Women Activists From The United States

"women did not have such exciting lives in the Sixties. A man had a much more dramatic life. I think about the literary scene in the Sixties when I was writing, also, in Berkeley. You'd go to a party, and what I'd love about the party is that the poets would get up and read, would entertain one another with poetry-but it was always the guys that would get up and read, and the girls were always in the back listening to the poems. And so to write about that time, even during the times of the demonstrations, the men had all the exciting jobs. Even Bettina Aptheker complains about having to run the mimeograph machine. And then also, men had a more dangerous life, too, because they had the draft. They were always susceptible to having to go to Vietnam. So there's that dramatic story that they had that the women did not have."

"To sit and wring my hands in agony may have been the first emotion with which I met this great sorrow. But I pulled myself together and applied my whole thought to the working out of the great duty that had fallen to my lot."

"It was my experience in the Angela Davis trial that propelled me into a study of Afro-American women's history and, ultimately, into women's studies."

"I believe in organizations and social clubs. While I claim that the deaf are equal to their hearing friends in every respect and should be treated accordingly, I still feel that there is an unexpressed bond of comradeship and sympathy amongst persons similarly afflicted, and that they derive much satisfaction from associating with others of their kind."

"Is it not time that the public should be enlightened on the subject of the ability and efficiency of those who, normal and intelligent in every respect, lack only the sense of hearing?"

"I have an incurable belief in the potential of working class people. I believe that ultimately, the need to organize, the need to strike, it may get detoured, it may be a very long detour but ultimately it gets back on the road again."

"I was very young, just 20, in 1964. A lot of people were speaking on top of the car, [including] Mario Savio and Art Goldberg, who later became an attorney. They were almost all men, and I thought I might have something to say and that a woman ought to get up there and say something. Later on, the other person who spoke on top of the car was Jackie Goldberg, who is wonderful and later became one of the most important state legislators. Later, when we were surrounded by the police and it looked like they were going to break us up, a woman lawyer spoke on the top of the car. I didn’t have any feminist consciousness, it was just a feeling. I had a great time speaking on top of the car. The crowd was marvelous, it was at night, the lights of the cameras were blinding me, so I couldn’t see, but I could hear them and feel them. I quoted Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” The crowd roared back."

"(What are your thoughts on American Jewish engagement in politics now?) BA: We are a very small minority in the population. We have had over decades of very significant influence and [engagement] in progressive politics. A very disproportionate number of white students that went south are Jewish. Michael Schwerner [a Congress of Racial Equality social worker], and Andrew Goodman [a civil rights activist killed by the Ku Klux Klan] were Jewish, from New York. That was not unusual. [These numbers] are very disproportionate in relation to our numbers in the population. The Reform Rabbis that I have encountered were very much involved in the Civil Rights Movement. There is this historic connection between black and Jewish activists in the 30s and 40s. What I see happening today, [Jews] are still very progressive on domestic issues. [Jews] still generally vote Democratic. [There was an] overwhelming vote for Obama and for Hillary from the Jews. Some of the students that come to me who are pro-Palestine – I say… don’t demonize Israelis and don’t demonize the Jewish people."

"I think many girls and women experience this split of appearing totally together and on top of things but are internally a total mess. I’m an incest survivor, I’m dealing with sexual harassment, I have huge issues with low self-esteem, worthlessness, [and] suicidal tendencies."

"“She was a heartfelt revolutionary of her time,” Donna Wilkinson, the widow of national civil liberties leader Frank Wilkinson, told The Times on Monday. “She was always so fiercely partisan for working people. Yes, of course, she cared about war and peace and women’s issues, but she was always concerned about working people.”"

"one of the American left's most brilliant and fearless women-a pioneer in the '30s and role model for activists in the '90s."

"To me she represented what was most appealing about the Old Left — commitment, dedication, selflessness...In devoting herself to working for peace, and against economic and racial inequality, she provided a fantastic model for the rest of us. I will always remember her fondly."

