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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
FEMALE EMANCIPATION
"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."
Rebecca West (1913)
"Generalizing about woman is like indicting a Nation-an amusing pastime, but very unlikely to be productive either of truth or utility."
Aldous Huxley
"Throughout the ages, the problem of women has puzzled people of every kind."
Freud
"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size."
-Virginia Woolf
"Yet other accounts tell of Adam’s first consort, Lilith, before he was enchanted by Eve. Lilith was handmaiden to the Matronit, and she left Adam because he tried to dominate her. Escaping to the Red Sea, she cried ’Why should I lie beneath you? I am your equal!’ A Sumerian terracotta relief depicting Lilith (dating from around 2000 BC) shows her naked and winged, standing on the backs of two lions. Although not a goddess in the traditional sense, her incarnate spirit was said to flourish in Solomon's most renowned lover, the Queen of Sheba. Lilith is described in the book of the esoteric Mandaeans of Iraq as the "Daughter of the Underworld.’ Throughout history to the present day she has represented the fundamental ethic of female opportunity."
Bloodline of the Holy Grail
WITCH(Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) put out this leaflet:
"WITCH lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh-suffocating clothes our sick society demands. There is no "joining" WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a WITCH. You make your own rules."
"There is a good principle which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman."
-Pythagoras
"It is clear that by 1900 writers and painters, scientists and critics....had been indoctrinated to regard all women who no longer conformed to the image of the household nun as vicious, bestial creatures.....creatures who were, in fact, the personification of witchery and evil."
Bram Dijkstra
Idols of Perversity
"Western feminists who denounce Islam for its misogyny should perhaps reflect that the Christian tradition has also be extremely negative to women....The Western view of women and relations between the sexes is confused. We preach equality and liberation, but....exploit and degrade women in advertising, pornography and much popular entertainment in a way that Muslims fine alien and offensive."
Karen Armstrong
Muhammad: A biography of the Prophet
"We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
In July 1848, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men in Seneca Falls, New York, signed the Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled after the Declaration of Independence, which had been written and adopted seventy-two years earlier. To many contemporaries, the addition of "and women" to Thomas Jefferson's famous sentence was as revolutionary as the original Declaration. Another seventy-two years would pass before the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution enfranchised women, the majority of the U.S. population; only one of the female signers of the Seneca Falls declaration lived to see it. Even today, full gender equality has not been achieved in American society. However, tremendous progress has been made since 1848, thanks to the organized movement for woman's rights triggered by the historic meeting at Seneca Falls."
Sherry H. Penney & James D. Livingston
A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and Women's Rights
" 'Emptiness" is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the "yin". The pitiful ness of this vacuous nonentity goes to his heart (I speak here as a man) , and one is tempted to say that this constitutes the "mystery" of woman. Such a female is fate itself. A man may say what he likes about it; be for it or against it, or both at once; in the end he falls, absurdly happy, into this pit , or, if he doesn't, he has missed and bungled his only chance of making a man of himself. In the first case one cannot disprove his foolish good luck to" him,' and in the second one cannot make his misfortune seem plausible . "The mothers , the Mothers , how eerily it sounds"
C.G. Jung
Mother Archetype
Collected works 9 , Part 1:
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 1959/68
A Woman's consciousness has a lunar rather than a solar character. Its light is the 'mild' light of the moon, which merges things together rather than separates them. It does not show up objects in all their pitiless discreteness and separateness, like the harsh, glaring light of day, but blends in a deceptive shimmer the near and the far, magically transforming little things into big things, high into low, softening all colour into a bluish haze, and blending the nocturnal landscape into an unsuspected unity. "
C. G. Jung
Mysterium Conjunctionis
Collected Works
"By the very fact that a woman, on the pretext that she has a vocation for religion, philosophy, art or love, emancipates herself in her heart, steps out of her sex, seeks to equal men and enjoy male prerogatives, it comes about that instead of producing a work of philosophy, a poem, a masterpiece of art, by which alone her ambition could be justified, she is dominated by a single thought which, from that moment, never leaves her and which takes, in her, the place of genius and idea: this thought is that in all things, reason, strength, talent, woman is man's equal; and that if whether inside the family or out in society, she does not hold an equal place with man, it is because it is denied her by iniquitous force. As for equality in the matter of the senses, its inevitable consequences are free love, condemnation of marriage, condemnation of womanhood, jealousy and secret hatred of men, and, to crown the system, inextinguishable lechery; such, invariably, is the philosophy of the emancipated woman."
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"The main roots of western culture has two main sources-we
get our religious ideas from the Jews-and our scientific ideas
from the Greeks-they had in common that they were anti-female. "
"She understood the meaning of the Vestal Virgins, the Virgins of the holy fire in the old temples. They were symbolic of herself. ..of woman weary of the embrace of incompetent man, weary, weary of that turning to the unseen Gods , the unseen spirits, the hidden fires and devoting herself to that, and that alone, Renewing thence her pacification and her fulfillment. "
D. H. Lawrence
"For more than six hundred years theology has fought a steadily losing battle with the Catholic folk mind, which, step by step, is persuading the official Church to recognize the true divinity of the virgin."
Alan Watts
Myth and Ritual in Christianity
(This is the obvious tendency behind the promulgation of the IMMACULATE CONCEPTION , and the Assumption of the Virgin as dogma (in Catholic terms is : belief in which is essential to salvation) and one can hardly doubt that in due course will be the dogma that she is the MEDIATRIX OF THE GRACES , and ultimately, some dogma to the effect that she must receive LATRIA of what was apparent long ago at Chartres and today in Mexico, where the Virgin of Guadalupe is in practice honoured far above the Father and Son)
"These dreams of a beautiful presence, a woman deity, gave the sublimest conceptions of beauty to my imagination."
John Clare
"One fact evident in our Western societies has been in all societies throughout history, seems just as true an Soviet Russia and other Communist states; a sort of Greshams Law: bad money drives out good' . Any profession in which women are numerous or in a majority is socially devalued and brings in lesser financial rewards."
Amaury de Riencourt
"Women get more unhappy the more they try to liberate themselves."
-Brigitte Bardot
"We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us "baby."
-Elizabeth Janeway
"The woman's liberation movement looks forward to achieving complete equality with man in the political, social, and economic fields without regard to retrieving, not only women's fast-fading femininity, but 'womanly values' which have almost completely disappeared from our exclusively male-oriented Western society. Their 'liberation' resembles the attempts of an artiste engaged in interior decoration while the building is crumbling."
Amaury de Riencourt
....Woman has increasingly gone into the world as an economic "equal" and therefore competitor of man (once again equality destroys fraternity). But a superficial explanation through economic changes is to be avoided. The economic cause is a cause that has a cause. The ultimate reason lies in the world picture, for once woman has been degraded in that picture-and putting her on a level with the male is more truly a degradation than an elevation-she is more at the mercy of economic circumstances. If we say that woman is identical with man except in that small matter of division of labor in the procreation of the species, which the most rabid egalitarian is driven to accept, there is no reason why she should not do man's work (and by extension, there is no reason why she should not be bombed along with him). So hordes of women have gone into industry and business, where the vast majority of them labor without heart and without incentive. Conscious of their displacement, they see no ideal in the task. And, in fact, they are not treated as equals; they have been made the victims of a transparent deception. Taken from a natural sphere in which they are superior, they are set to wandering between two worlds. Women can neither have the prestige of the former nor, for the fact of stubborn nature, find a real standing in the latter.
So we began to see them, these homunculae of modern industrial society, swarming at evening from factories and insurance offices, going home, like the typist in The Waste Land, to lay out their food in tins. At length, amid the marvelous confusion of values attendant upon the second World War, came the lady marine and the female armaments worker. It is as if the centripetal power of society had ceased. What is needed at center now drifts toward the outer edge. A social seduction of the female sex has occurred on a vast scale. And the men responsible for this seduction have been the white-slavers of business who traffic in the low wages of these creatures, the executives, the specialists in "reduction of labor costs"-the very economists and calculators whose emergence Burke predicted for us."
Richard M. Weaver
Ideas Have Consequences
Christian fathers and women….
"Woman is a temple built over a sewer, the gateway to the devil. Women are the gate to hell."
Tertullian
"Among all the savage beasts, none is so bestial as woman."
St. John Chrysostom
"Any woman who does not give birth to as many children as she is capable of is guilty of murder."
St. Augustine
"Women should stay at home, keep house and bear children, if a woman dies from a childbearing, let her die. That is all she is here for."
Martin Luther
"Wife Be content to be insignificant, What loss would it be to God or man had you never been born."
John Wesley (in a letter to his wife)
******
"Woman was made for only one reason, to serve and obey man."
John Knox
"The Marxist revolutions of the 2Oth century, in adopting the Spartan model, have cunningly made full use of women power, in both a destructive and then constructive sense, but without giving woman per se any greater share of ultimate power or responsibility. Freed from subservience to patriarchal families, they have ,all collectively fallen under the dominion of their successors: male-ruled totalitarian societies organized on a pharonic scale. Usually puritanical in sexual matters once their power is secure, Marxist regimes have, to a marked degree, enhanced the dignity of womanhood, as has the early Christians in the dissolving Roman Empire. But dignity can be granted at the expense of power or influence; by its very nature, revolution is masculine in spirit, in a direct line of descent from all the monotheistic creeds in spasmodic fashion by way of sudden restructuring of the entire social and political order."
Amaury de Riencourt
Beyond History: Woman and Revolution
"To trade a position of Goddess of the hearth for that of industrial slave is foolish--even for a position in the hierarchy is foolish--even for a position in the hierarchy of the mad house cut-throat institution of business is a subtle betrayal to sisterhood simply because the she-wolf tendencies make women a good typist and loyal worker-transferring allegiance from hearth and home to desk and typewriter on behalf of some invisible head of the firm is certainly empty and meaningless even when the head of the firm is female--She has in fact betrayed her sisterhood and 'her own sex at her seeming moment of triumph in the world of males and is in fact totally and unconditionally defeated. "
-G.K. Chesterton
"Women are forcing their way into a system that has dehumanized
men for centuries and calling this a great victory."
Mario Lachoff
(Letter to N.Y.T.)
"Equal rights for the sexes will be achieved when mediocre women
occupy high positions. "
Francoise Giroud
(France's first Secretary of State for women ' s affairs )
"Men who flatter them (women) do not know them; men who abuse them know them still less."
Madame De Stael
"Woe when the "eternally boring in woman"-she is rich in that she is permitted to venture forth. When she begins to unlearn thoroughly and on principle her prudence and art-of grace , of play, of chasing away worries, of lightening burdens and taking things lightly-and her subtle aptitude for agreeable desires: Even now female voices are heard which -Holy Aristophanes-are threatening with medical explicitness what woman wants from man, first and last. Is it not in the worst taste when woman sets about becoming scientific that way? So far enlightenment of this sort was fortunately man's affair, man's lot-we remained" among ourselves" in this; and whatever women write about 'woman, ' we may in the end reserve a healthy suspicion whether woman really wants enlightenment about her-self-whether she can will it-Unless a woman seeks a new adornment for herself that way-I do not think adorning herself is part of the Eternal-Feminine? -she merely wants to inspire fear of herself-perhaps she seeks mastery. But she does not want truth. What is truth to a woman? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth-her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty. Let us men confess it: we honor and love precisely this art and this instinct in woman-we who have a hard time and for our relief like to associate with beings under whose hands, eyes, and tender follies our seriousness, our gravity and profundity almost appears to us like folly. Finally I pose the question: has ever a woman confided profundity to a woman's head, or justice to a woman's heart? And is it not true that on the whole "woman" has so far been despised most by woman herself-and by no means us?
We men wish that woman should not go on compromising herself through enlightenment-just as it was man's thoughtfulness and consideration for women that found expression in the church decree, " mulier taceat ecclesia!"
It was for woman's good when Napoleon gave the all too eloquent Madam de Stael to understand Mulier Taceat in politics! And I think it is a real Friend of women that counsels them today " mulier taceat de muliere!"
*1, women should be silent in Church
*2. Women should be silent when it comes to politics.
*3. women should be silent about woman.
Nietzsche
"To go wrong on the fundamental problem of "man & woman," to deny the most abysmal antagonism between them and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, to dream perhaps of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and obligations-that is a real sign of shallowness, and a thinker who has proved shallow in this dangerous place-shallow in his instinct-may be considered altogether suspicious, even more-betrayed and exposed, probably he will be too "short" For all fundamental problems of life , of the life yet to come, too, and incapable of attaining any depth. A man, on the other hand, who has depth, in his spirit as well as in his desires, including that depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and hardness and easily mistaken for them, must always think about woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of woman as a possession, as property that can be locked, as something predestined for service and achieving her perfection in that. Here he must base himself on the tremendous reason of Asia, on Asia's superiority in the instincts, as the Greeks did formerly, who were Asia's best heirs and students as is well known, from Homer's time to the age of Pericles, as their culture increased along with the range of their powers, they also became gradually more severe, in brief, more Oriental, against woman. How necessary, how logical, how humanely desirable even, this was-is worth pondering."
