about that strand of Jewish tradition which heads toward justice. It must include all the other liberation struggles. Its root is compassion; its assumption, that domination is not only wrong but unnecessary. Progressive Jewishness approaches the world with an ethical imperative and a Marxist slant on constant transformation. Always something needs doing. The world is not a fixed entity but constantly changing, and as progressive Jews our work is to help shape these changes."

"Sometimes I say this myself, like a mantra: WE ARE THE ONLY ADULTS. This enrages and frightens me. What it means to me is no one will do our work for us. No one can show us the way, or make good on our errors. If the Jewish people need spiritual and political redirection-and we do-if the planet needs saving, and the U.S. needs to spin on its axis, we'd better get busy. No one will do it for us."

"When I talk about the long haul I'm talking partly about emulating those wonderful grownups of my childhood: the old Jewish left, some of the most energetic, caring, committed people I've ever met, who through the McCarthy period, which was my childhood, right up through the present never stopped fighting, or stopped and started again, over and over. That is one kind of long haul, how to go on being an activist. And even in a world where almost nothing seemed possible, even then I'd just as soon emulate the women and men I grew up around who refused to stop fighting; because, after all, you never know unless you try."

"Are we so attached to structures developed years ago as to believe that these are the only structures in which our organizations can function?"

"Keeping balance means being very open to change, especially in a time like now when the ground is shifting. It does not mean digging in your heels."

"I think we are entering a time when we need inspiration and vision. We need fresh voices. This means we need people to feel that what they have to say is welcomed, not that they're going to get dumped on the second they open their mouths. We need to create a sense of permission."

"we need the vision that inspires us forward. The couple, the nuclear family as the unit of survival, will not do. The single-issue movement will not do. The single-people struggle will not win. We are up against one of the most powerful, impenetrable machines of human history, our government. I am talking, ultimately, not only about preserving women's choice, or fighting hate, or even about peace between Israel and Palestine, but about massive transformation of society. This is what I had forgotten. This is the vision we need to hang on to. The old activists of my childhood who were my models-now I become them, and so do you. We are the only adults. No one will do it for us."

"We need a new level of sustained activism-not only symbolic action. There have been too many marches where we get a permit and go home afterwards. What is significant about marches is the promise they offer, a promise of trouble, and it is time to live up to those promises."

"one way to expand protection for sexual freedom is to assert this freedom. If our developing culture does support sexual honesty, then perhaps explicitly sexual art and literature will replace exclusively floral interpretations of our cunts."

"We're all thinking about this. The intifada, and the cooperation between the peace camp Israelis and Palestinians, especially the women; Tienanmen Square. The bizarre events of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, remind us of a basic, forgotten principle: vast unity across broad lines can challenge the very core of power. (The rise in ethnic chauvinism also reminds us-as do graveyard desecrations in Western Europe; if you can't find a live Jew, defile a dead one-of the longevity of anti-Semitism). The possibilities of breakthrough in South Africa contribute to our sense that what seemed frozen, impossible to budge, is not impervious to change."

"one task in creating a culture is to reclaim what one ought to have learned but that somehow went by and was lost."

"we should recognize that to the extent that lesbian culture represents the experience, insights, values, and interests of most lesbians, it will have a combative relationship to the dominant culture-as long as in that culture, lesbians are oppressed. Rubyfruit Jungle doesn't alter this oppression. Lesbian culture, for it to belong to and represent most lesbians, will be pro-woman, pro-working people, and multiracial. This means that a genuine culture of lesbians will always be in danger of repression, co-optation, and absorption, until such time as lesbians have control of our lives."

"things are in motion. Grace Paley has said, when people stand up, other people discover they've got legs. While there are limits to this kind of analogy (not everyone can stand, or has legs for that matter), the motion is unmistakeable."