Women Activists From The United States

"It's not easy. But, I mean, I raise the kids, you know, full-time. They live with me. I welcome a great, healthy relationship with my kids and their dad, and I think he knows that, I push for it all the time, but I also protect them when, you know, it's time for that. And it goes in waves and phases and it’s a lot of work."

"I mean, I don’t have a concept of what certain simple things cost, You know, I’d like to know a little bit more about what a milk carton costs."

"If anything, the tough decision to end that relationship was such a risk of losing ratings, losing my fan base, but I had to take that risk for myself."

"When I found out I was pregnant [with North], I was going through an awful divorce, Kanye and I had just been dating for seven months—granted, we knew each other for a decade—and I was like, "I can't do this. It's not the right time." But then I figured, If I'm in my thirties and I'm not ready, I'll never be ready. So it's been the biggest lesson, and the biggest joy of my life."

"Irene Paull was an intensely feminine, brilliantly intelligent and morally passionate woman. The privilege of publishing her stories in Jewish Currents, and the luxury of the friendship I enjoyed with her (mostly through her remarkable letters), have been among the ornaments of my personal and professional life."

"Woe to our memory if it can be said by unhappy future generations that we defeated Hitler and Mussolini, only to lay down arms to the Hoovers, the Vandenbergs, the Wheelers, Hearsts, Knutsons, and McCormicks of America. If we allow Germany to be built up again as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, if we permit American cooperation to be transformed into American imperialism-woe to our memory if we allow the seeds of a third world war to be planted under our victorious feet!"

"Irene Paull was a great person, as these selections of her writings make clear. She had no pretensions and great honesty with herself and others. If the world is still here in a hundred years, it will be because of people like her."

"The time was the era shortly after the First World War when waves of post-war immigration carried to the new world like rotting bilge water all the bitter hatreds, prejudices and venoms of Tsarist Russia and Poland."

"Hatred springs from uncertainty and fear."

"The ones we love are like lighted candles in our being. When one goes out, it leaves a part of us in darkness. I have a duty to perform, grappling with the darkness where once you used to be-a duty to you and to all youth like you born into a world of poverty and depression and war, a world which seems to have no present and no future. I have a monument to build to your memory...a better society where youth can blossom to its rich fulfillment. Goodbye, little sister! Thousands of crushed and broken youth lie like you in their needless graves, youth who had no present, and saw no future. But millions of us have set our teeth against the wind. The working class is moving toward a happier world where its beloved children will not be gnarled and twisted and broken, but will grow straight as the young trees straining towards the sun. ("She who Died Without Living")"

"Irene Paull is a voice of our time, of all the struggles, of the wars and depressions. Early she protested the violent, oppressed life of the Duluth harbor and the timber industry, the anti-Semitism, the exploitation of the immigrants in labor. She became a voice of the people, collecting the poems of lumberjacks."

"The independent strong woman was a bad woman, even in the radical press. Irene and I had a vision of the free new woman growing in her own pattern-a new crop, new protein, new communication, new connections, new conceptions-birthing out of terrible hunger and anger."

"Uneasy is the head that wears a crown. ("Justice in Connor's Kingdom")"

"History itself is the only arbiter of "dangerous thoughts" and to whom they are dangerous. For the world does move. Men's thoughts change as the times change. You can no more freeze the thoughts of mankind than you can stop the earth from moving on its axis, than you can freeze a lovely face into eternal youth. To try to do this is not only to make a mockery of democracy, it is to stop the movement of progress and to whip up a fierce tide of reaction. Who should have the right to determine that another man's thoughts are "dangerous"? ("Jailed for her Thoughts")"

"Greed and hypocrisy are indeed inseparable companions. ("To a Young Girl Graduate")"

"From the labor movement of the 1930s to the the civil rights, peace, and women's movements of the 1950s through the 1970s, Irene Paull conveys the richness of ethnic, working-class and oppositional cultures within the fortress of America. Her voice rings as true as it did sixty years ago."

"Irene Paull worked against injustice all her life, and part of that work was her exquisite writing"

"The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made by millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last."

"We're shaping software and the software is shaping us. It's a circle."

