Women Activists From The United States

"I won the contract for our company to install new ramps and equipment at Beefland. Building a "Stairway to Heaven" for the animals was more than just constructing a steel ramp-way into a concrete room. All of the workers, myself included, invested ourselves in [t]he project. Sometimes tempers flared, but when the job was completed, we were better friends. As the "stairway" began to take shape, many thoughts crowded in on me. I became aware of how precious life was. I thought about death and I felt close to God. He had given us dominion over the animals so we could make use of them, but I realized now, more than ever, that the animals were His creation too, and, thus, they should be treated with respect. One day my blind roommate visited the plant. She reached over the side of the chute and touched the cattle. She wrote the following prayer after her visit: "The Stairway to Heaven" is dedicated to persons who desire to learn the meaning of life and not to fear death. You, through respect for these animals, can come to respect your fellow man as well. Touch, Listen and Remember.""

"I believe there is some ultimate ordering force for good in the universe - not a personal thing, not Buddha or Jesus, maybe something like order out of disorder. I like to hope that even if there's no personal afterlife, some energy impression is left in the universe... most people can pass on genes - I can pass on thoughts or what I write."

"You've read about action at a distance, or quantum theory. I've always had the feeling that when I go to a meat plant I must be very careful, because God's watching. Quantum theory will get me."

"I don't like radical anything; left or right. I have a radical dislike of radicals."

"I was attending the American Society of Animal Science meetings when the flood occurred. I first learned about it when I read about it on the front page of USA Today, a national newspaper. I grieved for the "dead" books, the same way most people grieve for a dead relative. The destruction of books upset me because "thoughts died." Even though most of the books are still in other libraries, there are many people at the (Colorado State) university who will never read them. To me, Shakespeare lives if we keep performing his plays. He dies, when we stop performing them. I am my work. If the livestock industry continues to use equipment I have designed, then my "thoughts live" and my life has meaning. If my efforts to improve the treatment of cattle and pigs make real improvements in the world, then life is meaningful."

"And another reason to make sure we're not doing atrocious things at the slaughter plant is that if it is too easy to do something really atrocious to an animal; with the poor animal screaming and everything; the person who could do that might not have any problem torturing people. I remember one of the reasons that St. Thomas Aquinas said that we have to treat animals right is so that people themselves don't get corrupted."

"They may ask why nature or God created such horrible conditions as autism, manic depression, and schizophrenia. However, if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay."

"(About the workplace) Tyrants who get into power make life miserable for everyone."

"Since I think just in pictures it's sort of hard to think about abstract concepts so I have to have visual images like for example when I was a child I didn't really understand some of the stuff in the Lord's Prayer and y'know when it talks about "the power and the glory"...and I thought "electrical high tension lines, circular rainbow." "Thou art in Heaven"; that didn't make any sense to me but another autistic person says "Well I always pictured God up in Heaven with an easel.""

"Mother prepared me to live in the world, but she didn't try to make me into a social being just so I could hang out with other teenagers at the lake, or have pajama parties with other girls. Her eyes were on a bigger prize - giving me the skills and nurturing the talents that would allow me to graduate from school, attend college, find a satisfying job and live independently."

"Even today, romantic love is just not part of my life. And you know what? That's okay with me."

"It's OK to be an eccentric; it's not OK to be a rude and dirty eccentric."

"I had auditory sensory problems and touch sensitivity problems, I had no problems with my vision. Other people absolutely cannot stand fluorescent lighting and they're sometimes helped by a thing called the Irlen colored glasses where you try on all kinds of different pale colored glasses until it's easier to read. It stops the problem of the print jiggling on the page."

"If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave."

"I shall remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace; walking until given shelter and fasting until given food."