"(What do you wish you could tell yourself at the time? Girls your age now?) BA: I wish that I could have taken a class like what I teach. I wish feminist studies and women’s studies classes were offered [when I was in college]. [At my age,] You knew how you felt but you didn’t know what to do about it. I knew I was a lesbian [but] I didn’t have the language for it. There were lesbians in the Communist party, [but] the party was very homophobic. Some of [the lesbians] were living together openly but never talking about it. It was don’t ask, don’t tell."

"Beginning in 1937, UCAPAWA-CIO offered hope. Four decades later, I asked Dorothy Ray Healey to recall her most rewarding experience as a labor organizer. Her answer: "To watch the disappearance or at least the diminishing of bigotry... watching all those Okies and Arkies and that bigotry and small-mindedness-all their lives they'd been on a little farm in Oklahoma; probably they had never seen a Black or a Mexicano. And you'd watch in the process of a strike how those white workers soon saw that those white cops were their enemies and that the Black and Chicano workers were their brothers.""

"One of the things I'd say about Dorothy is that she has a great capacity to listen sympathetically and to be able to see the other person's point of view. She might have disagreed with ideas that people were articulating (not just these young Black people; it was true of many people that she would encounter), but she could see from the point of view of their culture and who they were personally why they were saying the things they were. At the same time she would be able to articulate alternative ways of thinking. That's a great gift. It's very helpful to people. It allows them to see things in a different way than if you come at people with your line and bash them over the head with your pickax and say, "You're wrong, you're counter-revolutionary, you're petit bourgeois." You do that with people and they say, "Bye.""

"The knowledge I gained about the Che-Lumumba Club did not satisfy me completely, because I had little firsthand knowledge of the larger Party. Kendra and Franklin, therefore, introduced me to some of the white comrades. I began to pay visits to Dorothy Healey, who was then the District Organizer of Southern California. We had long, involved discussions-sometimes arguments-about the Party, its role within the movement, its potential as the vanguard party of the working class; its potential as the party that would lead the United States from its present, backward, historically exploitative stage to a new epoch of socialism. I immensely enjoyed these discussions with Dorothy and felt that I was learning a great deal from them, regardless of whether I ultimately decided to become a Communist myself."

"Dorothy Healey, a 1930s communist union organizer of the migrant workers and head of the southern California region of the Communist Party for two decades, including the four years I lived in L.A., recounted the 1938 cotton strike and celebrated the militancy and solidarity of the Okie cotton pickers, hardly mentioning that the strike was lost, or that two decades later, the children of the pickers were serving as L.A. police officers or were active in the John Birch Society. Furthermore, Dorothy and other Communist Party people perceived the 1930s Okie migrants as responsive to the Communist Party."

"The formation of a lesbian (and gay) identity, divested of Freudian origin, is in process. (p 119)"

"A successful teach-in on campus during that fall of 1966 helped raise consciousness, although only a small percentage of students and faculty were involved. Noam Chomsky and Herbert Marcuse were the main speakers, but there were dozens more, and the event went on for fourteen hours, with thousands crowded into the student union cafeteria. I was distressed that none of the speakers were women. Dorothy Healey of the Communist Party was scheduled to speak but the Progressive Labor Party people-the Maoists-disrupted her presentation. That was my first personal encounter with infighting on the Left."

"The late Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a longtime CPUSA official, once remarked that Healey was a good leader in her District but was afflicted with a psychosis when she attended national meetings, because she insisted on challenging the leadership. FBI memorandum, August 6, 1969. I had seen many women in the Party who worked very hard and were intelligent and developed theoretically and politically, but I hadn't seen anyone with quite Dorothy's energy and charisma. I do remember very clearly certain Party conventions that I was at in the sixties where I saw her as the "embattled female." It was like this sea of cigar smoke, and she smoked these little cigarillos, and there was something about that, her being little, and she'd barge into these circles of men conversing on something or other, whatever caucus it was, she'd barge in there, and I just loved it. I thought that was great, just great. I didn't care what she said."

"when push comes to shove I still believe that until there is no longer the private control of the commanding heights of the economy, you can't fundamentally solve anything. Public or social ownership is needed-and that is a lot different than state ownership."