"Soften; Lighten; Quiet; Shrink. Conceal the bridge; Your ancestors built— A lady’s nose (like her mind) Must be petite. Blonde the mane, Straighten the curls— Her hair’s much too loud And fills space not for girls. Alter the foundation, Uproot olive for blush— Make light of those shadows, A woman’s face speaks none. Soften; Whiten; Quiet; Shrink."

"As Elly Bulkin indicates in a mind-stretching essay, "Hard Ground": "In terms of anti-Semitism and racism, a central problem is how to acknowledge their differences without contributing to the argument that one is important and the other is not, one is worthy of serious attention and the other is not.""

"The problem as I-and, I think, a great many other Jewish feminists-see it is to embrace the "We" of our Jewish identities without seeing "They" as totally Other. We strive to acknowledge Jewish identity and Jewish oppression as fundamental components of our lives and histories, individually and collectively, and, at the same time, to use what we know of being Jewish-as of our other identities and oppressions-to understand generations of experience that have some parallels, yet are different from our own. This process is complicated, and the history between non-Jewish people of color and white Jews has not made it less so. (III. THREADS)"

"Whatever our differences, efforts to address them directly should always be seen as attempts to break down divisions which are encouraged by-and which benefit-the rich white Christian men who run this country. (II. EXTENSIONS)"

"Writing pushes me, not to answers, but to questions, criticisms, problems, and possible strategies. It intersects with my activism, makes me look even more closely at the political work I do and why and how I do it. (II. EXTENSIONS)"

"How much easier it is for someone to say simply that she is oppressed-as a woman, a Black, a lesbian, a low-income woman, a Native American, a Jew, an older woman, an Arab-American, a Latina-and not to examine the various forms of privilege which so often co-exist with an individual's oppression. Essential as it is for women to explore our particular oppression, I feel keenly the limitations of stopping there, of not filling in the less comfortable contours of a more complete picture in which we might exist as oppressor, as well as oppressed. (II. EXTENSIONS)"

"I'm beginning to understand how my sense of identification with other women is making possible my own writing and recovery. Writing now, I'm struck by the extent to which my risks are inseparable from theirs. For me, the movement out of depression, into some sort of slow healing, has much to do with other women's stories, with what women have told me when I said, "I never told you this, but..." Some have put their stories on paper for their own reasons. But others have been jarred into memory or into talking about what they've already remembered, or what they've yet to recall. (p48)"

"The uneasy feeling (for me) of pieces falling into place, recollections demanding in some way to be dealt with. (p43)"

"My childhood had sealed off whole rooms where I couldn't look. I’d learned well to brick up how I felt... (p49)"

"It was easy, a few years ago, to think that lesbian poetry didn't exist. It had, of course, always been there-dusty in rare book libraries, lost in love poems with changed or ambiguous pronouns, absent from the published writing of otherwise acceptable women poets. Yet until fairly recently, we didn't know all this. Those of us who are lesbians seemed to have come from nowhere, from a great blankness with only a few shadowy figures to suggest a history. We could find Sappho's poetry, all right, but only when preceded by the (male) assurances that "Neither the gossip of scandalmongers nor the scrupulous research of scholars should cause us to forget that [her reputation as a lesbian] is nothing but speculation." We could surmise about Emily Dickinson's life, but until the fifties we were confronted only with a selected number of her published poems and letters. We could stubbornly claim Gertrude Stein and Amy Lowell and H.D. as lesbians-but they hardly constituted a lesbian literary tradition out of which to write or a history from which lesbians, especially lesbians of color or poor or working class lesbians, could draw strength."

"Lesbian Poetry must be seen as a the tip of an iceberg. The presence in it, for example, of Jean Mollison, a 63-year-old woman from rural New York who has many poems that have previously been seen only by close friends, serves as a crucial reminder of the existence of those lesbians whose work we have not seen, but who might very well have been writing poetry for four decades or more. They too, no less than Sappho and Angelina Weld Grimké and Elsa Gidlow, are a part of the tradition of lesbian poetry. In reading the lesbian poetry in this anthology, we cannot afford to forget the background of silence and denial and oppression out of which a vital, visible lesbian poetry has stubbornly emerged. While this background is important because it is at the same time not very far behind us and still present, the appearance of Lesbian Poetry-like the appearance of other publications by women who clearly identify themselves as lesbians-affirms our diversity, our creativity, our strength, our determination to continue to struggle and survive in a hostile world."

