Women Activists From The United States

"I'm kind of approaching my carbon footprint like I approach my weight, going to the gym regularly, watching what I eat, and realizing I'm not going to lose that 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) all at once, like I want."

"We can be pushing all these individual change things on people, but unless the government steps up, we won't be able to reach the target."

"In my experience and that of my colleagues, public interest in climate change has actually increased over the past few years - We’re witnessing the effects of climate change with far more frequency than we used to due to increased storms, flooding, and generally wacky weather."

"Far from it! The sooner we tackle climate change, the less extreme the measures need to be to solve it. In fact, most of the things we need to do to solve climate change are things we would want to do anyway for health, economic and social reasons. There are a lot of great reasons to move to a transport system that’s dominated by cycling and public transport options over traffic-inducing, isolating and dirty cars."

"So maybe the one biggest thing you can do is to get politically engaged, because behavioral change is really slow. Too slow to stop runaway climate change."

"We need to take into account the human actions that contribute to the adverse impacts of climate change together with the losses and damages that escalates with each and every effect of these issues."

"The greenhouse gases are causing the global surface temperatures to rise, and we need to build the adaptation and mitigation measures."

"At the time I was interested in a set of debates in the academy about speech acts. “Performative” speech acts are the kind that make something happen or seek to create a new reality."

"Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us."

"Perhaps we should think of gender as something that is imposed at birth, through sex assignment and all the cultural assumptions that usually go along with that. Yet gender is also what is made along the way – we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level."

"It is important to acknowledge that, while a white person cannot claim to represent Black experience, that is no reason for white people to be paralyzed on matters on race, refusing to intervene at all. No one needs to represent all Black experience in order to track, expose and oppose systemic racism – and to call upon others to do the same."

"get up, put on your shoes, get started, someone will finish"

"Left to themselves people grow their hair. Left to themselves they take off their shoes. Left to themselves they make love sleep easily share blankets, dope & children they are not lazy or afraid they plant seeds, they smile, they speak to one another."

"avoid the folk who find Bonnie and Clyde too violent"

"I have just realized that the stakes are myself I have no other"

"but don’t get uptight : the guns will not win this one, they are an incidental part of the action which we better damn well be good at, what will win is mantras, the sustenance we give each other, the energy we plug into"

"I decided I didn't want to live with a man. My family experience of growing up made me think that living with men wasn't a nice idea. I had lots of lovers, and I asked people if they wanted to father a kid, and everybody thought I was insane, and finally I didn't ask — I just got pregnant and had Jeanne."

"I wanted everything — very earnestly and totally — I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother. ... So my feeling was, 'Well' — as I had many times had the feeling — 'Well, nobody's done it quite this way before but fuck it, that’s what I'm doing, I'm going to risk it."

"NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down."

"Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes [...] She broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity."

"For six decades, her writing confronted the traditional stereotypes of the female body, how it should look, weigh, and be desired. She was, to my eye, the real sexual liberator of the sixties — a woman who wrote dangerously, lived wildly, and loved daringly, right up to her very last breath. [...] Diane di Prima knew firsthand what it was like to make a seat for herself at tables that had no space for women like her — women who challenged the system, and who thrived in the act. She was always in coalition with such women, and you can hear echoes of her work in the "fight the patriarchy" slogans of modern feminism. She ... was raised by the women in her mother’s family to understand that men are just "a luxury," not a necessity for women's survival. To survive in this world as a woman, she learned, was to live in a state of insurgency, and to make peace with that fact. ... She saw herself as a weapon to be deployed — no, detonated — against her oppressors. She wrote about the equality of the sexes. She wrote about women as wolves, women as predators, as hunters, as villains. She wrote about fat women, queer women, androgynous women, disobedient women, women as Gods, as birds, as the wind."

"We had a birthday party for her when she turned 80 and there were, you know, punk rockers and, you know, trans people and old hippies and beatniks and little teenagers."

""Still, you are expected to be intelligent, articulate, civil, kind, charitable, accepting of anything that comes.”"

", “everybody knew the ground rules. There was no mistaking where your place was.”"

"“They own you,”"

""They really put you through the grind.”"

"Being a Black woman who was born and raised in America to African parents is, naturally, where I draw my inspiration from as an artist and filmmaker."

"Through my artwork and films, I hope to open audiences up to a new dialogue between the continents of Africa and America; one that incorporates more than just stereotypes, but includes both conventionalized and un-conventionalized discourses of race in its service. By creating complex contradictions, I hope that new meaning can emerge and be deposited into the universal consciousness. If I can do this by creating an experience for the audience that enables them to experience what it is like to find oneself, while being foreign in a community, then perhaps I can help that new meaning come to light."

