Feminists From The United States

"I said “I don’t understand, why are you playing this."

"Where’s the element of danger and funkiness that generated so much excitement?”"

"A failed person who never took responsibility for her own actions, but rather blamed every ill thing that had happened in her life on the fact that she’d once briefly been in this industry."

"I was 35 when I got into this business and the prospect of becoming a so-called sex symbol at this stage was."

"I was at his apartment in Manhattan and he broke out some cocaine and we drank some champagne, and we were groping a bit on the couch in the living room and he said “Let’s move this into my bedroom”."

"I go into the bathroom and while I’m in the bathroom changing and primping, I hear my own voice coming out of the bedroom, and so I march out and sure enough on the TV screen in the master bedroom is a film of mine."

"I was somewhat taken aback as I was easily ten years older than almost every other woman."

"I said the whole point of the women’s movement is for women to choose whatever they want to do."

"I thought you’d get a big kick out of this."

"At that point I realized what was expected of me, and frankly I was ready walk out of there straight away."

"I made damn sure that was the end of that relationship."

"It offends me deeply."

"If it come to that, frankly, I don’t see us losing."

"Get it out of my system."

"Why should my choice be considered any less or more valid than your choice?."

"There was a newscaster, a TV journalist in New York."

"This could turn into a real test of free speech under the First Amendment."

"We’d met and we had a couple of dates sans sex and there was some chemistry and we were getting along quite well, so finally the big night arrived."

"I was raising a child at the time."

"“This was the face of slavery. To have nothing, and still have something more to lose.”"

"“There is nothing more satisfying than having plans.”"

"It isn't as if there were a lot of women, let alone African American women vice presidents," Tademy said. "There was a lot of bewilderment. And then 18 months later, when I said I was going to write a book, that's when people's eyes rolled back in their heads."

"“Making a better way for the children. In the end, making a better life for our children what we all want.”"

"In my head, I lived on the plantation, and then I lived through the Civil War, and then I lived in Reconstruction and then I lived in the Jim Crow South, " she said. "It was always very personal, and I think that's something that's an added complexity. I was these women, but on the flip side, they were me. I really felt them as ancestors, not just characters I made up."

"“There is a special way of seeing come with age and distance, a kind of knowing how things happen even without knowing why. Seeing what show up one or two generations removed, from a father to a son or grandson, like repeating threads weaving through the same bolt of cloth. Repeating scraps at the foot and the head of a quilt.”"

"“We been writ out of the history of this town. They got a metal marker down to the courthouse tell a crazy twisting of what really happen Easter Sunday sixty years ago. The ones with the upper hand make the story fit how they want, and tell it so loud people tricked into thinking it real but writing down don’t make it so. The littlest colored child in Colfax, Louisiana, know better than to speak the truth of that time out loud, but real stories somehow carry forward, generation to generation.”"

"An author's life is very solitary and that part is sometimes difficult," she said. "I think about how stimulating it was to have so many smart people around (at Sun Microsystems), but I enjoy this."

"“You can’t tell how heavy somebody else’s load is just from looking. The Lord doesn’t give us more than we can carry.”"

"My childhood had a great influence in making me very determined to be independent and listen to my own voice. And that really put me in very good stead when I started my corporate career. I had built up my career, and I had climbed the corporate ladder. After a couple of decades, I had worked myself up to being a Vice President and General Manager of a Fortune 500 Company in Silicon Valley."

"I literally woke up one morning and said 'I am going to write a book.' I didn't write it from chapter one. I just tried to get to know who these women [my ancestors] were. I wrote in their voices for a couple of months. I would write it as a diary, and then I would put two of them in the room together and see how they interacted with one another. And then I put three in a room together until I began to really feel that I had a handle on who they were and how they would react. And what happened was a novel."

"“Sometimes while you wait for what you think is better … what is good enough slips away.”"

"There is, between the sexes, a law of incessant reciprocal action, of which God avails himself in the constitution of the family, when He permits brothers and sisters to nestle about the same hearthstone. Its ministration is essential to the best educational results. Our own educational institutions should rest upon this divine basis."

"Influence follows close upon the heels of character; and whatever we are, that we shall in the end be acknowledged to be."

"I cannot help directing your attention to the significant fact that while the word "mistress," applied to a woman, serves at once to mark her out for reprobation, there is no corresponding term which, applied to man, produces the same effect; and this because the interests of the state are still paramount to the interests of the soul itself."

"We claim for women a share of the educational opportunities offered to man, because we believe that they will never be thoroughly taught until they are taught at the same time and in the same classes."

"Let a neatness as exquisite as womanly, and as polished as that of Charlotte Brontë, pervade not only our homes, but consecrate our own personal appearance; then may we safely wear the livery of the schools."

"Let us candidly confess our indebtedness to the needle. How many hours of sorrow has it softened, how many bitter irritations calmed, how many confused thoughts reduced to order, how many life-plans sketched in purple!"

"Let woman once reject the absurd notion that she was created for happiness, let her constitute herself instead a creator of it, let her accept with joy the fact that this is a working-day world; then she will no longer strive to escape from labor, discipline, or sorrow, but will gladly hail each in its turn as part of God's appointed teaching, a shadow crossing the sunshine to show that it is bright."

