Women Born In The 1930s

"We were on the threshold of being an independent state and those who formed the Egbe, they saw what was going on in Europe – free health, free education and all that – and they wanted to translate same to Nigeria so that we could move forward and if possible catch up with the western nations."

"If you believe in something you must stand by your belief. You cannot start wavering because of material benefits."

"Being a woman, I wanted to be one of the first in politics to make a mark in Nigeria."

"... the role of the parliamentarian is to see that your constituency get what the government provides for them ... children should be educated, women be empowered, pregnant women have free access to healthcare and develop the chiefdoms as well"

"Cryer said that it is because they do not want arranged marriages with “very young girls from their village” in Pakistan that Muslim men "look for very young girls through this organised sex ring that we are seeing in Keighley." She does not explain what part of "Asian culture" would lead the parents to want their sons to marry “very young girls” from Pakistan, nor why this should lead to "organised" rings of men who seek to exploit "very young", non-Muslim girls near Bradford, and get them addicted to drugs and alcohol and then turn them into prostitutes. Ann Cryer left it up to the population of Britain to assume that Hindu and Sikh and Buddhist men were also doing this, as these activities were supposedly part of “Asian culture”, rather than men from one specific religious group..."

"We are aware of no evidence showing that Ann Cryer spoke out about the activities of the grooming gangs before August 22 2003, when Channel 4 News disclosed the existence of the 18-month investigation into the grooming gangs by Bradford Council and West Yorkshire Police, although surely as the MP she must have known about such a major investigation into their activities. Perhaps she had known about this investigation, but had chosen to remain silent, as the previous year she came under criticism from left-wing Muslims for "damaging race relations", when she stated that "Asian gangs" in her constituency were out of control."

"But the quotations of contemporaneous reports of what Cryer actually said in 2003 show that in claiming that it was to do with "Asian culture" rather than religion, she had led the public to believe the problems were nothing to do with Islam. Since Islam comes from Arabia rather than Asia, and since Asia has many religions and cultures other than those of Muslims, the public was led to believe that what was happening in Bradford involved criminal grooming gangs of many different religions. But Cryer was talking to Muslim leaders in order to get the grooming gangs to stop; there was apparently no need for her to talk to Hindu or Sikh leaders to get their youths to stop grooming young white girls. Thus, even at the time, Cryer should have been able to perceive the difference between Muslim culture and Asian culture."

"To the best of my ability I tried to do some good, tried to make people's lives better in whatever way I could? Without sounding sanctimonious about it. Perhaps just that I tried not to do any harm."

"Dame Cath was a true trailblazer for women in public life."

"I hope we’ll have as much pride as the Americans had, but I don’t think it’ll be done in quite the same way. It’s not our style to let everything hang out."

"I would hope that we’re not going to be, on the one hand, encouraging young people into a healthy lifestyle, and at the same time promoting a way of life that is demonstrably unhealthy."

"My values. Know what I hold to be most sacred in my life that I would never want to give up. And if I cannot reclaim that, if the likelihood of my reclaiming that in the future is very low, then act accordingly."

"[this episode] has been the most difficult two days of my professional life"

"I’ve been doing this daily and loving it each day, but I do think it’s time for me, it’s time for the radio station, it’s time for listeners to hear something new and fresh"

"Until we overcome our fear about talking about death, few of us can have the end of life we envision. We've been so focused on living and accomplishing and moving forward that we don't think about death as part of life."

"Senator, you have dual citizenship with Israel"

"In my early teens, skinny ribs daily rent asunder by the explosive emotions within - oh golly gosh how I hate that spotty, mingy Mildred and will Rock Hudson ever ever clasp me in his steely arms - I burst upon a diary with a great gold lock. But the Moroccan leather binding, the milky expanse within, instantly transformed me into Baroness Munchausen. My very handwriting spiked into the serious trembly copperplate I deemed more suitable for the consumptive heroine I wished to be than the thick round letters of the large schoolgirl I was (if experts today are right and handwriting shapes the fortunes of the writer, I should have died elegantly at the end of the diary). Even the contents were bastard - I found it beneath my dignity to write of anything but the most searing Brontë-esque passions and now, far from being a record of day-to-day events, each entry requires a simultaneous translation: "Today I think I shall go mad, I shiver, I groan, I sob" (Myron Fickelburger didn’t sit next to me in Chemistry); "Wild gales sweep across the moors, I run and howl, my eyes stream tears" (it’s windy in the playground and I’ve got this bit of asphalt in my eye). Discovered long hence, that diary would provide historians with a vivid and haunting picture of youthful stress in the fifties - vivid and haunting and deeply untrue."