"I would like to insert myself in the tradition of African storytelling through cinematic language."

"My definition of success isn’t about the accolades and the awards, but being authentic and consistent in my work and opening audiences up to seeing other perspectives in film."

"Instead of 'Africanizing' Western stories, I'm interested in reclaiming African history rendering them into what is happening in the present day."

"The waves have rolled in upon me, the billows have repeatedly broken over me: yet I am not sunk down."

"America stands armed with resolution and virtue; but she still recoils at the idea of drawing the sword against the nation from whom she derived her origin. Yet Britain, like an unnatural parent, is ready to plunge her dagger into the bosom of her affectionate offspring."

"I would be doing myself a great disservice if I do not do what I can to empower those who are less fortunate than I am; so that they can also have voices to share their bits of the knowledge pie"

"The rights of individuals ought to be the primary object of all government, and cannot be too securely guarded by the most explicit declarations in their favor."

"I have my fears. Yet, notwithstanding the complicated difficulties that rise before us, there is no receding; and I should blush if in any instance the weak passions of my sex should damp the fortitude, the patriotism, and the manly resolution of yours. May nothing ever check that glorious spirit of freedom which inspires the patriot in the cabinet, and the hero in the field, with courage to maintain their righteous cause, and to endeavor to transmit the claim to posterity, even if they must seal the rich conveyance to their children with their own blood."

"The thorns, the thistles, and the briers, in the field of politics seldom permit the soil to produce anything, but weariness to the body, vexation to the mind, and ruin to the adventurer."

"No single person has monopoly over knowledge, hence it is in my own interest to keep an open mind. To learn from the newborn baby and also from the aged woman on her death bed; from the billionaire and also from the street hawker."

"Our situation is truly delicate & critical. On the one hand we are in need of a strong federal government founded on principles that will support the prosperity & union of the colonies. On the other we have struggled for liberty & made costly sacrifices at her shrine and there are still many among us who revere her name too much to relinquish (beyond a certain medium) the rights of man for the dignity of government."

"Even the Italian master in politicks, the subtle and renouned Machiavel acknowledges, that no republic ever yet stood on a stable foundation without satisfying the common people."

"Black Americans are residents of a settler colony, not truly citizens of the United States. Despite a constitution laden with European Enlightenment values and a document of independence declaring certain inalienable rights, Black existence was legally that of private property until postbellum emancipation. The Black American condition today is an evolved condition directly connected to this history of slavery, and that will continue to be the case as long as the United States remains as an ongoing settler project. Nothing short of a complete dismantling of the American state as it presently exists can or will disrupt this."

"We are not ready to fight because we love fighting. We are ready to fight because we are worth fighting for."

"As a feminist, I believe that individuals on their own cannot change the culture; individual solutions don’t have traction. It takes a mass movement to really change things."

"(about writing her 1972 novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen) I wanted to show everything that we were talking about, in consciousness-raising"

"“Looks were an advantage for getting a husband, and getting a husband was everything,” Shulman explains. “You couldn’t even go to upscale restaurants in the evening if you were a woman alone or even two women. You had to have a man with you. It’s very hard for people to understand what it was like then."

"When I ask Shulman if she is surprised that women are still having such bad sex, her response is swift. “Not really,” she says. “And the reason is that the power relations between genders haven’t changed much. I think it takes a lot of trust and caring for good sex to happen—for women at least.”"

"Each generation must define the problems anew, from their own observations and experience."

"My inspiration for the novel came from my participation in the first national demonstration of the women’s liberation movement: the 1968 protest against the Miss America Pageant, in Atlantic City, that symbol of traditional white beauty standards. That protest brought women’s liberation to national attention for the first time."

"In "Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism," her contribution to the Signs collection, Alix Kates Shulman explains the premise of radical feminist consciousness raising: "The so-called experts on women had traditionally been men who. as part of the male-supremacist power structure, benefited from perpetuating certain ideas. ... We wanted to get at the truth about how women felt.. .. Not how we were supposed to feel but how we really did feel." As it turned out this was easier said than done, especially when the feelings in question were sexual."

"Alix Kates Shulman had no idea that its main principle, that "a woman and man should share equally the responsibility for their household and children in every way, from the insidiously unacknowledged tasks of daily life to the pleasures of guiding a young human to maturity," would cause such uproar. Reprinted in the debut issue of Ms., in Redbook (attracting two thousand letters), Life, a Harvard textbook on contract law, and other anthologies, it drew scorn from Norman Mailer, who famously mocked Shulman by declaring that he never would be married to a woman like her-he would never help his wife with the dishes!"