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Quote by Chelsea Abdullah

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The Ashfire King

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Chelsea Abdullah

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“Of course, being perishable, the textiles themselves are not easy to learn about -- just like most of the rest of women's products (such as food and the recipes for preparing it). Therefore, to recover the reality of women's history, we must develop excellent techniques ... using not just the obvious data but learning to ferret out every helpful detail. Practical experiments like reweaving some of the surviving ancient cloths are a case in point. Among the thousands of archaeologists who have written about pottery or architecture, how many have actually tried to to make a pot or build a building? Precious few; but with so much data available for study in these fields, scholars felt flooded with information already, and such radical steps hardly seemed necessary. Our case is different; we must use every discoverable clue.”

“Learning to listen with one's whole body. Learning to hear with the eye and see with the ear and speak with the hearing. Knowing the Spirit in movement and not in stasis. Such a process makes us aware of the way some of our bodily and work-role functions were usurped for the rituals of the church over which women were forbidden to officiate as celebrants. New birth, symbolized by the uterine waters of baptism, was separated from physical birth. The Eucharist took the serving role in which women were cast all the time and adapted it as a seminal experience that only men could perform.”

“Work in the kitchen and in the home has been systemically devalued and outright dismissed for thousands of years. It's impossible to confine alcohol or cocktail history to the bar because so many types of people were not allowed to work or drink there until very recently in modern history. Alcohol was a deeply important part of the private home lives of people all over the world in the nineteenth century, not just the goings-on in the public taverns, hotels, saloons or pubs. Many of women's recipes and innovations are what various alcohol industries and companies are built on.”

“. . . just as alcohol is not the cause of capitalism's problems, it is also not the cure. Wine does not alleviate wage inequality or the lack of affordable childcare. If people mocking wine moms on Instagram were truly concerned about their health and welfare, they might instead try working toward getting women the support they desperately need.”

“For within the very structure of family life, in families that do or did embrace the male religions, are the almost invisibly accepted social customs and life patterns that reflect the one-time strict adherence to the biblical scriptures. Attitudes towards double-standard premarital virginity, double-standard marital fidelity, the sexual autonomy of women, illegitimacy, abortion, contraception, rape, childbirth, the importance of marriage and children to women, the responsibilities and role of women in marriage, women as sex objects, the sexual identification of passivity and aggressiveness, the roles of women and men in work or social situations, women who express their ideas, female leadership, the intellectual activities of women, the economic activities and needs of women and the automatic assumption of the male as breadwinner and protector have all become so deeply ingrained that feelings and values concerning these subjects are often regarded, by both women and men, as natural tendencies or even human instinct.”

“It is also more than likely that women invented that most fundamental of all material technologies, without which civilization could not have evolved: the domestication of plants and animals. In fact, even though this is hardly ever mentioned in the books and classes where we learn history of "ancient man", most scholars today agree that this is probably how it was. They note that in contemporary gatherer-hunter societies, women, not men, are typically in charge of processing food. It would thus have been more likely that it was women who first dropped seeds on the ground of their encampments, and also began to tame young animals by feeding and caring for them as they did for their own young. Anthropologists also point to the fact that in the primarily horticultural economies of "developing" tribes and nations, contrary to Western assumptions, the cultivation of the soil is to this day primarily in the hands of women.”

“(Man) fancied that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the bare earth to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the death and burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, and made smooth the path for the footsteps of returning spring. We may smile at his vain endeavours if we please, but it was only by making a long series of experiments, of which some were almost inevitably doomed to failure, that mane learned from experience the futility of some of his attempted methods and the fruitfulness of others. After all, magical ceremonies are nothing but experiments which have failed and which continue to be repeated merely because the operator is unaware of their failure.”