"Our model is the amazing Jill Tweedie, a former columnist on the Guardian. Her close friend Polly Toynbee told me that after a diagnosis of motor neurone disease – the condition that drove Diane Pretty to battle for the right to die – Jill calmly acquired the medication needed for a sure and safe despatch. She booked herself into a hospice for what she told her family was a short respite and took her tablets whilst she was still capable of self administration, but in a setting where it would be professionals who would find her body rather than those close to her."

"Her weekly column became an icon of all that was hairy and terrifying to men who found the women's movement a threat to their security. She was parodied, ridiculed and attacked. Mostly, though, she became a focal voice of women all over Britain who wrote to her in their thousands and took courage from her to look at the truth about their lives. ... Her radicalism never wavered but her honesty demanded that she explore the ambivalences feminists like her were scarcely able to confess to themselves, let alone to the world. The result was "Letters From A Faint-hearted Feminist", a new series of columns in which issues of central feminist ideology were put through the same critical wringer as the unthinking patriarchal orthodoxies that had been in her earlier columns. Could not you wear high heels with a boiler suit? Were beautiful clothes a gorgeous prison, or a legitimate choice for independent women? Was monogamy inevitably a road to servitude? The cleverness of those columns was Jill's ability to admit to ambivalence, to weakness and to changing her mind without compromising her beliefs in equality, independence and the destructiveness of stereotypes. In their way, they were a bridge between the revolutionary battlefields of the 70s and the next generation who rightly took their freedoms for granted and saw no reason whatever to agonise about boiler suits or PhDs."

"From the word go, Tweedie, 'the doyenne of feminist journalists bringing the hottest of bulletins from the front line of the sex war' (ibid) [See note below] was both partisan and subjective/ Although reserved about detaikls of her life, especially the tragedy of her children, she mined other experiences. Her style, too, was the radical opposite of the remote discoursew which passed for objective journalism. She wrote as she spoke and the words jumped off the page, full of colloquialisms and inner dialogue."

"She [Tweedie] opens her case with an account of her own experience — she married three times and twice it was rotten — and goes on to list, throughout the ages, the devastation perpetuated in the name of love. ... I disagree with some of her book. She chronicles a horrific list of cruelties and repressions practiced in the name of love and she infers that it is the exception rather than the rule that people know how to love one another. She must be wrong. What about all those millions of human beings who, long before the welfare state, despite misery, hunger and disease, mostly managed to care for each other with charity and tenderness? I don't know why any of us should presume that we're here to do anything very special, except procreate ..."

"It would be a tragedy if the still embryonic Women's Liberation Movement in this country sank without trace into the amniotic fluid of niceness, but already I detect some signs. The women directly concerned with organising the March 6 demo, though they point with pride to the massive WL movement in the US seem not to have learned very much from the performance of their American sisters. They bend over backwards to be fair. ('We must be very careful not to assume that if a woman is refused a job it is sexual discrimination' — why? It's not our job to worry about fairness.) They talk too much about wanting to be taken seriously; they say too often how much they deprecate extremes and shudder with refined horror at bra-burnings, and at SCUM and WITCH. Not at at the image we want, they say, metaphorically crooking their little fingers and adjusting their petal hats. We don't want to go to jail, or worse, be laughed at. The tendency among these ladies is to sneer at the Germaine Greers of the movement and, indeed, it is easy enough to carp at sweeping genralisations and lack of careful factual research. But anger, neurosis, insights , obsession and extremism is where it is at and women will have lost the battle before it has begun if they reject all this and concentrate their energies only on concrete injustice. Reforms like equal pay, equal job opportunities, free contraception, better nursery schools, have needed implementation as long as I can remember, and armies of hard-working, dedicated women have been pushing them forward as long as I can remember, too, and a great deal longer. The only new ingredient Women's Lib had to offer was the intellectual recognition of an imprisoned psyche, and the realisation that when that inner battle is fought and won, concrete injustices crumble at the roots. And that is not done by being nice. American liberationists did not surge into life thinking of the other chap's point of view or making constant efforts to be fair, moderate, cool and ladylike. They succeeded by being prejudiced, unfair, immoderate, uncool and devastatingly unladylike and they came up with the only symbolic image of the movement so far (em) bra-burning. A small and risible thing, perhaps, but their own."

