Women Born In The 1930s

"But women often find their husbands don't love them for the things they value in themselves, and part of the charm of an affair is you can give what you want, and need only give if you choose."

"Men don't come to see other women to help take out the garbage and if they wanted to put up the screens they would have stayed home. So mistresses tend to get a steady diet of whipped cream, but no meat and potatoes, and wives often get the reverse, when both would like a bit of each."

"You can, after all, produce an orgasm yourself if that's what you want, so we must go to bed for something more."

"Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life."

"A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men — and people in general."

""We the people-still an excellent phrase," said the playwright Lorraine Hansberry in 1962, well aware who had been excluded, yet believing the phrase might someday come to embrace us all…Lorraine Hansberry spoke her words about government during the Cuban missile crisis, at a public meeting in New York to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. She also said in that speech, "My government is wrong." She did not say, I abhor all government. She claimed her government as a citizen, African American, and female, and she challenged it."

"The position of women has been debated in socialist and communist circles, but even there it is usually left as a question. And black women specifically? They have never been a primary subject of the American Left, always falling somewhere in the cracks between the Negro Question and the Woman Question. As we've seen, key interventions by the likes of Ida B. Wells or Claudia Jones attempted to disrupt color- and class-struggle-as-usual, but few leftists paid attention. Nearly half a century ago, black playwright and critic Lorraine Hansberry took the Communists to task for failing to recognize that the Woman Question stood alongside class, race, colonialism, and the struggle for peace as "the greatest social question existent.""

"My first real job was as an art editor of the People's Voice...The secretary who was there gently growing her wings was Lorraine Hansberry."

"Years later when Alpheus Hunton, Lou Burnham and Lorraine Hansberry started Freedom, the newspaper in which Paul Robeson wrote, they portrayed Africa-a big black giant, in shackles, ready to break loose. I realized then that there was a large segment of Black America caught up in the African movement, in African history."

"The great victims in this country of the institution called segregation, which is not solely a southern custom but has been for a hundred years a national way of life-the great victims are the white people, and the white man's children. Lorraine Hansberry said this afternoon when we were talking about the problem of being a Negro male in this society. Lorraine said that she wasn't too concerned really about Negro manhood since they had managed to endure and to even transcend fantastic things, but she was very worried about a civilization which could produce those 5 policemen standing on the Negro woman's neck in Birmingham or wherever it was, and I am too."

"It is hard for me to talk about Lorraine in a way because I loved her. She was like my baby sister, in a way. I can't think of her without a certain amount of pain. Every artist, every writer goes under the hammer. But under ordinary circumstances, since a writer's real ambition is to be anonymous and since his work is done in private, one arrives at some way of living with the hammer. But the black writer is by definition public, and he lives under something much worse. The pressure of being a writer is one thing, but the pressure of being a public figure is another and they are antithetical, too. The strain can kill you. It is certainly one of the things that killed Lorraine, who was very vivid, very young, very curious, very courageous, very honest. But she died, as you know, subsequent to the eruption in Birmingham, as the country, in fact, began to go over the cliff. Many of us began to realize then that there was no way of redeeming the American Republic. It was bent on destruction. This was one of the things that killed her. It was the incomprehension of her country and the disaster overtaking the nation, which, after all, she, like I, had many reasons to love. We were born there, and our ancestors paid a great deal for it."

"Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."

"I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and — I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations."

"There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he's been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning — because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is."

"Don't get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think."

"Children see things very well sometimes — and idealists even better."

"I look at you and I see the final triumph of stupidity in the world!"

"If men went through menopause, we'd know everything about it, but we still don't even know if we should be taking hormones."

"Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms."

"I'm against abstinence programs because I really consider "abstinence only" child abuse."

"If you can't control your reproduction, you can't control your life."

"I want every child that's born in the world to be planned and wanted."

"We must stop this love affair with the fetus."

"As long as I was in Washington I never met anybody that I thought was good enough, who knew enough, or who loved enough to make sexual decisions for anybody else."

"We've tried ignorance for a thousand years. It's time we try education."

"How do you get rid of the trash? It's out there in society, it's going on every day […] You can educate children an awful lot easier than you can get rid of the trash."

