Women Activists From The United States

"it has to do with Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness: you inherit a set of values at home, and have to embrace another set of values when you walk out of home. You are appreciated if you are more assertive at school. On the contrary, you are supposed to be obedient at home. It’s about balancing the two worlds. My poetry is about negotiating many worlds, the past and the present, as well as the East and the West. “Inner cultivation” and outer despair. The sublime and the ridiculous."

"I am always fighting against the stereotype of the subservient female maiden. I want to shake up the assumptions about being a Chinese-American woman. We all must champion women’s and children’s rights in the world. The little brown girl is still the most vulnerable person in the room."

"The two main issues in American history are slavery and the destruction of native Americans, historical events that have left a profound mark on American history. On even a larger scale, I would say more than ever, now in the era of Trump. We must fight against demagogues all over the world. This open hatred against immigrants! Against dark-skinned peoples… The language of building a wall, “bad hombres”, China-shaming! The demagogues are manufacturing fear and hate, Islamophobia, and generally, phobia against anybody who is “different” and might take your job."

"The Woman Warrior was a very important book in my life. I discovered it in 1977…in Amherst, Massachusetts. I was an undergraduate there...for a long time I was in despair. I thought, there was really no audience for my voice. And the narrator, the protagonist in The Woman Warrior, she was working hard to let her voice out. She had to wade through the contradictions of this dual culture, this heavy-duty heritage. If she had the power and the fortitude to continue her 'pressed duck' voice, to eke out that voice, I said, perhaps so must I continue my struggle."

"I was raised by my grandmother who spoke Toisan, a very ancient language. I see myself as part of the minority tribe. I align myself more with people like Kafka, with his weird dialect. I see myself as an outsider on many levels even if we are Han."

"Am I not the poet of witness? Am I not a disciple of Nellie Sachs and Paul Celan trying to describe the horrors of the Holocaust, meanwhile inventing a new lyric, which questions the possibility/impossibility of poetry after the most heinous episodes of history? Am I not a descendent of Qu Yuan, whose lyric intensity caused him to drown himself in the Mi Lo River in protest? And the descendent of the courageous feminist poet Qiu Jin, who recited a poem on the path to her own beheading?"

"I echo Adrienne Rich’s idea that the personal is political. My poetics is rooted in my personal history, and from there I examine the world around me. I see myself not just as a Chinese-American, but as a global citizen. I care about America but also about what happens in the world."

"I am gratified that some of my poems have served the people for decades. From the start of my career I waxed personal and political and have sought to be an activist-subversive-radical-immigrant-feminist-transnational-Buddhist-neoclassical-nerd poet who was always on her soapbox with a bag of tricks. I see myself as an inventor of a fusionist aesthetics, of bilingual and bicultural hybrid forms."

"When we were young, we have to memorize those texts from Tu Fu and others. And my grandmother used to carry me on my back and chant to me Chinese poems and sayings. The first kind of poetry I heard was Chinese poetry, and it ingrained in my ear, even though English is my main language. I can hardly read Chinese. The Chinese poem was ingrained in me when I was very young. You can hear the Cantonese language in my work. The Chineseness is in the DNA of my work. I can’t divorce it from my work. I can’t say I forget it. it’s there. Bei Dao’s generation was not trained in that tradition. They didn’t go to university to study wenyanwen or ancient poetry. They were imitating the West. I tried to read Chinese poetry every day, because I think it’s important for my aesthetics."

"Chinese history, Hong Kong history course through my blood."

"I think it’s important to reinvent with poetry...I like to keep experimenting. It’s important to love your genre and the possibilities. There’s so much to explore for those poets with bilingual and multicultural backgrounds as well."

"Hundreds of babies are fed and washed and wrapped in warm, new baby flannels and placed back again into grateful mothers' arms. All day and all night they come, one constant stream from evacuated towns, with tales too pitiful to listen to, and yet always with courtesy and graciousness that almost shames."

"Before this war it was difficult to see that fair play was done to the people. I believe hearts have been softened. There is a greater sense of community. The people have gone through a fiery furnace together."

"Holbrook has a theory that if children hear the best of literature from the beginning of their education they will never wish for any other."

"There is a multitude of men and women doing delightful work in literature and language from Brookline to San Jose, from Kansas City to Toronto, from Birmingham to Seattle, but Florence Holbrook is as distinct in her leadership as are Luther Burbank, Julia Richman, and Jane Addams in their distinctive fields."

"Museums, theatres, and concert halls are all around us, but what use are they unless you can get the child into the way of having sympathy for the art and the artist, of seeing and hearing the thing itself and talking about it?"

"She never struck anyone that I can recall; she just made you feel very small. That was enough for discipline. We feared but loved her."

"The pupils should retell the stories, thus enriching their vocabulary and learning to express thought clearly, easily, consecutively, and confidently,– a power so much needed and so valuable to citizens of a republic."

"Florence Holbrook is a woman who is not interested in educational work alone; she is strong enough to be interested in all that affects humanity."

"From the horror of dead and wounded that I saw in just my little corner of war work, my mind is constantly seeking to escape. Again I see the sad, appealing eyes of the terribly disfigured men in the face and jaw hospital in Paris. Again I hear the call: 'Clear the way for the blind!' and see our sightless boys slowly making their way down the gangplank to their homeward-bound ships at Brest. And the armless ones and legless ones! And the insane! How many thousands of such has this war made!"

"Our time will be remembered as one of reconciliation for the great European enemies during the World War. Statesmen of France, Germany, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Italy, and Great Britain realized that nations were interdependent and that what was disastrous to one would be disastrous to all."

"Over a span of two weeks, AAP President Colleen A. Kraft, M.D., M.B.A., FAAP, and other pediatrician experts were featured in more than 60 national and regional news outlets covering the crisis at the border. They had a consistent message: Family separation causes irreparable harm to child health, and detention is no place for a child. Amid advocacy and outcry from pediatricians, advocates and the public, President Donald Trump issued an executive order in June that sought to end the administration’s policy of separating children and parents at the border."

"I learned that kids live in the community and that pediatricians need to be involved in the community in order for children to develop healthy habits and succeed in life."

"Separating children from their parents contradicts everything we stand for as pediatricians — protecting and promoting children's health ..."

"... I went to medical school before I became a mother. I had my oldest son as a fourth-year medical student. And so, when I was an intern, he was a baby. I had my daughter in the middle of my residency. And then my youngest son in my first year of private practice. And throughout my career, what I decided to do had everything to do with my own kids ... because the surprising thing that I learned is that what you do with children as a pediatrician is just a little bit in your office. What you really need to do is change the world around where they live day-to-day ... if you're going to improve their health."

"Tejana socialist labor leader and political activist Sara Estela Ramirez would not live to participate in El Primer Congreso Mexicanista held the following year. Ramirez's ideas, however, would resonate in the words of her compañeras. Composed of South Texas residents, this Congreso was the first civil rights assembly among Spanish-speaking people in the United States. With delegates representing community organizations and interests from both sides of the border, its platform addressed discrimination, land loss, and lynching. Women delegates, such as Jovita Idar, Soldedad Peña, and Hortensia Moncaya, spoke to the concerns of Tejanos and Mexicanos."

"A Brave Journalist:While many mexicanas fought for justice against the dictatorship in Mexico, others struggled against Anglo injustice in Texas. Born in Laredo to an activist family, Jovita Idar soon joined the struggle against racist discrimination inflicted on tejanos. She was enraged by school segregation, lower wages than Anglos, and horrible lynchings. Texas Rangers were responsible for 5,000 tejanos killed in 1914-19, a state investigation revealed. Working at La Crónica and three other Texas newspapers, Jovita exposed the abuse. When Rangers came to close down La Crónica, she stood in the doorway blocking them. Her courage extended to many other fronts. She also worked as a teacher and served as a nurse in the Mexican revolution."

"Scholar Jose Limón explains that through the newspaper, the Idars launched a "campaign of journalistic resistance" in which the press and its contributors actively fought the "social conditions oppressing Texas-Mexicans""

"with the Mexican Revolution raging just miles away across the border, Idar's world was in flux. She and her counterparts were realizing the need to work outside the home as a means of supporting their families as well as an opportunity to gain a new sense of direction and purpose in their lives."