"Under the pseudo-Gothic vaults, brightly hatted, lace stockinged, discreetly jewelled, the 27 womwen Members go clicking over the tiled floors. ... Highly educated, immensely hard working, more dedicated, more conscientious than many of their male colleagues these women hold down one of the most demanding jobs there is. Many of them are married, a few have small children and some have households organised beyond the dreams of Mrs Beeton. And all of them have one regret — that there are no more than 24 hours in a day. Time is an enemy. Watching telly by the fireside becomes a rare treat, an evening at the theatre something to be planned for weeks in advance, and then frustrated. They need energy, energy, and more energy. This is no life for fluttery ladies with migraine[s] and female complaints. Life at the House is not yet geared to women. The men have their built in barber but they have no hairdresser, what do you do when your hair droops and your on television that evening? They share one bath between them. They have no office of their own."

"Sheila Aitkenhead is 38, has four children, and is consumed by various cancers. She is unbelievably pretty and healthy and sensible. When would she like to kill herself? "The point at which I simply represent distress." Her children had been told. I wanted dreadfully, interferingly, to know what they thought about it. But we weren't told; oddly, it is all supposed to be so open."

"It is clear enough where Mrs Whitehouse stands - and, indeed Judge King-Hamilton, who 'could not imagine...a more scurrilous profanity'. Most of us, I suppose - Gay News included - are a bit less sure of ourselves. One especially interesting feature of this case was how united the observers - and in particular the press - were against the prosecution, and in particular against Mr John Smyth's conduct of the case. Of course the press benches are parti pris where the freedom of the press is in question. One of our heroes is Clarence Darrow; one of our texts the Scopes case, when he defended a teacher accused of corrupting children's minds with the Darwinian theory of evolution. This case, though, involved Christianity, homosexuality, and obscenity. It was a perfect trio for the prosecution, who could imply, though not state, that the defendants were not just blasphemers but filthy-minded deviants as well. But not one of us, from an extreme disbeliever to a devout Catholic, welcomed the verdict. As far as we were concerned, the prosecution had, at the least, deliberately introduced irrelevancies to discredit the character of the paper."

"I am but one of many who walked this path of change: it took a movement to change what this place called North Amerika had become."

"Enriqueta Vasquez's column "Despierten! Hermanos" became known for its eloquent efforts to combat sexism within the movimiento while also working for an anti-colonial liberation to benefit all Raza."

"Today, Los Alamos and newspapers like The New Mexican are celebrating August 6. They call it The 25th Anniversary of the Atomic City, or the birth of The Atomic Age, but those are just fine words for a Day of Murder-for the single most horrible slaughter in human history. We cannot celebrate Murder with them. We will celebrate instead the awakening of ourselves and all the Sleeping Giants, rising up everywhere in the world to cry BASTA YA. Let the Manufacturers of Death celebrate the birth of their Atomic Age. We will celebrate the dawn of the People's Age. Power, at last, to the People! (1970)"

"Let's start thinking in terms of feeding ourselves instead of feeding the grocery stores. Cooperatives are certainly a big answer for the people. Let's go back to being more self-sufficient. Why do we have to support Mr. Safeway, whoever or wherever he may be?"

"As I look back I remember, To think that at one time even my mother accused me of being a communist and threatened to report me to the government as such. I always respected her and had never answered her, but this time I answered: Go ahead, I will call the FBI for you and you can turn me in. Who do you think I learned to be a revolutionary from? Remember when you would say: 'Si yo supiera hablar inglés, ¿ya me hubieran echado a la prisión?' Pues yo sí sé inglés, y ahora, justed me acusa de ser comunista? Ándele, entrégueme.Her little eyes blinked and after a long silence we both laughed, hugged and cried as she said, Hija de tu nana, me ganaste. I thought, Of course, I won, what do you expect from the daughter of the Mexican Revolution? Later, in 1968, I brought her to visit me in New Mexico and took her to hear Reies Tijerina when he spoke at Española High School. I will never forget the incredible look that came over her face as she drank up every word. After he finished, my mother walked right over to Reies, talked to him and hugged him, tearfully saying, Nunca crei que oyera en este país las palabras y verdades que ha dicho usted. After we left, I smilingly hugged her and reminded her that now, she too was a communist. ¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN, SIEMPRE!"

"How can one guarantee complete non-violence when one lives in a completely VIOLENT country?"

"I certainly embrace socialism. I can’t see any other solutions. This country (the United States) could feed the world if it wanted to."

"When we speak of Gringo, we do not particularly hate all white people, but we refer to their social system as ‘Gringo.’ That is what we don’t like."