"Handguns are a public health issue."

"I certainly agree with the suggestion made by the former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders that a public dialogue on the decriminalization of drugs is absolutely necessary. As it stands today, people are punished because they have done harm to themselves. The "crime problem" can only be addressed ultimately by the eradication of poverty, by the eradication of the circumstances that lead people to commit the kinds of crimes for which most are sent to prison."

"I heard on the way over here, by the way, that they've come up with a new nominee for surgeon general: Pee-Wee Herman, is....You don't think that would have happened if it weren't for the fact that you were all elected do you? This is a sensitive subject and I am not gonna mention it because she got canned for it, but I'll tell ya, she said much worse than this. And she said far stupider things, like “The way to combat crime is with safer bullets, with safer guns.”"

""__ I think that we have made a lot of progress. But you know, it took thousands of years to get here. Can you imagine that in 1960 it was illegal for married people to use condoms"."

"""A core belief of mine is the importance of honesty. When we stop talking openly about sex, we stop communicating important information to our young people. Then you have worse reproductive health, more teenage pregnancy, higher rates of HIV/AID"."

"I believe that the reason we do not see health care as a human right is that our country is run by a class of white men who don’t understand the problems of *needing* and *not having*. Perhaps they’ve never been there themselves. Nobody wants to be poor. We all want food, clothing, and shelter. And health care, too."

""I grew up on a farm in a three-room shack. I was the oldest of eight children. We were very poor. We didn’t have running water. We didn’t have electricity, so we didn’t have TV or radio. No one had health care. There were no health facilities for miles and miles. The first time I saw a doctor was when I was a freshman in college. So I couldn’t grow up wanting to go into public health, or even wanting to be a doctor, because I’d never even heard of that. You can’t be what you can’t see"."

"I think that we need to look at health - sexual health - as a part of our overall health, and I don't feel that you can really be healthy unless you are sexually healthy. And I truly feel that we need to start educating our children about sex from kindergarten through 12th grade, so that they can respect their sexuality and protect their sexuality so that they can be - have sexual health throughout their lives. Other countries do it. Why do we have to have the highest teenage pregnancy, highest rates of STDs, the highest rates of HIV in our adolescents? It's because we feel that ignorance is bliss, and it's not bliss. We got to educate our young people."

"Absolutely. You can do both. I feel that parents should educate their children about their sexuality and teach them the things they want them to know. But so often, what they're taught is what I was taught - to just say no. We have been taught abstinence only. We've been taught nothing about protection from diseases or anything. We've been taught nothing about contraception. And, you know, we say well, if we tell them about it, they'll do it. Well, if you've got the highest rates in the world, that says you're already doing it."

"If you say children wouldn't know anything about masturbation on their own, you've never changed a little boy's diaper."

"We know that more than 70 to 80% of women masturbate, and 90% of men masturbate, and the rest lie."

"They are boycotting common sense."

"You have done more to bring shame on the family than could ever have been imagined."

"She is far too bright for her station in life, which she takes altogether too solemnly."

"Which one? My sister, my mother or my husband?"

"But we can go back further still, for the thing did not start with Princess Anne, either; before her there was Princess Margaret. She, too, was attacked for going on holiday, and indeed for putting on weight, but the main charges, which seem almost incredible today, concerned her choice of men friends - and after, not before, her divorce."

"Her Royal Highness was charming ("I have this terribly flat voice," she told me apologetically), with a ready sense of humour and a dry wit. We did one rehearsal and the producer said: "That's very good, Ma'am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?" She looked him straight in the eye and said acidly, "Well, I wouldn't be, would I?""

"We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in."

"Not once have you hung your head in embarrassment even for a minute after those disgraceful photographs. Clearly you have never considered the damage you are causing us all. How dare you discredit us like this and how dare you send me those flowers?"

"Silly ass. The land would be much more valuable today."

"Mother brings a child late to contact by half-an-hour; father then requires an extra half-hour the next week. This is getting silly. If, in fact, the father does not see the child at all, of course he should see the child on another occasion, but there are fathers who actually add up the minutes and produce it and say "Now I should have so much more contact because I lost five minutes last week and ten minutes the week before"."