Nietzsche
"Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman now aspires to the economic and legal self-reliance of a clerk. "Woman as clerk" is inscribed on the gate to the modern society that is taking shape now. As she thus takes possession of new rights, aspires to become "master" and write the" progress" of woman upon her standards and banners, the opposite development is taking place with terrible clarity: Woman is retrogressing Since the French Revolution, woman's influence in Europe has decreased proportionately as her rights and claims have increased; and the "emancipation of woman, " insofar as that is demanded and promoted by women themselves (and not merely by shallow males) is thus seen to be an odd symptom of the weakening and dulling of the most feminine instincts. There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity of which as woman who had turned out well-and such women are always prudent-would have to be thoroughly ashamed." The role of each sex is traced, its task is assigned, and Providence gives to each the instruments and resources which befit it. Why should society upset this admirable order.. .by...giving women the same attributes as men? Women complain of being brutally enslaved, of being badly educated, badly advised, badly directed, badly loved, badly defended. All this is unfortunately true. But what confidence would women inspire if they were to demand by way of compensation, not household peace nor the freedom of maternal affections, but the right to parade in the forum with sword and helmet, the right to condemn people to death?"
George Sand
" known to the world as George Sand, was the most astonishing female personality of the nineteenth century and one of the most gifted women of all time. Dubbed the "Queen" of her literary generation, she played a leading part in the great Romantic revolution which swept ever France and Europe in the late1820s and early 1830s.Endowed with phenomenal energy and determination, George Sand wrote not less than sixty novels, twenty-five plays (all of them which were staged) , enough essays and articles to fill a dozen volumes-a formidable literary output that makes her the most pro-life authoress the world has ever seen."
Curtis Cate
George Sand A biography
Houghton Mifflin Co Pub
"A woman is always a woman, and don't think this is something I complain of. On the contrary, it's so convenient! It's so comforting. ..to have no common sense, to go around speaking one's mind at will without having to go to prison for it, not to have to pit men of one party against those of another, and not to have one' s conscience troubled by those heavy reproaches which must weigh on the minds of prominent leaders in the midst of their humdrum errors. "
George Sand
"I have often heard women of talent say that household work, and needlework particularly, were mind-numbing and insipid and part of the slavery to which our sex has been condemned. I have no taste for the theory of slavery, but I deny that these chores are its consequence. They have always seemed to me to have a natural, invincible attraction for us, for I have felt it in all periods of my life and they have sometimes calmed great agitations of the mind. Their influence is mind-numbing only for those who spurn them and don't know how to look for what can be found in everything-skillful work, well done. "
George Sand
"Learning to cherish and emphasize Feminine values is the primary condition of holding our own against the masculine principle."
Emma Jung
"On woman falls the duty, in a world of brute passions, of preserving the virtues of charity and the Christian spirit. When women cease to play that role, life will be the loser."
George Sand
" All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking."
Helene Deutsch
The Psychology of Women
"Women almost inevitably fall victim to their own Animus thrusting for power, however much that end may be muffled in a velvet glove, as the economic terms are now laid down for "achievement" . Their gain individually, and the gain of society collectively, will come when a living relationship with their animus has been accomplished by a substantial number of women. It is 'their' influence which shall constitute a genuine "intervention" in the existing natural order for only in this way can the feminine principal of Eros be made to balance our logos-based civilization."
Maria Mahoney
The Meaning in Dreams andDreaming
Citadel
"What wonder then that women want emancipation--one of the many ugly phenomena of our age for which men are responsible."
Soren Kierkegaard
"For this reason I hate all talk about the emancipation of
women. God forbid that ever it may come to pass. "
Kierkegaard
"There is no doubt that women have been deformed by the degenerate housewifery that is now called their "role"-but not, I think for any man' s benefit. If women are deformed by their role, then, insofar as the roles are divided, men are deformed by theirs. Degenerate house-wifery is indivisible from degenerate husbandry. There is no escape."
Wendell Berry
The Unsettling of America
" "until woman comes into her kingdom physically she will never really arrive at all. She has made of herself an hour- glass, whose sands of life pass quickly by. She has walked when she should have run, sat when she should have walked, reclined when she should have sat. . .She is a creature born to the freedom of Diana, but she is swathed by her skirts, splintered by her stays, bandaged by her tight waist, and pinioned by her sleeves until. . .a trussed turnkey or a spitted goose are her most appropriate emblems."
Frances Willard (addressing the National Council of Women of the United States -1891)
"The freer that women become, the freer will man be. Because
when you enslave someone-you are enslaved."
Louise Nevelson
"Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man
and the masculine in the woman."
Corita Kent Los Angeles Times July 11,1974
But before we can appreciate the true Feminine, we have to clear the mirror-image of the tyrant, so the radical feminist is the mirror- image of the tyrannical patriarch; they are images of one another and they also feed off one another. But the true masculine and feminine have very little do with either. If we are talking about the new age as a return of the feminine principles, we don't mean that finally women get to be marines and terrorist assassins, we mean that the feminine is finally recognized to be powerful, that a polity that does not embody that power is literally cut off from life."
William Irwin Thompson
"Women’s freedom now has the positive task of recapturing the central themes of life: the elaboration of erotic art and ritual, the selective improvement of mating, the application of maturer psychological insights to child care and family relations; in short, the widening and deepening of the province of love."
Lewis Mumford
The Condition of Man
"Women, then, are only children of large growth….A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them….they have in truth but two passions, vanity and love."
(A letter from Lord Chesterfield to his son-1748)
"Deploring the state of women has become a minor industry, and it usually takes one of three positions. One is to decry the failure of feminism; another is to decry feminism’s victories; the third, and most frequent, is to show that women today stand in frustration between feminist and traditional ideas."
Arno Karlen
Sexuality & Homosexuality
"Never again allow any woman to hold supreme power in the State, and never again allow eunuchs to meddle in government matters."
(Last words of the Chinese Empress Tzu-his)
"Let’s get rid of infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyaches, anorexia’s, bulimics, depressives, rape victims and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses."
Camille Paglia
Vamps & Tramps
" Respect for the right of the other’s personality will increase and a mutual sensitivity will be learned; men and women will strive to express their love not only in kisses and embraces but in joint creativity and activity. The task of proletarian ideology is not to drive Eros from social life but to rearm him according to the new social formation, and to educate relationships in the spirit of the great new psychological force of comradely solidarity."