"Chicana feminist activities in the 1904 to 1920 period were channeled through civil rights activities and labor organization work. Some outstanding women were Jovita Idar, a journalist and civil rights worker from Laredo, Texas; Soledad Peña, orator and educator; María Renteria; and María Villarreal. These women were speakers and participants in a historical civil rights conference, the Primer Congreso Mexicanista. On October 15, 1911 they also founded the Liga Femenil Mexicanista."

"As La Crónica reports, Idar's El Estudiante was "a bilingual weekly magazine... dedicated exclusively to school interests and issues" ("El Estudiante" 1)." The sheer existence of this publication signals Idar's dedicated investment in educational issues on the border and, most interestingly, her attempt to initiate a cross-cultural pedagogical conversation between both English- and Spanish-speaking writers and readers."

"It is certain that we are in the country of business and that "time is money," but although history and geography are not indispensable to earn a living, they are good for the preservation of our patriotism."

"The working woman, by recognizing her rights, raises her head in pride and gets ready for the struggle. The time of her degradation has passed, she is no longer the slave sold for a few coins, she is no longer the servant of, but the equal to man, his partner, by his being her natural protector, and not her lord and master."

"At the turn of the century, Sara Estela Ramírez, the Villarreal sisters, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Jovita Idar and the staff members of La Voz de la Mujer and Pluma Roja were organic intellectuals of their times who revealed different discursive positionings of women within their societies, positionings informed by the master narratives of nationalism, religion and anarchism. Until now these women's work as publishers and their written contributions have remained virtually unrecognized. Either because of political affiliations or gender discrimination, their work has not been recognized in Mexico. In the United States, these factors, as well as linguistic biases, have relegated their work to oblivion. These women's stories and their publishing efforts, nonetheless, capture the realities of a people, the significance of whose daily existence transcends the limitations imposed by political and national borders."

"Nations disappear and lineage sinks into oblivion once the national language is forgotten; that is why the Aztecs do not exist anymore as a nation. Rome had so much influence in all the nations that it had conquered because of its language, and if the Jews are not a nation today it is because each one of them speaks the language of the land they inhabit. We do not say that English should not be taught to Mexican-Texan children, it is very fortunate, we do say that it should not be forgotten to teach them Spanish, just as arithmetic and grammar is useful to them, English is useful to those who live among those who speak that language. We are all shaped by our surroundings: we love the things that we have seen since our childhood and we believe in what was infused into our spirit since the first years of our lives; therefore, if in the American schools that our children attend they are taught the biography of Washington and not that of Hidalgo and if instead of the glorious acts of Juárez they are told of the accomplishments of Lincoln, no matter how noble and just they might be, that child will never know the glories of his country, he will not love it, and will even look with indifference at the countrymen of his parents."

"The Mexican children in Texas need to be educated. Neither our government nor that of the U.S.A. can do anything for them, and there remains no other recourse than to undertake it through our own efforts, in exchange for not continuing to be despised and humiliated by the foreigners who surround us."

"There is no doubt that education elevates the woman. The woman who possesses some knowledge always tries to keep herself at a certain moral level that helps her greatly in the fight for life, by making her better, more pure, and by guiding her steps along the path of virtue."

"Men flatter the vanity of those women who seek praise, who always want to be complimented and enthroned because they know their weak side, but the woman who is pure, with her own chastity she is protected, because men, no matter how uneducated they are, always respect the woman who shows herself to be worthy of respect. The woman should always try to acquire useful and beneficial knowledge, because in these modern times she has wide horizons; the sciences, industries, workshops, and even her very home demand her better abilities, her perseverance and consistency in her work, and her influence and aid for everything that is progress and advancement for humanity."

"one of my teachers around this is a writer and a thinker named Mariame Kaba, and she’s an exquisite human being, exquisite thinker. And one of the things that she often reminds me of — because I think what would be so comforting to us is if we could be like, We’re going to end the prison system and automatically move to a very well-organized, centralized system where instead of everyone going to prison, you just go straight to a mediator and it’s all handled. And she’s like, It won’t be a huge, overarching, centralized system. Transformative justice will be a lot of us learning the skills to hold conflict within our communities, within our families, within our schools and institutions. We’re learning, ourselves, to hold it in different ways."