"Peace Pilgrim's Pocket" How old are you, Peace?/I am ageless!/Only three things in her pocket/comb toothbrush postage stamps/With those three possessions she lived/so many (secret number) years/making millions of friends/hiking byways and back roads/crossing the nation again and again/town to town thousands of miles/unafraid/"Life is a mirror!/Smile at it, it smiles back!"/woman with a white bun/striding by herself in a navy blue tunic/white tennis shoes/no money no credit cards no tickets/opening her mouth wherever people would listen/"Never stop your efforts for peace!"/walking till someone offered a bed/fasting till they offered food/"Personal peace necessary before world peace! Every good thing you say... vibrates on and on/and never ceases!"/I am standing outside under ageless pecan trees/listening to the voice I first heard in my/parents' living room/as a girl of three/"Would you kill a cow?/The three-year-old said, Never!/"Then how can you eat meat? Why let someone else do your dirty work for you?" She was thrilled to turn kids into vegetarians/"I'm only a little person but/there are lots of little things to be done!"

"In the final analysis you find spiritual truth through your own higher nature. Your higher nature is a drop in the ocean of God - and has access to the ocean. Sometimes your higher nature is awakened through the inspiration of beautiful surroundings or beautiful music, bringing you insights of truth. Sometimes you see the truth written or hear the truth spoken, and your higher nature confirms it. Or you directly perceive the truth from the inside through an awakening of the higher nature, which is my way. All the inspired writing came from the inner source, and you too can receive from that source. Be still and know."

"To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life — bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live them — then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace."

"Spiritual truth should never be sold — those who sell it injure themselves spiritually."

"You have much more power when you are working for the right thing than when you are working against the wrong thing. And, of course, if the right thing is established wrong things will fade away of their own accord. Grass-roots peace work is vitally important. All who work for peace belong to a special peace fellowship — whether we work together or apart."

"Knowing that all things contrary to God's laws are transient, let us avoid despair and radiate hope for a warless world. Peace is possible, for thoughts have tremendous power. A few really dedicated people can offset the ill effects of masses of out-of-harmony people, so we who work for peace must not falter. We must continue to pray for peace and to act for peace in whatever way we can, we must continue to speak for peace and to live the way of peace; to inspire others, we must continue to think of peace and to know that peace is possible. What we dwell upon we help to bring into manifestation. One little person, giving all of her time to peace, makes news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history."

"Never think of any right effort as being fruitless. All right effort bears fruit, whether we see the results or not."

"Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God; it is a sincere seeking for a good thing; and it is a concentration on the thing sought, with faith that it is obtainable."

"I am constantly thankful. The world is so beautiful, I am thankful. I have endless energy, I am thankful. I am plugged into the source of Universal Supply, I am thankful. I am plugged into the source of Universal Truth, I am thankful. I have this constant feeling of thankfulness, which is a prayer."

"Please don't say lightly that these are just religious concepts and not practical. These are laws governing human conduct, which apply as rigidly as the law of gravity. When we disregard these laws in any walk of life, chaos results. Through obedience to these laws this world of ours will enter a period of peace and richness of life beyond our fondest dreams. The key word for our time is practice. We have all the light we need, we just need to put it into practice."

"This is the way of peace — overcome evil with good, and falsehood with truth, and hatred with love."

"When you approach others in judgement they will be on the defensive. When you are able to approach them in a kindly, loving manner without judgement they will tend to judge themselves and be transformed."

"A PILGRIM IS A WANDERER WITH A PURPOSE. A pilgrimage can be to a place — that's the best known kind — but it can also be for a thing. Mine is for peace, and that is why I am a Peace Pilgrim."

"There is great freedom in simplicity of living."

"Stop being an escapist! Stop being a surface liver who stays right in the froth of the surface. There are millions of these people, and they never find anything really worthwhile. Be willing to face life squarely and get down beneath the surface of life where the verities and realities are to be found."

"I HAD A VERY FAVORABLE BEGINNING, although many of you might not think so. I was born poor on a small farm on the outskirts of a small town, and I'm thankful for that. I was happy in my childhood. I had a woods to play in and a creek to swim in and room to grow. I wish that every child could have growing space because I think children are a little like plants. If they grow too close together they become thin and sickly and never obtain maximum growth. We need room to grow."