Alexandra Kollontai (leading Female Bolshevik)
Make Way for Winged Eros young Guard ,Moscow 1923
"Nature has given women so much power that the law has wisely given them little."
Samuel Johnson
"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition."
Tim Leary
"Woman wants to become self-reliant-and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about "woman as such": this is one of the worst developments of the general uglification of Europe. For what must these clumsy attempts at scientific self-exposure bring to light! Woman has much reason for shame; so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmarmishness, petty presumption, petty licentiousness and immodesty lies concealed in woman-one only needs to study her behaviour with children!-and so far all this was at bottom best repressed and kept under control by fear of man. Woe when "the eternally boring in woman"-she is rich in that!-is permitted forth! When she begins to unlearn thoroughly and on principle her prudence and art of grace, of play, of chasing away worries, of lightening burdens and taking things lightly-and her subtle aptitude for agreeable desires!
Even now female voices are heard which-Holy Aristophanes!-are frightening; they threaten with medical explicitness what woman wants from man, first and last. Is it not in the worst taste when woman sets about becoming scientific that way?
So far enlightenment of this sort was fortunately man’s affair, man’s lot-we remained "among ourselves" in this; and whatever women write about "woman," we may in the end reserve a healthy suspicion whether woman really wants enlightenment about herself-whether she can will it…."
Nietzche
Beyond Good and Evil
"No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!" But a woman! What more can you ask to be?"
Maria Mitchell (1818-1889)
"If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again."
SoJourner Truth (1797-1883)
"Our whole civilization is a masculine civilization. The State, the laws, morality, religion and the sciences are the creation of men…..if we are clear about the extent to which all our being, thinking, and doing conform to these masculine standards, we can see how difficult it is for the individual man and alas for the individual woman really to shake off this mode of thought."
Karen Horney
"If we take a survey of ages and of countries, we shall find the woman, almost-without exception-at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed. Man, who has never neglected an opportunity of exerting his power, in paying homage to their beauty, has always availed himself of their weakness. He has been at once their tyrant and their slave."
Thomas Paine 1775
"Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question: you will deprive her of that right at least, tell me, what gives you sovereign empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your Talents?"
Olympe de Gouges 1791
"We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the superiority of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things! Each has what the other has not each completes the other they are in nothing alike and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give . "
John Ruskin
"The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of "woman’s Rights" with all its attendant horrors on which her poor, feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety….It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself."
Queen Victoria (letter 1870)
"A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after."
Gloria Steinem
"When they try to assert themselves as the equals of men they become unendurable."
George Sanders
"No man is as antifeminist as a really feminine woman."
Frank O’Connor
"When I see the elaborate study and ingenuity displayed by women in the pursuit of trifles, I feel no doubt of their capacity for the most Herculean undertakings."
Julia Ward Howe
"American women are fools because they try to be everything to everybody."
Viva
"Even if so inclined, an artist has no business to marry."
Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908)
"The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)
"I’m Calamity Jane and I sleep when and where I damn please."
Calamity Jane
"There is no slave, after all, like a wife."
Mary Boykin Chestnut (1823-1886)
"My theory is that men are no more liberated than women."
Indira Gandhi
" I hate the victim-centered nature of contemporary feminism! It’s loathsome to me. I believe woman is the dominant sex, okay? And that everyone knows throughout world culture than woman dominates man. Everyone but a feminist knows that ! And I think that its absolutely perverse and neurotic to insist that history is nothing but male oppressors and female victims. This is ridiculous, all right?"
Camille Paglia
Vamps & Tramps
"However dull a woman may be , she will understand all there is in love. However intelligent a man may be , he will never know but half of it."
Madame Fenelon
"Deprived of the salutary prejudices of devotion, exposed to the intellectual ferments which have seeped into the nooks and crannies of their education, they are no less rigorously chastised by public opinion. Public opinion is made up, on the one hand, of intolerance or cold, ugly, cowardly women, and on the other, of the mocking and insulting criticism of men who don't want devout wives, who don't yet want well-educated wives, and who still want faithful wives. But it is not easy for a woman to be philosophically perplexed and faithful at the same time. . .The women of our time are thus neither well-educated, nor devout, nor chaste, and the moral revolution which should have transformed them to the liking of the male generation has been wrongly undertaken. No attempt was made to raise woman in her own eyes, and to place her on a footing of equality which would have made her capable of virile virtues. Chastity would have been glorious on the part of free women. For women slaves it is a tyranny which wounds them and whose yoke they boldly shake off. I can't blame them for it."
' "Too proud of their recently acquired education, certain women have shown signs of personal ambition. . .The smug daydreams of modern philosophies have encouraged them, and these women have given sad proof of the powerlessness of their reasoning. It is much to be feared that vain attempts of this kind and these ill- founded claims will do much harm to what is today called the cause of women. . . If women were rightly guided and possessed of sane ideas, they would be better placed to complain of the rigidity of certain laws and the barbarism of certain prejudices. But let them enlarge their souls and elevate their minds before hoping to bend the iron shackles of custom. In vain do they gather into clubs, in vain do they engage in polemics, if the expression of their discontent proves that they are incapable of properly managing their affairs and of governing their affections."George Sand
"I am very far from thinking that woman is inferior to man. She is his equal in the sight of God, and nothing in the designs of Providence destines her to slavery. But she is not like man, and her nature and temperament assign to her another role, no less fine, no less noble, and of which I do not think she can complain unless mentally depraved."
George Sand
"Tesla considered one of the most profound portents of the future to be the inevitable emergence of women. He was convinced that a new sex order would arise with the female as the superior, that female capacity would be expanded, and that women would not only be well educated, but even better educated than men, since their faculties had so long lain dormant and therefore had become intense and powerful.
Tesla felt that such a development was not without peril, however. He feared that with the acquisition of new fields of endeavor, women would finally dissipate their feminine sensibilities and choke out completely the maternal instinct so that marriage and motherhood might become abhorrent to them and human civilization would draw closer to that of the bee."
John B. Kennedy,"When woman is Boss" in Colliers,Jan 30,1926 p-l7 comment by Nikola Tesla
"It is women who will solve the human predicament."
Henrik Ibsen Speech to the Norwegian Feminist Union 1898
"Help one another, is part of the religion of our sisterhood, Fan."
Louisa May Alcott
"The dogma of woman's complete historical subjection to men must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created by the human mind, "
Mary Ritter Beard
Woman as a Force in History
THE GODDESS
Infant
Sister
Mistress
Mother
Lady of Mercy
Queen of Peace
Gate of Heaven
Throne of Wisdom
Mirror of Justice
Refuge of Sinners
Comforter of the Afflicted
Holding both breasts in her hands
holding one breast and pointing to her loins
arms open to embrace
holding a serpent
holding a flower
riding a bull
standing pregnant
squatting in childbirth
holding an infant to her breast
with rampant animals by her side crowned with the walls of a city
Mother of sorrows
(Mother of Sorrows a poem by Tobey Tate)
"It is only the woman whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the
Dorthy Dix 1926
"For women, the symbol of the Goddess is profoundly liberating, restoring a sense of authority and power to the female body and all the life processes: birth, growth, lovemaking, aging and death, In Western Culture the association of women and nature has been used to devalue both. The imagery of the immanent Goddess imparts both to women and to nature the highest value. At the same time culture is no longer seen as something removed from and opposed to nature. Culture is an outgrowth of nature-a product of human beings who are part of the natural world. The Goddess of nature is also the muse, the inspiration of culture, and women are full participants in creating and furthering culture, art, literature, and science. The Goddess as mother embodies creativity as much as biological motherhood. She represents women's authority over our own life processes, our right to choose consciously how and when and what we will create. "
StarHawk
Dreaming the Dark
"Another spurious conflict created by Absolutism is that between religion and science. When God is felt to be separate from the physical world, religion can be split off from science, and limited to the realm of things having to do with God. But the Goddess is manifest in the physical world, and the more we understand its workings, the better we know her . Science and religion are both quests for truth-they differ only in their methodology and the set of symbols they use to describe their findings. The field of inquiry is the same."
Starhawk
Spiral Dance
"A Matrifocal culture based on nature, celebrates diversity, because diversity assures survival and continuing evolution. Nature creates thousands of species, not just one; and each is different, fitted for a different ecological niche. When a species becomes overspecialized, too narrow in its range of adaptations, it is more likely to become extinct. When political and spiritual movements become too narrow they are also likely to die out.
Starhawk
"If Goddess religion is not to become mindless idiocy, we must win clear of the tendency of magic to become superstition.
Starhawk
"The paradox, of course , is that we are the Goddess. We are each a part of the inter-penetrating, inter-connecting reality that is ALL. And, while we can't stop the earth from turning, we can choose to experience each revolution so deeply and completely that even the dark becomes luminous. To 'Will' does not mean that the world will conform to our desires-it means that we will make our own choices and act so as to bring them about , even knowing we may fail. Feminist spirituality values the courage to take risks, to make mistakes, to be our own authorities."
Starhawk
In the future of contemporary Goddess religion, a photograph of the earth as seen from space might be the mandala of The Goddess.
Starhawk
"A feminine aspect of divinity is an ingredient of most religion, and in Catholic Christianity this is supplied by the Virgin Mary. Protestants, to their loss, have rejected the deification of the Virgin Mother, but they do not thereby annul the psychological and spiritual need for HER. An exclusively male god does not warm the emotions of many people, and the way of divine love, which in Hinduism is called "bhakti", is more often directed to an all-loving female figure."
Joscelyn Codwin
Robert Fludd
"But there are valuable concepts in Witchcraft, on which other feminist traditions can draw. The most important is the understanding of the Goddess, the divine, as immanent in the world, manifest in nature, in human beings , in human community . The All-That-Is-One is not now and never has been separate from this existing physical world. She is here, now, is each of us in the eternal changing present; is no one but you, is nowhere but where you are-and yet is everyone. To worship HER is to assert, even in the face of suffering and often against all reason that life is good, a great gift, a constant opportunity for ecstasy. If we see it become a burden of misery for others, we have the responsibility to change it."
Starhawk
The Spiral Dance
Harper & Rowe
"Feminine wisdom is a paradoxical wisdom which never juxtaposes opposites into "either-or" pairs but gathers them into "both-and" relationship."
Ann Usinov
"The major difference between patriarchal religions and the evolving Goddess religions--.,..is the worldview that includes regarding divinity as immanent in the world, not outside the world."
Starhawk
The Great Goddess
"Disguise our bondage as we will,
Tis woman, woman , rules us still. "Thomas More
"Man is a demi-god: he always has either one foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld, or on the earth. Man envies her and tells him- self lies about his own completeness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she IS not even a demi-goddess-she is a mere nymph and his love for her turns to scorn and hate.
Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man' s dependence on her for life. She is passionately interested in grown men, however, being passionately interested in grown men, however, because the love-hate that Osiris and Set feel for each other on her account is a tribute to her divinity. She tries to satisfy both, but can only do so by alternate murder, and man tries to regard this as evidence of her fundamental falsity, not of his own irreconcilable demands on her. "
Robert Graves
The White Goddess
"Generalizing about woman is like indicting a Nation-an amusing pastime, but very unlikely to be productive either of truth or utility."
Aldous Huxley
"Biologically speaking, she is the carrier of immortality, of the generations of man. This gives her a close affinity to and appreciations of the awesome and creative mysteries of the universe; Moonrise, tidal flow, the growth, death and re-birth of things . "
Marie N. Robinson MD
The Power of Sexual Surrender
"At the inmost heart of Chivalry was the Mystery of the Lady, whose image the King bore on his banner, for, contrary to accepted opinion, there is much to show that Lady-worship goes back farther than the Middle Ages, although the Middle Ages gave the cult a new form and a new impetus.
The reverenced for the Lady goes back in fact to the cult of the great Mother Goddess, which has always been the basic love-cult of the nations and the ages. Even the patriarchal society of Hebrew Palestine could not wholly expunge it, and in the Kabbala, as well as in the Wisdom literature of the Bible the Divine Feminine peeps as through a veil in the likeness of Isis, Mother of Wisdom, in the mystery of Shekinah, "She who inspires the Prophets." Wherever men meditate on high and holy things, says the Zohar, the Shekinah is present with them. Neither Britons, Celts, Goths nor Saxons felt any need to dethrone the Divine Feminine , for they simply identified their own great Goddess with the Virgin Mary, or the Sophia of the Greeks, or the Shekinah of the Hebrews."Corrinne Heline
Mysteries of the Holy Grail
The feminist movement is a magico-spiritual movement as well as a political movement. It is spiritual because it is addressed to the liberation of the human spirit, to healing our fragmentation, to becoming whole. It is magical because it changes consciousness, it expands our awareness and gives us new vision. It is also magic by another definition "the art of causing change in accordance with will. "
Starhawk
The Spiral Dance
"We tell you this We are doing the impossible. We are teaching ourselves to be human. "
Susan Courtot
FEMNINE. . .THE DARK SIDE
"The goddess is bountiful but also merciless. The moon, with its mysterious power over the tidal waters and the regular flow of menstrual blood, is the centre of a universal set of symbols ; she presides over night rituals connected with " such animals as the cat, the snake and the wolf. In Greek legend, as in Celtic, it is identified with the triple goddess who presides over birth, life and death: the triad of maiden, bride and crone, Morrigan, Macha and Badh in Ireland, Persephone , Demeter and Hecate in Greece. The ancient Gauls, whose' theology disappeared with their oral tradition, have left nameless double-and triple-headed fixtures which irresistibly suggest recurrent Celtic symbols: the ambiguous facing-both-ways state, and the cyclic nature of the triad."
Robert. Graves
"Yes, my dear fellow, women are the pivot around which the world turns. My affairs too are in a bad way, very bad, and all because of women."
Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
"I have a horror of fallen women. You are afraid of spiders and I am afraid of these horrible creatures."
Leo Tolstoy
Does not Wisdom call, and understanding raise HER voice?
Sincere are all the words of my mouth, not one of them is wily or crooked;
All of them are plain to the man of intelligence, and right to those who attain knowledge.
By me Kings reign, and lawgivers establish justice;
By me princes govern, and nobles; and all the rulers of the earth.
Those who love me I also love, and those who seek me find me.
With me are riches and honor, enduring wealth and prosperity. "Proverbs Chapter 8
Wisdom introducing herself.. .
(So now, O children, listen to me; instruction and wisdom do not reject! Happy the man who obeys me, and happy those who keep my ways, Happy the man watching daily at my gates , waiting at my door posts; For he who finds me finds life, and WINS FAVOR FROM THE LORD : ; BUT HE WHO MISSES ME HARMS HIMSELF ; ALL WHO HATE ME LOVE DEATH . )
Proverbs Chapter 9-12
"Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practice a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes; they are at grips with the essentials of a problem before men have finished debating its mere externals. They are the supreme realists of the race.
Apparently illogical they are the possessors of a rare and subtle super-logic. Apparently whimsical, they hand to the truth with a tenacity which carries them through every phase of incessant, jelly-like shifting of form. Apparently unobservant and easily deceived, they see with bright and horrible eyes. . .In men, too, the same merciless perspicacity sometimes shows itself-men recognized to be more aloof and uninfalible than the general-men of special talent for the logical-sardonic men, cynics. Men, too, sometimes have brains. But that is a rare , rare man , I venture , who is as steadily intelligent, as constantly sound in judgment, as little put off by appearances, as the average woman of forty-eight. "H. L. Mencken
The Feminine Mind
Opinions & Attitudes
Ronald Press 1942
"Helmer-Before all else you are a wife and mother. Nora-I don' t believe that any longer. I think that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are."
Henrik Ibsen:
A Doll's House 1879
"Women have often more of what is called good sense than men.
They have fewer pretensions ; are less implicated in theories, and judges of objects more from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and therefore , more truly and naturally. They cannot reason wrong; for they do not reason at all."William Hazlitt
The Ignorance of the Learned
"Be not ashamed, woman-your privilege enclosed the rest, and is the exit of the rest; You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul . "
Walt Whitman
I Sing the Body Electric 1855
"He knew she was there by the joy and terror that gripped his heart. He went down, trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking. "
Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karerina
"If Western woman now attempts to become pseudo-male, it is largely because Western man invented this concept long ago, instead of granting female specificity the full recognition and respect it deserves--result of an over-valuation of cerebral creation at the expense of the physiological maternal creativity that gave birth to it.
As a result, female 'liberationists' are only too prone to assert that ' after a long period of celebrating the differences between men and women , we are heading into an androgynous world, ' But , if this is the case , it is only Western civilization that is heading in that deadly direction. Decrease in differentiation is devitalizing and would threaten Western society with biological extinction. The burden of the Promethean drive will have spiritually exhausted its civilization by depriving it of any further reason to live. The sons of Prometheus will simply have forgotten that just as man lives and woman is lived, just as man attempts to control destiny and the future, woman is destiny and the future. Men make history; Pandora' s daughters are history. "Amaury de Riencourt
Sex and Power in History
David McKay Company
New York
"A beautiful and chaste woman is the perfect workmanship of God, the true glory of angels, the miracle of earth, and the sole wonder of the world. "
Hermes
We are here within sight Of the recognition that the dogma of Assumption is the revelation of what the Virgin was from the beginning-the one who reigns eternally with Christ, Sophia as the consort of Logos, divine Matrix of the Universe.
27. "When he established the heavens I was there, when he measured out the vault over the face of the deep.
28. When he made firm the skies above , when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth ; (compare Job)
29. When he set forth the sea its limit,- so that the waters should not transgress his command;
30. Then I was beside him as his craftsman and I WAS HIS DELIGHT DAY BY DAY, (divine consort) PLAYING BEFORE HIM ALL THE
WHILE ,
31. PLAYING ON THE SURFACE OF THIS EARTH (and I found delight in the sons of men) "Proverbs Chapter 8
The theme of woman as the root of all evil and human misery was introduced by the Greeks. According to the Myth, Zeus, angered by Prometheus, decided to punish mortal man. He ordered Hephaestus to Mold a woman out of earth, a woman of such entrancing charm and beauty as would bring misery upon the race. Thus was Pandora, the ' all-gifted' first woman, created: Aphrodite gave her beauty, Hermes speech, boldness . and cunning. Prometheus ' s brother, Epimetkeus , made her his wife , ignoring Prometheus' s specific instructions not to open a mysterious box which he had left to Epimetheus's safekeeping, Pandora, consumed with curiosity, lifted the lid, releasing all the ten thousand ills that have been plaguing mankind ever since. Only "Hope" remained at the bottom of the box. As Hesiod put it in his Works and Days:
'For of the old tribes of men lived on the earth apart from the evil and grievous toil and sore diseases that bring the fates of death to men. For in the day of evil men speedily wax old. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and made a scattering thereof and devised baleful sorrows for men . "Hesiod
"On women : The dear despots of the fireside have a weakness for lawless characters." "
G. K. Chesterton
"Now I distinctly feel both of Arachne' s knees gliding onto my body and the gurgling of my blood as it rises to her mouth. Soon my heart will be sucked empty; then it will remain smothered in its prison of white threads. And I? I will flee with her through the kingdom of the Spiders to the dazzling network of the stars using the silk skein which Arachne will throw to me. I shall flee with her and leave to you poor fools-a pale corpse, with a shock of fair hair shivering in the morning wind. . . "
(A Classic Art Nouveau negative feminine description)
"Agriculture and regulated intercourse of the sexes belong to the same philosophy of life . This fact gives rise to a contrast in female nature , for Aphrodite hates monogamy. She did not endow Helen with all possible attractions to have her wither in the arms of a single man. Any permanent liaison is an infringement on aphrodisiacal precepts and must be atoned."
Helen Diner
Mothers and Amazons
As to the Moon , it hides a mystery.
It waxes and wanes. Its light surrounds the jungle with an uncanny glow. It is changeable, mysterious, like woman."Dane Rudhyar
"The woman Folly is fickle , she is inane, and knows nothing. She sits at the door of her house upon a seat on the city heights calling to her passers-by as they go on their straight was 'Let whoever is simple turn in here, or who lacks understanding; for to him I say Stolen water is sweet, and bread gotten secretly is pleasing. Little he knows that the shades are there , that in the depths of the nether world are her guests. "
Chapter 9 : 13
("You will start out standing, proud to steal
her anything she sees. . .
but you will wind up peeking through a keyhole down upon your knees . " )B . Dylan
Love Minus Zero
"And Saul said to his servants; Seek me a woman that hath a divining spirit and I will go to her, and inquire by her."
lst Kings Old Testament
Chapter 28 verse 7
"I came into the inner cavern, after groping painfully on all fours up the stairs, and saw the Sibyl, more like an ape than a woman , sitting on a chair in a cage that hung from the ceiling, her robes red and her unblinking eyes shining red in the single red shaft of light that struck down from somewhere above . Her toothless mouth was grinning. There was a smell of death about me. But I managed to force out the salutation that I had prepared. But she gave me no answer. It was only some time afterwards that I learned that this was the mummified body of Deiphobe the previous Sibyl, who had died recently at the age of one hundred and ten; her eye-lids were propped up with glass marbles silvered behind to make them shine, The reigning Sibyl always lived with her predecessor
At last the living Sibyl, whose name was Amalthea, quite a young woman too , revealed herself. The red shaft of light failed, so that Deiphobe disappeared--somebody, probably the novice, had covered up the tiny red glass window--and a new shaft, white, struck down and lit up Amalthea seated on an ivory throne in the shadows behind. She had a beautiful mad looking face with a high forehead and sat motionless as Deiphobe. Gradually her face changed, the prophetic power overcame her, she struggled. and gasped, there was a RUSHING NOISE through all the galleries, doors banged, wings swished my face, the light vanished, and she uttered a Greek verse in the voice of the God. "Robert Graves
" I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets and her hands as bands : who so pleaseth God shall escape her; but the sinner shall be taken by her!"
Ecclessiastes 7:26 "
"Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
The nightmare Life-in-Death was she, who thicks man' s blood. with cold. "Coleridge
A Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Part III, Lines 190-4
"Come to think of it, old man, a woman's a queer fish- something of all sorts in her-so much that one never comes to the end. "
Paul Claudel
*******
"For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation, from whatever perdition, lies in love; in fact, it is her only way to it."
Dostoevsky
THE WHITE LADY
'There, in the middle of the broad, high road-there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heavens- stood the figure of a solitary woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her."
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
"It is woman’s destiny to rule men. Not to serve them, flatter them, or hang on them for guidance. Nor to insult hem, demean them, or stereotype them as oppressors. Gay men and artists create a realm marked off from woman’s power, but most men require women to center them and connect them to the underworld of emotional truth. When women withdraw from men, as has been done on a massive scale in lesbian feminism, we have a cultural disaster. In such a situation, men are divided from themselves, and women simply fail to mature. Lesbian feminists, are for all their ideas of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fickleness, parasitic exploitive ness, and suspicious spite, that have to be seen to be believed."
Camille Paglia
Vamps & Tramps
"A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her won way, and works within whatever system she is in."
Anita Brookner
"The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend…for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings-woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general…only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star."
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
"It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never by anyone to go home to."
Anita Brookner
"The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, if fact."
Julie Burchill
"A good part-and definitely the most fun part-of being a feminist is about frightening men."
Julie Burchill
"Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating."
Andrea Dworkin
"The fundamental impulse of the movement is neither masturbatory nor concretely lesbian-although it of course offers warm houseroom to both these possibilities; it is an impulse to maidenhood-to that condition in which a woman might pretend to a false fear or loathing of the penis in order to escape from any responsibility for the pleasure and well-being of the man who possesses it."
Midge Decter
The New Chastity and Other Arguments against Women’s Liberation
"The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century age, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yen and yang."
Barbara Ehrenrich
The worst years of our lives, Why we lost the ERA
Atlantic Monthly 1986
"Surely women’s liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, and our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained."
George Gilder
Sexual Suicide
"There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood ‘what women want’ and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their won coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue…Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinist."
Germaine Greer
Eternal War: Strindberg’s View of Sex
"Thou art blind to the danger of marrying a woman who feels and acts out the principle of equal rights."
Angelina Grimke (1805-1879)
"Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true will-nilly, so let’s get on with it."
Germaine Greer
The Female Eunuch
"Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being…Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free."
Emma Goldman (1869-1940)
Anarchy and other Essays The Tragedies of Women’s Emancipation 1910
"Women hate everything which strips off the tinsel of sentiment, and they are right, or it would rob them of their weapons."
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
"I have always found women difficult. I don’t really understand them. To begin with, few women tell the truth."
Barbara Cartland
The Isthums Years
"All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking."
Helene Deutsch (1884-1982)
The Psychology of Women
"Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man-it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country."
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
On Women 1722 Reprinted in Selected Writings ed by Lester G Crocker 1966
"Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant."
Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948_
Save Me the Waltz
"Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow, a herb most bruised is woman."
Euripides (480-406 B.C.)
"Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my won sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case, I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention. I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate."
Germaine Greer (1939)
Soul, the Stereotype
"Supposing truth is a woman-what then?"
Nietzsche
"I’m furious about the Women’s Liberationists. They keep getting up on soap boxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket."
Anita Loos
"When the women of this country come to be sailors and soldiers, when they come to navigate the ocean and to follow the plow; when they love to be jostled and crowded by all sorts of men in the thoroughfares of trade and business; when they love the treachery and the turmoil of politics; when they love the dissoluteness of the camp, and the smoke of the thunder, and the blood of battle better than they love the affections and enjoyments of home and family, then it will be time to talk about making the women voters."
Senator George H. Williams Oregon 1866
"God the Father, the inscrutable, the unknowable, we bear him in our flesh, we find Him in woman. She is the door by which we come in and go forth. In her we return to the Father, just like whose who, blind and unconscious, were present at the transfiguration.’
D.H. Lawrence
"No progressive thinker of today will challenge the claim that the social advancement and general well-being of Communities are greatest where women are the least debarred, by artificial barriers and now prejudice, from taking their full position as citizens."
Aga Khan III
Message to the World of Islam
"A broader, deeper criticism is necessary, the problem is not the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else."
Wendell Berry
What are People For?
"Be understanding, my dear Byron. A woman spends her life in unremitting anxiety. When she is young she is frightened, when she grows older she is apprehensive, and when she is old she is appalled. Nothing can change it. Wrinkles are wrinkles."
(Lady Oxford speaking to Lord Byron)
"Feminism is not the Story of my Life."
Elizabeth Fox Genovese
"Never forget that your girl or your wife is every damn bit as much a person as you are…She thinks the world revolves around her just as you do around yourself, just as anyone does. She has a vote in life as well as in politics, she eats and sleeps and suffers and loves and thinks (regardless of how badly you or I may think she thinks) like you and me. She was born, she lives, she’s got to die; and for you to attempt to dominate her, to pinch her personality, is some kind of sin."
John O’Hara to his younger brother, Thomas
"On woman falls the duty, in a world of brute passions, of preserving the virtues of charity and the Christian spirit. When women cease to play that role, life will be the loser."
George Sand
"Eve! Magdalene! Or Mary, you?"
Hart Crane
"He said to himself: How different she is from me, how strangely different! She is afraid of me, and my male difference. She is getting herself naked and clear of her fear. How sensitive and softly alive she is, with a life so different from mine! How beautiful, with a soft, strange courage of life, so different from my courage of death! What a beautiful thing, like the heart of a rose, like the core of a flame. She is making herself completely penetrable. Ah, how terrible to fail her, or to trespass on her!"
D.H. Lawrence
"It was She-he recognized her immediately, even though he had never seen her in his life. He was amazed that finding her had been so easy, for it had always seemed impossible. Although strangers, they recognized each other and rushed to seize each other by the arms.
There was a light of a kind, and he could see, though not well enough to make out features and expression, yet he was piercingly aware that it was ‘she’—the one, the longed for, the inexpressibly beloved woman, the lowliest of all beautiful women, of all beautiful women, of all the women in creation! They embraced and spoke, yet did not speak."
August 1914
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Woman stands for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet’s, but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic’s."
G.K. Chesterton
"I felt purified and had a strange sense and apprehension of a secret innocence and spiritually in nature-a prescience of some bourn, incalculable distant perhaps, to which we are all moving."
"Of a time when the heavenly rain shall have washed us clean from all spot and blemish."
W.H. Hudson
"Why, often enough, are the women better-looking, better-dressed and more likely to behave in a feminine manner in places that are old-fashioned, and even politically confused, such as Italy was and , according to Signor Severignini, still is?
Burke rather foresaw some of this two hundred years ago. He remarked that, in an age of women's rights-which he foresaw in the United States, the great country of formal rights-the women would become ugly and you would be sued in the courts if you presented them with a bunch of flowers (something like this has happened in New York). Of progressive left-wing movements in general, a character in one of Arthur Koestler's novels remarks, in the context of Communist internationalists: "There must be something wrong with a movement whose women are so ugly."
Professor Norman Stone, Evening Standard, 15.8.91
"Those who are bold enough to advance before the age they live in, and to throw off, by the force of their own minds, the prejudices which the maturing reason of the world will in time disavow, must learn to brave censure. We ought not to be too anxious respecting the opinion of others.-I am not fond of vindications.-Those who know me will suppose that I acted from principle.-nay, as we in general give others credit for worth, in proportion as we possess it-I am easy with regard to the opinions of the best part of mankind. I rest on my own."
-Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
"When I see the elaborate study and ingenuity displayed by women in the pursuit of trifles, I feel no doubt of their capacity for the most Herculean undertakings."
Julia Ward Howe
"The Mysterious Feminine never dies....
although She becomes the whole universe.
Her immaculate purity is never lost.
Although She assumes countless forms
Her true identity remains intact.
Tao is limitless, unborn, eternal-
It can only be reached through
the Mysterious Feminine.
She is the very face of the Absolute."
-Lao-Tzu
******************
SEE Article: "How Serfdom Saved The Women's Movement: Dispatches from the Nanny wars" by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic Monthly Mag Mar ,2004 (and book)
Book: "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" by Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
Book: "Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft" by Diane Jacobs
Book: "The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wenworth Higginson (1823-1911" Ed by Howard N. Meyer
Book: "A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and Women's Rights" by Sherry H. Penney & James D. Livingston
Book: "American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans" by Eve LaPlante
Book: "The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy" by Gerda Lerner
Book: "Isadora: A Sensational Life" by Peter Kurth
Book: "The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets." By Barbara G. Walker
Book: "Sex, Time & Power; How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution" by Leonard Shalain
Book: "Madame De Pompadour: Sex, Culture and Power" by Margaret Crosland
Book: "Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Bewitched the West" by Lesley Downer
Book: "The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World." by Helen Fisher
Book: "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman" by Danielle Crittenden
Book: "What Every American Should Know about Women's History" by Christine Lunardini
Book: "Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror" Ed by Betsy Reed
Book: "The Suppression of Women's Rites" by Merlin Stone
Book: "A World Without Women" by David Noble
Book: "Feminism Is not the Story of my Life." by Elizabeth Fox Genovese
Book: "A Glossary of Feminist Theory" By Sonya Andemahr et.al.
Book: "Larousse Dictionary of Women" Ed. by Melanie Parry
Book: "Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age" Ed. by Ella Shohat
Book: "Women of Discovery: A Celebration of Intrepid Women Who Explored the World" by M. Polk & M. Tiegreen
Book: "Each Mind A Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement 1875-1920" by Beryl Satter
Book: "America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines" by Gail Collins
Book: "Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations" Ed by C.J. Adams & J. Donovan
Book: "Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany" by Sigrid Brauner
Book: "Music in the Old Bones: Jezebel Through the Ages" by Janet Howe Gaines
Book: "Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat" by Paula Gunn Allen
Book: "The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution" by Carolyn Merchant
Book: "Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars" Margaret Wertheim