"We have to stop thinking in oppositional categories. We have to stop thinking that one line is "correct" and that others must be "won over" to it, while those who disagree are "defeated." (p 252)"

"You've got to accompany any demand for privatization with worker and community control. It shouldn't only be the worker, it should be the worker and the community participating together."

"I find myself again cut off, babbling "buts." I find myself then, also, drawn to Catharine MacKinnon's eloquent "discourses on life and law," in which she argues that viewing gender as a matter of sameness and difference covers up the reality of gender as a system of power, hierarchy, and privilege, of imposed inequality. The point is that more than one thing is true for us at the same time. A masculinist process, however, at least as it has been institutionalized in Western society, accentuates the combative, the oppositional, the either/or dichotomies, the "right" and the "wrong." What I have been about throughout this book is showing that the dailiness of women's lives structures a different way of knowing and a different way of thinking. The process that comes from this way of knowing has to be at the center of a women's politics, and it has to be at the center of a women's scholarship. This is why I have been drawn to the poetry and to the stories: because they are layered, because more than one truth is represented, because there is ambiguity and paradox. When we work together in coalitions, or on the job, or in academic settings, or in the community, we have to allow for this ambiguity and paradox, respect each other, our cultures, our integrity, our dignity. As we have pressured against racial and sex discrimination, institutional doors have been opened, however tenuously and with whatever reluctance. Some of us have been allowed in, but nothing about the values of those institutions or their rules of success has changed, whether they be academic, corporate, ecclesiastic, political, medical, or juridical. The point is to change the values and the rules and to change the process by which they are established and enforced. The point is to integrate ideas about love and healing, about balance and connection, about beauty and growing, into our everyday ways of being. We have to believe in the value of our own experiences and in the value of our ways of knowing, our ways of doing things. We have to wrap ourselves in these ways of knowing, to enact daily ceremonies of life. (p 253-4)"

"The desert is a metaphor. For how long women have endured. Like creosote. Waiting for the rains. We are the rains. (p 254)"

"Corporations couldn't care less about welfare-community welfare, the nation's welfare. In the absence of any countervailing pressure, I don't see any way they can be held accountable. The public must be educated to understand that the most fateful decisions in their lives are being made not by politicians sitting in Congress whom they can watch and see, but by corporate executives who make the major decisions affecting their lives-whether they will have jobs, whether their children will have jobs, where they are going to live, whether they are going to live in a healthy atmosphere. Until people in great numbers start to understand the significance of the corporate decisions made privately, I don't see much likelihood of any important regulation of them."

"a visionary and fervent Pan-Americanist...one of the most extraordinary and creative figures of the twentieth century, a builder of bridges and hopes...a magnificent woman.'"

"What I keep thinking is: why didn't I know about you? I have needed you and I didn't know. I grew up in the Puerto Rican independence movement, in a home full of books, speaking English and knowing other families who did, pacifists, university people, circles you would have moved through. I am a poet, a translator, a feminist historian studying women's resistance, women's voices, and I never heard that Luis Muñoz Marín had a first wife, far less one like you...The world is full of opportunities to be of use, but I believe with you that poetry has a special power to reconnect our severed bonds, and I will practice it, because for myself and also for the world, you have reminded me that poetry is bread."

"Our petition as women, amongst you free citizens of Pan America, is like the petition of my Puerto Rico in the community of American States. We have everything done for us and given us but sovereignty. We are treated with every consideration save the one great consideration of being regarded as responsible beings. We, like Puerto Rico, are dependents. We are anomalies before the law. We, the women of the Americas, ask for a treaty granting us equal rights before the law. We ask this not for one woman, not for one country, not for one race, but for the women of Pan America, for the women who are proving to you here today by their solidarity and mutual trust that Pan-Americanism is a fact. We offer you a new definition: Pan-Americanism is the deep desire of every country for the common good of all, favoring none and slighting none. It is the oneness of purpose that makes of us all responsible citizens of the spiritual commonwealth of Pan America. We offer you a definition and we offer you an opportunity; the opportunity of acting with unparalleled generosity and vision. We, the women of America, ask of you, the men of America, a treaty guaranteeing us our equal human rights."

"Many temples have been built to shelter Pan-Americanism. Some of them have been built with marble, some with words. But deep and true friendship is no less than beautiful. It does not come even to temples merely because it is summoned, nor even because each country of our continents may sincerely desire its coming. International friendship to be real must be unselfish, and complete unselfishness is hard of attainment when interests differ; as hard for nations as for individuals. But here, today, you have before your eyes a concrete demonstration of that very thing: a Pan-Americanism that includes all, that excludes none, that makes not the slightest difference between one and another. The women of all the Americas have one need. Every enlightened woman of this hemisphere desires for her sister of another country, the same good which she craves for herself. The woman of no country of our Americas believes that equal rights for herself will in any way give her or her country an advantage over her sisters to the north or to the south. She does not wish such advantage. She does not ask for one thing and pay with another; she is not carrying on a barter of power, of friendship, of advantage. She asks for herself and for every other woman in all of our countries, one thing, for the good of all-and for the good of those countries which we women have helped upbuild and are helping uphold."

"Puerto Rico is Spanish American in its past, Anglo-Saxon in its present, and, I trust, in the deepest sense Pan-American in its future"

"For the world, which seems so various, is made up to a large extent of a few patterns used over and over again in innumerable combinations. We need not falsify in order to find the identities. We need only to look with comprehending eyes. Poetry is this recognition, and expression, of identities. The common words of our language, and of the language of every other people, is full of such poetry..."

"It is poetry to express an entire philosophy in simple words"

"The lack of understanding that comes from actual ignorance is notorious. Most North Americans know nothing even of Puerto Rico, which has been under the Stars and Stripes for thirty years; so it is hardly surprising that they are apt to confuse Uruguay with Uganda."

"There is nothing to be afraid of in the name of poetry, though it is in all languages and in all ages a name for wisdom and beauty. Whether we know it or not, poetry is a part of the everyday life of all of us. It is about us, and inside us, all the time. More often than not, we do not recognize it. Even when it is most present, we may not realize that what we are seeing or hearing or even saying is poetry. But we can learn to recognize and realize it: and to the extent to which we may do so, we ourselves become poets. In an essay familiar to most high-school students, Carlyle declared that everyone who reads a poem understandingly becomes a co-creator of the poem, and so a poet. We are creators in greater degree; and, therefore, poets the more, when we open our eyes and ears and minds to the innumerable little things as well as the big things that make life."

"This working partnership of facts and imagination gives us reality, which I think is another word of poetry. I do not believe that poetry can ever be anything but truth. When poetry speaks in parables, or in metaphors or in similes, it is not to lead you away from what is real to what is unreal, but rather to lead you by the quickest path to the very core of reality. Poetry does not give us fanciful falsehood instead of truth: poetry is a shorthand for truth itself. When we depart from truth, we depart from poetry."

"Science of course is the great international bond."

"In law there are “magic words.” If one of them applies to what you are challenging, you have a good chance of getting it overturned. Linda and I used all the magic words that might possibly apply: The statutes were “vague” and uncertain on their face; they were “unconstitutionally broad” on their face in that they infringed upon plaintiff’s “right to safe and adequate medical advice” about the decision of whether to carry a pregnancy to term, upon the “fundamental” right of all women to choose whether to bear children, and upon plaintiff’s “right to privacy” in the physician-patient relationship; on their face they infringed upon plaintiff’s “right to life” in violation of the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; on their face they violated the “First Amendment” prohibition against laws respecting an establishment of religion; and on their face they denied plaintiffs the “equal protection of the laws.”"

"One of the few stories that captured my real feelings on the day we won, however, didn’t appear until a few weeks later, in the Milwaukee Journal: “Sarah Weddington looked uncomfortable as the women pressed close to her, offering their thanks. ‘If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have,’ she explained to them.” Indeed, I saw Roe as part of a much larger effort by many attorneys. I was the one who, through a series of quirks, stood before the Court to represent all of us. Had a different string of events occurred, another case might have been the one to make history."