"What people really suffer from is immaturity. Among mature people war would not be a problem — it would be impossible. In their immaturity people want, at the same time, peace and the things which make war. However, people can mature just as children grow up. Yes, our institutions and our leaders reflect our immaturity, but as we mature we will elect better leaders and set up better institutions. It always comes back to the thing so many of us wish to avoid — working to improve ourselves."

"Material things must be put into their proper place. They are there for use. It's all right to use them; that's what they're there for. But when they've outlived their usefulness, be ready to relinquish them and perhaps pass them on to someone who does need them. Anything that you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions. We are not free."

"I deal with spiritual truth which should never be sold and need never be bought. When you are ready it will be given."

"Take assertiveness training, get paid what you're worth, join a consciousness raising group."

"Probably the easiest thing would be to vasectimize males at the age of 13 after freezing some of their sperm. Then you could unfreeze it only after they have enough money to support a child up to the age of 18."

"There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will."

"The antidomesticity of Charlotte Perkins Gilman influenced their views on social organization; both Henrietta Rodman and Crystal Eastman tried to encourage the construction of apartment houses based on the Gilmanesque model. Nevertheless, they did not share Gilman's pronounced antierotic biases."

"Gilman, like Bebel and Engels, integrated the causes of labor and feminism; but she altered the priorities: "The great woman's movement and labor movement of today are parts of the same pressure, the same world-progress. An economic democracy must rest on a free womanhood; and a free womanhood inevitably leads to an economic democracy." Gilman's practical device for freeing women before the victory of socialism was the cooperative apartment house, containing common kitchens, laundry facilities, and nurseries, thus liberating the individual couple from the unshared burden of those responsibilities. Her idea never came to fruition, and William O'Neill has suggested that her scheme was inadequate: "Her solution to the problem was largely mechanical, a matter of revised domestic arrangements, which would free women for outside work. The alternative would seem to have been some kind of socialist order that would provide the institutions public nurseries, paid maternity leaves, and the like-necessary to fulfill the promise of feminine emancipation. Surprisingly enough, the key writings of this professed socialist neglected the point. She believed that feminism would have to socialize the home, but she apparently believed it possible to have socialized homes in a capitalist society.... Mrs. Gilman was a socialist and a feminist, yet in her mind the two remained separate and distinct causes. In the end, her failure to integrate them prevented her from fully utilizing the insights she had gained from each.""

"Charlotte Perkins Gilman-brilliant, outspoken, and iconoclastic-was both a socialist and a leader of the organized women's rights movement. Undoubtedly the most radical of the second generation of suffrage leaders, she attacked the home and domesticity because of its deadening influence on the female mind and spirit, and she announced her willingness-even eagerness-to abandon the conventional social structure to which most of her sisters in the mainstream feminist movement were committed. Gilman's socialism was non-Marxist; Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward and a sequel, Equality, had influenced her profoundly. Both of Bellamy's utopian visions, but particularly the latter, advocated participation of women in the work force in traditionally masculine occupations such as engineering and the skilled crafts as well as in more conventionally feminine pursuits; economic equality; and the removal of domestic tasks, including child care, to the public realm. Gilman concurred that equality would never be possible without full participation in economic life. And such participation required the socialization of childrearing and domestic tasks. Men and children, as well as women, would benefit under the new arrangement. An economically independent woman would marry for love, and children would grow to maturity in an environment that consisted not merely of an untrained mother's efforts, but of the attention of specialists in child care and education. Although she attacked conventional domestic arrangements, Gilman was not against the family. She argued: "Like all natural institutions the family has a purpose; and is to be measured primarily as it serves that purpose; which is, the care and nurture of the young. To protect the helpless little ones, to feed and shelter them, to ensure them the benefits of an even longer period of immaturity, and so to improve the race-this is the original purpose of the family." Men, she determined, had subverted that purpose: "What man has done to the family, speaking broadly, is to change it from an institution for the best service of the child, to one modified to his own service, the vehicle of his comfort, power and pride." In order to create a mutually rewarding family life a family "based on love and ... maintained because of its happiness and use"-society must destroy the old notion of home." People trained for the tasks of cooking, cleaning, and child care could better perform house-keeping duties than the isolated wife. Women would become free to develop their special talents, and Gilman believed that a free womanhood was necessary to full social development."

