Women Born In The 1940s

"Ufot Ekaette was exceptionally patriotic to Nigeria’s cause."

"We have definitely seen marked improvements in the status of women. These improvements are driven by the diligent efforts exerted by women- led movements."

"There are several measurable examples that echo the ongoing progress of women in Egypt by law: more than 12 years ago Egyptian women already have gained the right to travel without their husband’s prior consent, and the right to pass down their nationality to children born to foreign fathers."

"some people doubt women’s capabilities simply because they are women, so you have to double your efforts to get what you are entitled for."

"My diligent efforts were rewarded when I was decorated with the ‘Order of Good Hope’."

"Women will be fully empowered and gender equality will prevail when we explain to everyone in the society that they stand to benefit."

"You can do it just have self- confidence and work hard. Women are multitaskers. They are soldiers and if they believe in what they are doing they will succeed…so believe in God, build friends and alliances, do not make enemies"

"Offering females quality education and putting in place techniques for active life-long learning, while giving them the space to express themselves and air their grievances, as well as access to support removing any obstacles in their way for development, are badly needed."

"There are still women and girls who are denied their right to education even though the government provides free basic education, but some parents deprive their daughters of that right."

"To empower women, we should ensure that all young girls receive their education. The benefits of this education will trickle down not only to their families but nationwide as well."

"We still need to change the cultural practices that constitute violence against women and the best way to achieve this is by putting more women on the decision- making level, be it at the governmental or the parliamentary."

"Women’s rights have been secured constitutionally, with many constitutional terms, translated into legal clauses while others remain in the pipes. There are several measurable examples that echo the ongoing progress of women in Egypt by law."

"Egyptian women already have gained the right to travel without their husband’s prior consent, and the right to pass down their nationality to children born to foreign fathers."

"Sattar (my son) wanted a free Iran, eliminating poverty, and happiness of people."

"For a religion that wants to kill people, after eighty years, I will remove my hijab."

"It was massive that the crowd agreed with us because it was against the church. You just knew it resonated with women who thought "I needn’t get pregnant"."

"As one of the women who took the train in 1971, she set in train an unstoppable wave for equality and a changing of Ireland for the better. That change has not yet reached its conclusion but it would be nowhere if it wasn't for warriors like Nell. In an Ireland trying to emerge from the shadows and find who it was, Nell McCafferty was one of the people who knew exactly who she was and wasn't afraid to enter every battle for gay and women's rights. We all owe her a great debt for this. Nell McCafferty left Ireland a much better place than she found it and she played her part with spirit and style."

"Her passion and wrath was not scattergun – it had a laser-like focus on calling out inequality and injustice. She suffered no fools but had a kindness and warmth for many."

"It was never a condom train. We were never going to give control of our sexuality to men."

"We were touching a raw nerve. Women in Ireland wanted contraception. I mean, six children on average. Or maybe more."

"The more I read the Rig Veda the harder it becomes for me – and much of the difficulty arises from taking seriously the aberrancies and deviations in the language… One can be blissfully reading the most banal hymn, whose form and message offer no surprises (I have come to cherish such coasting) – and suddenly trip over a verse, to which one’s only response can be ‘What??!!"

"Many of the most obscure images and turns of phrase in the Rig Veda make sense as poetic realizations of specific ritual activities […] every apparent barbarity in syntax, in word choice, in imagery is deliberate and a demonstration of skill whose motivation I must seek."

"Within its soberly academic trio of hardback volumes, however, seethes an incoherent mix of mumbo-jumbo and misplaced obscenity, most of it apparently meaningless. It reads like a burlesque version, in the style of Hamlet Travestie, of a long lost original... Strangely, though, ‘spoked wheels’ have been introduced twenty-two times into this translation, as a new interpretation of the word aratí. This epithet of the fire god was previously understood to mean ‘servant’ or ‘messenger’... Given the current frantic search for evidence of ‘spoked wheels’ in the remains of the Indus Valley Civilization, the translation could even be considered irresponsible... As Hamlet Travestie slid into Dogg’s Hamlet I found myself wondering: could this be a long-hatched plot by the Pentagon to destroy Hindu fundamentalism at its heart?"

"I am not a poet: I can enjoy the talents and artistic sincerity of a Rig Vedic poet, but I cannot emulate it or imagine how it feels to be part of this creative tradition. I am a scholar (though not a theologian), and I can appreciate internally the intellectual effort and acuity employed to make sense of the religious traditions that confronted the scholar of the Bráhmana period. I would hope to have in some measure the same controlled intelligence, the flashes of insight, and the empathy that these ancient scholars brought to bear on the tradition they were trying to explain, and I would also hope that they would appreciate the fact that this tradition remains an absorbing intellectual puzzle to this day."

"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)"

"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."

"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)"

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

"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 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)"

"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)"

"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."

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

"When you are black you carry your colour with you everywhere you go."

"Nothing gets me. Good or bad. Because I never look back. If you look back, you're going to be in trouble, you will suffer from depression, mental illness – no! Always look forward."

"I don't let the bad things eat me up, oh no. Because I'm not a victim. That's why people say to me, "When I see your smile I feel so happy, when I see your body, your aura, I feel as if I can cope." Because I’m Miss Optimist!"

"I am there to move society on and even though I get obstacles I will overcome them because I am working for good."

"I won. And I'm telling women that they can win."

"". I believe that the God who has seen me through till today will continue to do so until He comes.""

""God raised other people to help me.""

""You find that when people knock you down, they don’t expect you to get up again. So, when you get up, they have mixed feelings,”"

"[On dealing with sexism from male MPs] One of our colleagues from the northern group had complained about Mo [Mowlam]'s swearing, and he was in the tea room when we got there. So she said: "Oh, it's all right, I won't swear today. But you need to understand the real problems I'm having with my period." I've never seen anybody run faster out of the tea rooms."

"Up to now I have tried to make my life a gift for him. What is most important is that my life belongs to the Lord. He has often led me to hear him, unexpectedly, and this time he has come to me and I could not say no to what the Lord was asking me."

"We Cuban artists have played a decisive role not only in the Cuban society of today but also in its greatest definition throughout our history. We Cuban artists have contributed to improving our values, to articulating our character, to stimulating the clearest cultural resistance, to understanding ourselves better, to creating a world where, as the poet José Martí demanded, the most important currency is the full dignity of man and woman. We have offered that contribution through our work and, in many cases, through our efforts to transform the country. Sometimes utopian, sometimes feasible, our art operates in the spirit of modernity, service and independence."

"My whole vision of the world, beyond the perspective of art, literature and specifically poetry, is affected by those three conditions, which cannot in any way be separated...I am not more of a black person than a woman; I am not more of a woman than a Cuban; I am not more of a black person than a Cuban. I am a brief combustion of those factors."

"In 1959, when the revolution triumphed, I was an adolescent. I had only lived 14 years in the other society. Today, with the passage of time, we see how different it was in 1959 to have the power of reasoning. I was a person whose sensibility, intelligence, and knowledge were in formation. Various members of my family-and I myself—were the objects of many racist demonstrations. In addition, I was a witness along with them to many others. Thus, the transformations that were starting to take place were obvious, unobjectionable. Notice that I use the word transformations but not changes. I do so because I think that when I’m speaking about transformations the reader must think of a process that moves forward in a progressive way; whereas if I speak about changes, one thinks of a magic leap toward some paradise. We have made extraordinary advances in this terrain. And yet it has been neither easy, nor by way of a magic wand. The social gains in this domain respond to a long-standing, well-defined awareness that supports the full dignity of all Cubans, whatever their class or ethnic origins or their sexual or religious preferences. Racial prejudices still exist, which these 40 years of efforts have not been able to eradicate completely. This is a reality. I can tell you that, in this sense, racial prejudice is defeated but not dead."

"For many years I have said, following the tradition of Nicolás Guillén, Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier, that whoever wants to understand Cuba cannot ignore its mestizo condition in which the Hispanic and African components cannot be divided because they have created a cosmovisión that is authentically original."