"I didn’t want my kids to go through what I went through."

"I learned to listen, not only to words, but to the hearts of people; thus capturing the passion, anger, outrage, and indignation when discussing racism, greed, repression and exploitation. These sentiments became an eruption of hundreds of years of repressed thought now set free."

"El Grito Del Norte, a Chicano newspaper based in Espanola, New Mexico, was born from the revolutionary flames that engulfed the Southwest in the late 1960s and the early 1970s."

"That we have scholars and Chicana PHDers of this caliber teaching in our educational institutions fulfills a vision of what we hoped would come out of the Chicano Movement. Even more extraordinary is the fact that most scholars do not forget “la causa Chicana,” thus watering the raices of the ancient past and living Chicano epic."

"Child care is one of the most difficult problems for a woman to have to face alone. Not only is she tormented with having to leave the raising of her children to someone else, but she wants the best of care for them. For the amount of money that she may be able to pay from her meager wages, it is likely that she will be lucky to find anyone at all to take care of the children."

"Then you will find the Chicana with a husband who was not able to fare so very well in the Society and perhaps has had to face defeat. She is the woman that really suffers. Quite often the man will not fight the real source of his problems, be it discrimination or whatever, but will instead come home and take it out on his family. As this continues, his Chicana becomes the victim of his machismo and woeful are the trials and tribulations of that household."

"A woman who has no way of expressing herself and realizing herself as a full human has nothing else to turn to but the owning of material things."

"And now, today, as we hear the call of the Raza, and as the dormant, "docile" Mexican American comes to life, we see the stirring of the people. With that call, the Chicana also stirs and I am sure that she will leave her mark upon the Mexican-American movement in the Southwest"

"To find a job, a single mother will be faced with working very hard during the day and coming home and again having to work at home."

"There are not a few people with too much and others with too little; instead, everyone has enough. (1969, about Cuba)"

"We want an abundant society with a different kind of man, the Cubans said. In other words, people will not work for money-they will not have to sell their hard work to somebody else. They will work for the good of the land, for the good of all the people. (1969, about Cuba)"

"The new man is a person of the future. The idea of the new man (and new woman) is the realization that human beings have no limit for development. They have great capacity. They can be unselfish, and without envidia. They can all work together for the common good. They can be freed from the pressure of getting money, and become real humans instead of work-machines. (1969, about Cuba)"

"I had heard that the revolution lives everyday and that it must continue to change and live everyday if it is to be truly of and for the people. (1969, about Cuba)"

"In exchange for hard work the people have freedom. Not only freedom from want but freedom to develop themselves as individuals. They have shelter, no mortgages, sufficient food for survival and sufficient clothing. There are few cars, as this is really a luxury item, and what cars there are, are for the use of the people. There are many buses. These buses are all made in France or England. In Havana, transportation is only 5 cents. If you have it, you pay it consciously, if not you can ride anyway. I used to watch the people get on and everyone seemed to pay. Public telephones are free. Medical care is completely free to everyone. Even sports events are free. (1969, about Cuba)"

"And what about César Chávez in California? What's the history of the campesino and what is he fighting for? These are our people too. And in Texas our brothers and sisters have a struggle. Just what is this all about? What is happening to our people? We feel what is happening, let's learn about it and let's start speaking up. Let's talk to each other and let's not be afraid to be heard. (1969)"

"I believe that one of the big problems we will find is the racism in education. We know that in school they are not given a culture that they can identify with. They are not taught who they are. Our way of thinking and our human values: as a matter of fact, discouraged. Our own children are wandering away from Raza culture and this is mostly because they have been educated to feel inferior. Our own history books in the schools tend to wipe us out as a people. Our children don't know themselves. It is our obligation and responsibility to show them who and what they really are. We must realize that when educators speak of equality, it is in law and in writing but not in practice. And worse yet, what is being taught to our children is that the Americano as well as their history is superior and infallible. This is totally inhuman, and if you really want to see what this attitude does to people, just go to a foreign country and see the behavior of the American wherever he goes. And listen to what people from other countries feel about the Gringo. (1969)"

"It seems that before the Europeans came to the Americas, our highly cultured Indian woman usually held an honored position in the "primitive" society in which she lived. She was mistress of the home and took full part in tribal elections. The position of the woman was not only free, but honorable. She was a strong laborer, a good mechanic, a good craftsman, a trapper, a doctor, a preacher and, if need be, a leader. It seems that among the so-called SAVAGE people of this continent, women held a degree of political influence never equaled in any CIVILIZED nation."