"The anarchist-feminists' denial of gender-based distinctions precluded their use of many of the arguments for equality utilized by the mainstream feminists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...even Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who almost alone among the younger generation of mainstream feminists stressed the similarities between men and women, also on occasion found it necessary or expedient to exploit the concept of a special relationship between woman's biology and her drive for equality. In 1912 Gilman wrote: "We are the makers of men, and because we are the makers of men, it is requisite that we should be citizens of the world we live in.""

"So impressed by her writings was W. D. Howells as early as 1902 that he declared: "She has enriched the literary center of New York by the addition of a talent in sociological satire which would be extraordinary even if it were not altogether unrivaled among us.""

"The theory that women had been members of a subject sex throughout long history, but coupled with a plan for their emancipation by socialism or communism, found expression with increasing force in the United States as the twentieth century advanced. Among the women who expounded this theory of woman none was more influential than Charlotte Perkins Stetson who long before her death in 1935 attained national and international fame as an exponent of a new feminism...In her writings she ranged from light, humorous verse and witty narrative poetry, through articles gravely gay and wholly serious books, to novels. Captivated by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888, Mrs. Stetson discovered in idealistic socialism what she deemed the clue to the emancipation of women and joined the disciples of Bellamy. Henceforward, with growing stress, she dwelt on the economic aspects of the "woman question"...Her belief in woman's long subjection to man was embodied in the following lines, quoted from a poem in her collection entitled In This Our World: "Close, close he bound her, that she should leave him never/Weak still he kept her, lest she be strong to flee;/And the fainting flame of passion he kept alive forever/With all the arts and forces of earth and sky and sea." But the future could be different, she believed. It had been and was woman's economic dependence on man that kept her in thrall. This was Mrs. Gilman's contention, especially, in Woman and Economics. Hence, she concluded, woman - especially the mother as guardian of the social spirit in social evolution - when freed from economic bondage to her mate would achieve liberty and make her "culture" and her "religion" prevail over his culture and his religion. And this economic freedom was to be won through various economic institutions of a collectivist nature, especially a form of cooperative living that would ease, if not abolish, the home drudgery of woman. To the old doctrine, so often advanced by parsons and lay men, that "woman's place is in the home," Mrs. Gilman opposed the doctrine that woman's place is in community and public life. In a poem on the assumption of male prerogatives, she stated the case in boasting words by the male: "I sing to the wide world/And she to the nest." But Mrs. Gilman did not deride singing to the nest. She approved it and gave it social significance. She proposed, however, that henceforward there should be a common singing to the wide world, her idea being that such singing had been done by man alone."

"As the drive for the vote heated up in the years before World War I, another less sharply defined movement emerged among more radical women, who called themselves feminists. While women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Crystal Eastman supported the suffrage campaign, their ideas moved beyond women's political rights to include more modern themes of economic independence and more modern sexual relationships and marriages…Unlike the votes-for-women movement, feminism placed the cutting edge of change in women's private lives, not in their public roles. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist favorite for her conviction that the family-oriented life of the middle class was narrow and inefficient, a point she explored in her pathbreaking books Women and Economics (1890) and The Home (1903)."

"I read "The Yellow Wallpaper" and found another example of a woman who was locked away by her husband because she was different from other women-too strong, too assertive, and a writer. The captivity drives her mad, too."

"The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty.... From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now."

"Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized."

"To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America, to say nothing of other countries, who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood relationship."

"There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver."

"Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain."