“The insistence that manmade women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males.”
Source: The Whole Woman
“Of course I never mention it to them anymore - I am too wise - but I keep watch of it all the same.
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit.”
Source: "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual-Text Critical Edition
“They’re all waiting for permission. From who? Men? The Church? Their mothers? The version of themselves when they were teens?”
Source: Us, Women
“They teach us early how to carry things; babies, blame, silence. And when it’s too heavy, they still expect us to smile.”
Source: Us, Women
“In a society constructed of self-perpetuating elites a grass roots movement exists to be walked on. Elites tumble down but the grass survives to spring again through the thickest pavement.”
Source: The Whole Woman
“All women should have the freedom to choose whether they have children and when. Having a child changes everything in your life.”
Source: So Many Children
“and we laugh and laugh and
all I know is
at this moment I feel like
I can do anything I want
and be anyone I want
and go anywhere on the globe
and still call it home”
Source: The Geography of Girlhood
“Many men are angry at women, but more profoundly, women are the targets for displaced male rage at the failure of patriarchy to make good on its promise of fulfillment, especially endless sexual fulfillment.”
Source: The Will to Change, Men, Masculinity, and Love
“The other faction, far less visible or influential, arose in the marginalized communities, among women - Black, brown, queer, trans, poor, disabled - whom the state has never protected. These abolition feminists have learned from experience that prisons do not end violence, but rather perpetrate and perpetuate it, while destroying individual lives, families, and communities. Like a lot of their compatriots in the carceral feminist movement, many are themselves survivors of sexual harm. But, unlike the other contingent, their politics join the struggle against sexual and gender violence with that against the "white supremacist prison nation," to use the term coined by abolitionist scholar Beth E. Richie.”
Source: The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Harm, Ending State Violence
“The highest cards have men on them.” María can see that. There are men holding clubs. Men holding swords. Men holding coins. Men holding cups. “Where are the women?” she asks, and Ysabel only laughs, as if it were a joke.”
Source: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil