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Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

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Helen Lewis

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“He would open the door of the drawing-room or the nursery, I thought, and find her among her children perhaps, or with a piece of embroidery on her knee at any rate, the center of some different order in the system of life, and the contrast between this world and his own, which might be the law courts or the House of Commons, would at once refresh and invigorate; and there would follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of opinion that the dried ideas in him would be fertilized anew; and the sight of her creating in a different medium from his own would so quicken his creative power that insensibly his sterile mind would begin to plot again, and he would find the phrase or the scene which was lacking when he put on his hat to visit her.”

InspirationalFeminismEqualityGender Equality
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire when there was no fire, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not goddesses or matriarchs or edifices of forgiveness; we are not fiery fingers of judgement or instruments of flagellation; we are women forced back always upon our woman's power.”

FeminismForgivenessOppression
Book:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
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“Well, women with breast cancer are warriors, also. I have been to war, and still am. So has every woman who had had one or both breasts amputated because of the cancer that is becoming the primary physical scourge of our time. For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it. I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel. I refuse to be reduced in my own eyes or in the eyes of others from warrior to mere victim, simply because it might render me a fraction more acceptable or less dangerous to the still complacent, those who believe if you cover up a problem it ceases to exist. I refuse to hide my body simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable.”

WomenPowerFeminismCancerBreast CancerMastectomy
Book:The Cancer Journals
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“We gather as we always have: Naomi and Ruth, Aphrodite and Helen, Eve and her lioness. We are good girls. Mothers and dancers and counselors. We are wicked too, but we won't tell you this. Instead we arrange plates of bread and fruit, slip into the center of each other. Find our childhoods, our varied pleasures, the aged and blistered scars. We are half drunk, half destroyed. Nothing left but blood and bone. Still we surface— fold into each other like paper cranes. Her, like a long-lost lover. Her, a cool and healing balm.”

PoetryWomenFeminism
Book:What Kind of Woman: Poems
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