"The problem I see for younger activists is that today it’s harder to get a good job. It’s harder to make the money you need. I mean, we lived so simply. I watch my students and the tuition is so much higher and they’re working two or three jobs trying to support themselves. I think it is harder for people to have the time to be able to do the kinds of work we did, just because we didn’t have as many other demands on us as people who are of college age and a little bit older do."

"In an insightful study of the two memoirs, legal scholar Kevin McMunigal argues that Weddington did not adequately inform McCorvey that her chances of receiving an abortion as the Roe plaintiff were slim, thereby allowing the vulnerable McCorvey to believe that being the plaintiff in the case was her most likely ticket to a legal abortion. Doing so, McMunigal states, was a questionable ethical decision on Weddington’s part, as she treated McCorvey as a stand-in for pregnant women as a whole, not as a client with needs and interests of her own. Ultimately, McMunigal maintains that McCorvey should have been treated with comparable ethical standards as patients seeking out medical care or participating in medical research, namely, being provided with comprehensible information about the various strategies open to her from which she would then be able to choose."

"As soon as Sarah Weddington had my name on the affidavit, I had served my purpose...If she told me how and where to get an abortion (or introduced me to people who knew, since, as a lawyer, she might have to cover herself), she wouldn’t have a plaintiff. And without a plaintiff, somebody else might get their case before the Supreme Court first."

"Hays, who is currently a candidate for Texas Agriculture Commissioner, said she remembers Weddington a constant advocate for others. “She…taught me that you always help somebody out and connect them or open the door for them,” Hays said. “That generosity of spirit is too rare these days.”"

"Translators, again-the most abused and patient lot of folk on earth-are helpful in making us better acquainted; though we hope the time will soon come when citizens of the twenty-one republics will no longer need translators. There is no reason for our not speaking each other's language."

"Another's estimate has never the rich completeness of the sudden word from the inner self."

"...of poetry as daily fare-of poetry as being as much the daily bread as the white hyacinths of life."

"The Titanic disaster was a tragedy that was as unnecessary as turning the Brown Palace Hotel into Pikes Peak."

"Among the academicians manipulatively shaping Dalit Studies, Gail Omvedt occupies a very important place. She is a sociologist from the University of California at Berkeley, and became an Indian citizen in 1983. She combines nineteenth-century colonial categories with Marxist subaltern constructions, seeing Indian culture as a creation by the upper castes to subjugate the lower castes for thousands of years. Anything that united Indians in their fight against colonialism is merely ‘high-caste symbols’. She attributes the attitudes of Aryan supremacy to even Mahatma Gandhi, saying that he ‘saw Aryans as his ancestors. As against what he saw as the evils of industrialism, he wanted to go back to an idealised, harmonious village society in which tradition ruled. This he called Ram Rajya’... While she argues against the Indian state and criticizes Indian industrialists, she favors globalization of the Indian economy in ways that would make India subservient to the West. Her former leftist colleagues analyzing her stand on globalization, find a striking continuity in her writings. They point out how she puts into the mouths of Dalits words of appreciation for British rule."

"Such a position authorizes Omvedt’s recent pro-liberalization stance: neo-colonialism and economic dependency are abstract, academic concepts irrelevant to the lives of the peasant masses. 140"

"I do not wish anyone to think that I am a saint and that people project on me their insecurities and that is how I deal with life. But, unlike some of these people, I have spent countless hours in introspection, alone and in therapy. I am very happy with who I am, but that took years of pain, suicidal thoughts, tears, panic attacks, and insecurities to develop. I have dealt with many of my problems as a Lesbian, as an abused child, and as an anorexic teenager. I am, indeed, not perfect, but I am happy with who I am. And, if maintaining my happiness and the happiness I can bring to others through my voice and writings means that I will be the object of persecution, banned, ignored and left out, I am willing to pay that price."