"...I did what I had always done. I held tight to my rational side, going on with business as usual, seeking in reasoned argument some stability for my precariously rocking days. And I pulled myself together to write-to clarify; to argue for complexity; perhaps more than anything, to affirm my intention not to crawl under a rock and be heard from no more. (p16)"

"Isolation. I had nobody to tell, and no language for it anyhow. (p28)"

"It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing. It is about returning repeatedly to forage something."

"You don't know me, but you've been inside me, and that's why we're here today."

"In more than three decades as an , I have seen the faculty express unwillingness to deal with pain-in-the-neck academic activities, such as repetitive low-level advising, course scheduling, fund-raising, alumni services, the running of some programs, and the preparation of dossiers and other reports. Over time, staff were hired to fill these roles, and — surprise! — started to make decisions and generally to run the place."

"I have found that this speech is routinely removed from high school anthologies because it associates religion with falsehood and violence, thus offending people who demand that religion must always be presented favorably."

"For the first seven years that I worked full-time as an adult, I had no legal right to a credit card, , or other line of credit. Although no law barred unmarried women from obtaining credit, banks and other lending institutions could, and often did, reject our applications without even pretending that it was for some other reason. It wasn't until 1974 that the banned discrimination on the basis of marital status. Back then, that legislation was viewed as a matter of gender equity because credit had not been widely denied to unmarried men and because the new law also prohibited lending institutions from requiring married women to have their husbands' permission to obtain credit. If you've read or seen Margaret Atwood's , you may recall that the government subjugated women by preventing them from having access to money independent of men. That wasn't fantasy or imagination on Atwood's part. It was memory."

"A few years ago, I taught a summer course in literary classics for high school English teachers. When the class began talking about Romeo and Juliet, two of the teachers had trouble following what the others were saying. These two teachers were using high school literature anthologies; the rest of the class had read paperback versions of Romeo and Juliet. We compared the high school anthologies with the paperbacks and found more than three hundred lines missing from the play in each anthology. Neither textbook mentioned that its presentation of Romeo and Juliet was definitely not Shakespeare's. In the anthologies, lines containing sexual material—even such mild words as bosom and maidenhood—were missing. Removing most of the love story shortened Romeo and Juliet considerably, but the publishers did not stop there; they also took out material that had nothing to do with sex. Both anthologies, for example, omitted Romeo's lines,"

"Many of the essays engage with the question of written constitutionalism in the United States, meaning, in a specific legal way, that we are ruled by the dead. But a lot of the essays also engage broadly in questions about how memory and devotion and obligation to the dead inform decisions that we make. I don’t think it’s an unshakable hold. And sometimes, as in the title essay (from 2019), that hold is an embrace."

"I never set out to study history. I only ever set out to write."

"The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist,”. “It is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth."

"When you look at another person [of the same race or ethnic group], you see your future success in them, but you don't see the same possibilities in those who are different."

"We want the straightest gay people, and the whitest black people. We want that first-generation immigrant to act like they've been chilling in this place forever."

"To move ahead, you have to go looking for your biases and stay on top of them."

"After musicians started auditioning for orchestras from behind curtains, "the number of women in top U.S. orchestras increased five-fold."

"We have so many ways to favor those in the "in group" while excluding those who aren't, including keeping them in their place with subtle but often intentional "micro inequities." Regardless of the intention, the pain and the impact is the same."

"Look at your Facebook feed, look at your Twitter feeds, and consider how diverse they are. Build relationships across differences. Get closer. Get uncomfortable."

"Biases are the stories we make up about people before we learn who they are. They are especially apparent when things are high-risk, or you have to make quick decisions."

"What we learned after Michael Brown was shot is that police officers are deeply ingrained with erroneous ideas about who's dangerous. Looking at pictures of black kids, they're adding four years to their age, and are told that 'black people are crazy strong and have crazy [levels of] pain tolerance."

"Go somewhere where you're the minority. Go to the 'black gay women with disabilities film festival, because this is where you can confront your biases."