"some of the leading abolitionists in the United States and around the world today are people like Mariame Kaba and Andrea Smith and Kelly Gillespie and others, who came out of work against domestic violence — i.e. it was in doing work to try to fight against violence and harm, that they realized abolition was the only way to resolve the problems that were not being resolved by having better, faster, more swift and sure punishment when somebody harmed somebody else."

"Mariame Kaba has given incredible talks about this, that we've had 250 years of this well-funded prison system experiment. And it hasn't stopped rape. It hasn't stopped robberies. It hasn't stopped drugs. It hasn't stopped anything at all. All of those things that we think of as harm, they continue without the responses they need...One of the other things that Mariame points out—what would it look like if the experiment of transformative justice was as well funded as the experiment of prison? We have no idea what things could look like at scale because we've never actually had the resources to even experiment at any kind of scale. We’ve had to argue over every penny."

"I also keep thinking about the cruel irony of naming a bill after — a police reform, supposedly, bill, after someone who was killed by the police, and then to include a whole set of so-called procedural reforms that would not have prevented that person’s death. So, you know, this particular offering that they’re making, supposedly, in Congress wouldn’t have kept George Floyd alive. And I think that’s just cruel irony."

"Change requires collaboration and coalition, even (especially) uncomfortable coalition. Mariame Kaba, a longtime prison abolitionist who has done as much as anyone to imagine what it would take to live in a world that does not equate safety with police and cages, puts the lesson succinctly, one passed on to her by her father: "Everything worthwhile is done with other people.""

"That’s a chant that has been ringing out in the streets ever since 2014 in Ferguson and in New York and all around the country. I’ve seen and heard, when I was in the streets with young people at protests, young people in Chicago screaming that chant."

"why has Mariame written so much if she detests writing? And when it's often but not always done solo? In addition to writing that advances organizations and writing to support campaigns, Mariame is practicing what she preaches to fellow organizers: document your work and write your self into the record. Mariame encourages organizers to do so, despite any attention given to them by journalists, pundits, and academics, as many from the outside might not get it right. In doing so, Mariame has joined a publishing history of Black women organizers and activists who wrote themselves into the archives, including Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett."

"June Jordan, who has been a touchstone of mine, really, since I first read her work in college, which was many, many years ago. So I really can't believe that I'm here today, and I'm really grateful to be here with all of you to celebrate her legacy and her life. June Jordan loved Black people, and so do I. She was an educator, and so am I. She was an activist; so am I. She was an internationalist, and so am I. She was a brilliant writer, and I am not-at all...She insisted that by organizing, we have the power to overcome oppression. I too believe this to be true."

"I always tell people that when we talk about prison-industrial complex abolition, we’re talking about a dual project. We’re talking about, on the one hand, a project that is about dismantling death-making institutions, like policing and prisons and surveillance, and creating life-affirming ones, putting resources and investing in the things we know do keep people safe — housing, healthcare, schooling, all kinds of other things, you know, living wages. You just talked with Reverend Barber earlier. Those types of investments are what really actually keep people safe. So, that’s what PIC abolition is really about at its core."

"I think, really, the reason why the book has been resonating is because of the uprisings and the struggle in the streets, the fact that so many people around the country recognize the complete and utter failures and limits of so-called reform to actually do what people want, which is to have some little modicum of justice. So, I think people are impatient with incrementalism and are impatient with solutions that don’t actually address the root causes of violence. And part of that is the fact that, you know, policing is inherently violent and that the starting point has to be to actually reduce people’s contact with the police altogether. And I always tell people, if you care about the violence of policing, then you should want as little policing as possible in any form."

"Let's begin our abolitionist journey not with the question "What do we have now, and how can we make it better?" Instead, let's ask, "What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?" If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us."

"I was struck again by the importance of language and of words that need to be spoken. Our best teachers, including Audre Lorde among others, have imparted this truth. In the last few months, weeks, and days, I have found myself saying #BlackLivesMatter out loud at various times. It's not that I don't already know that they do. I think that I am trying to speak the words into existence. These words should be taken for granted. They are not. I've revised my previous belief that the words should remain unspoken. "Who are they trying to convince?" I'd previously confided to a friend. It turns out that I owe a debt of gratitude to Opal, Patrisse, and Alicia for reminding me of the power of language and the spoken word."