"Woman is quick to recognize genius, to listen when wisdom speaks. She chatters, to be sure, in the presence of fools; but when earnest men come to know the value of her enthusiasm, they will never be willing to lose it."

"I have seen no Hindu who seemed to me prepared intellectually and morally for the freedom he would find in American society; nor are Americans prepared for the air of innocence and exaltation worn by very undeserving Orientals."

"I thought I knew how corrupt modem society could be; but I did not know how unsoundness had darted to its very core till I began to read law, and to understand the estimate which that puts upon women and chastity."

"The deep gender bias of science (including medicine), of its very ways of seeing problems, resonates, Keller argues, in its "common rhetoric." Mainly "adversarial" and "aggressive" in its stance toward what it studies, "science can come to sound like a battlefield.""

"The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong. Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control."

"Virtually every time someone watches that movie, they're watching me being raped."

"When in response to his suggestions I let him know I would not become involved in prostitution in any way and told him I intended to leave, [Traynor] beat me and the constant mental abuse began. I literally became a prisoner, I was not allowed out of his sight, not even to use the bathroom, where he watched me through a hole in the door. He slept on top of me at night, he listened to my telephone calls with a .45 automatic eight shot pointed at me. I suffered mental abuse each and every day thereafter. He undermined my ties with other people and forced me to marry him on advice from his lawyer.My initiation into prostitution was a gang rape by five men, arranged by Mr. Traynor. It was the turning point in my life. He threatened to shoot me with the pistol if I didn't go through with it. I had never experienced anal sex before and it ripped me apart. They treated me like an inflatable plastic doll, picking me up and moving me here and there. They spread my legs this way and that, shoving their things at me and into me, they were playing musical chairs with parts of my body. I have never been so frightened and disgraced and humiliated in my life. I felt like garbage. I engaged in sex acts in pornography against my will to avoid being killed ... The lives of my family were threatened."

"It is a crime that movie is still showing; there was a gun to my head the entire time."

"She is one of the few public intellectuals that engages with issues and people all over the world yet still remains connected to the grassroots. The writings and ideas of Selma James are as relevant now as they have ever been. Her solidarity knows no borders, her compassion excludes no sufferer."

"What keeps me motivated is that I want to enjoy my life, and the closest I can get to full enjoyment is to attack my enemies. And I find that, if I do it honestly and with others in a collective way, I have a good chance to know what’s happening in my own life. So my own life is not mystified, so I don’t believe the lies they tell me about what I think and what I feel or should feel and should think. That I really begin to see other members of the human race in the round rather than with the nonsense that all of us spew out from time to time when we don’t know what better to say. And that’s what really keeps me motivated. I have a very high opinion of my own life, and therefore, I want to use it in a way that is elevating to me but also to all those who are down here with us. I don’t know if I’ve said that very clearly, but you know, it’s something that I want for myself. To be part of this struggle is to be learning, all the time. And that’s more fun than anything I know, I mean, like anything. To learn what’s really going on is such a major thrill that it’s what really keeps me motivated."

"The relationships on which the whole society rests are in wreck condition, are in disastrous condition because women are going out to work. It’s not just a few minutes a day. It’s taking care of the relationships that are the foundation of our lives. That’s what women do. And when we can’t do that, when most of us can’t do that, we are either furious, resentful, or we begin to be uncaring ourselves. And that has happened to some women. It’s happened to all of us to some degree. That we don’t want to know about how the people that we would ordinarily have been taking care of, how they’re suffering. We don’t want to know. We can’t cope with the knowledge of the mess that people we love are in, as a result of the fact that we have no time to take care of them. I think there are really a lot of women in that situation. They call it the Sandwich Generation. They call it whatever they like. Any nice little name they give it, it’s definitely the suffering of the carer as well as those that they care for, obviously, which is why the carer is suffering."

"I think that that is what the teachers should be saying and doing. They should be spelling it out. They should be telling the parents, “If you want me to teach, fight for my wages, and fight for my time. Fight for the facilities, and fight for the children to have instruments to play in band and things like that, on school time, with school money.” You know, we want to give these children an education that really fits them to have a happy life, not fits them to be a repressed individual at the service of the state…I think that something similar has happened with nurses – and nurses are fighting to take care of patients…They’re not only fighting that they’re overworked and underpaid. They’re fighting so that they can take the proper care of the patients. You know, one of the nurses was complaining to me that his boss on the ward says that, “You spend too much time with the patients. If you have to go bandage a leg, just bandage a leg, but then you sit and talk with them, and that’s no good!” So, I think there’s a real crisis – this is in general – between us carers and those who exploit us. On the one hand, we want to care. But on the other hand, we don’t want that wish to care to be used against us as workers. And we have always to decide, as carers, as teachers, as nurses, as mothers, as neighbors, we have to decide how to defend our caring but not allow ourselves to be exploited because we have this “weakness,” and in fact, this vulnerability is the right word. We have to say, “You have to pay us to do the right thing.” And we don’t take the little bit that [either] we want to do the right thing, or we want to take the money. We want both. That’s really crucial, and it took a lot of years, I think, to be absolutely clear, to be able to say that in that succinct way because it’s very hard to figure out, if you are a carer, if your work is the health and well-being of other people, how to be dedicated to it but not exploited, not allow yourself to be exploited by it."