patriarchy

I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism.

The arbitrary character of patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role has little effect upon their power over us. Nor do the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and polar qualities of the categories __asculine_ and __eminine_ imposed upon human personality give rise to sufficiently serious question among us. Under their aegis each personality becomes little more, and often less than half, of its human potential. Politically, the fact that each group exhibits a circumscribed but complementary personality and range of activity is of secondary importance to the fact that each represents a status or power division. In the matter of conformity patriarchy is a governing ideology without peer; it is probably that no other system has ever exercised such a complete control over its subjects.

Women have participated in almost every fight for freedom. They were there when civilians were targeted they were there when the bombs were planted. To argue they didn't have enough power to speak up or they had been brainwashed by their male colleagues is to try to disassociate from the darkness that resides in everyone. And to disassociate from your darkness is to lose your power over it.

... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

Mollycoddling was the mother's duty; the father's lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love the professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to the truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds.

Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation.... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging.

The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.

Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.

I got a text from my husband. __anal, you are divorced,_ it read. __our papers are in the court of Khobar._ I was divorced in my absence, just as I had been married.

he way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He__ attracted to independent women. __e__ like an exotic bird collector,_ she said. __e only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.

How else to make a dent in an object as immovable as patriarchy itself...?

Religious fundamentalism advocates homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, polygamy and many other primitive evils. Can you imagine, somebody telling you, your love for your dearly beloved is a sin! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, women are inferior to men, and are meant only serve the men! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, a man can have multiple wives, and yet be deemed civilized! Here that somebody is a fundamentalist _ a theoretical pest from the stone-age, who somehow managed to survive even amidst all the rise of reasoning and intellect. Such a creature with no modern mental faculty whatsoever, knows nothing beyond the words of a book, written hundreds or thousands of years ago, when ignorance was the default mode of thinking in the society. It does not only believe every single word of a book to be literally true, but puts all its efforts to convince others to believe the same. This way, it would be an understatement to say, such is a worthless creature. In reality, such a creature can cause a catastrophic contagion in a society, especially if that society is already going through socio-political turmoil.

[Giving context to how radical bloomers as an article of clothing were at the time]"The women shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord they God." - Deutronomy 22:5

Equal rights meant just that, rights for both blacks and women, with the association working for both at the same time. Women should not be told to "stand back and wait." [Frederick] Douglas said that women should be generous and allow the Negro to get his vote first. A young woman in the audience replied that she did not think it generous "to compel women to yield on all questions ... simply because they are women.

Almost from the beginning, Lucy Stone had run-ins with the established code of female propriety. Every Sunday morning the students had to sit through a long chapel service. Lucy, who suffered from headaches, took her hat off one morning. She was charged by the Ladies' Board, which supervised the manners and morals of the coeds, with violating the Bible's teach that women must keep their heads covered in church.

In 1879, Massachusetts allow women to vote in school elections. Lucy Stone went to register, but when she discovered that she would have to sign as Mr.s Blackwell, she refused, and so forfeited her opportunity to vote.Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony were delighted. Mr.s Stanton wrote to Mrs. Stone : "Nothing has been done in the woman's rights movement for some time that so rejoiced my heart as the announcement by you of a woman's right to her name." Susan Anthony wrote that she "rejoiced that you have declared, by actual doing, that a woman has a name, and may retain it throughout her life."Some women in the movement disapproved, however, and wrote to tell her so. She replied that "A thousand times more opposition was made to a woman's claim to speak in public," and continued to use the name of Lucy Stone for the rest of her life. Those who followed her example were called "Lucy Stoners." But in spite of Lucy Stone and the Lucy Stoners, the law has been slow to acknowledge the right of a woman to her own name. More than a hundred years later, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court would uphold an Alabama law which required a woman to use her husband's name.

An angry discussion followed, during which belligerent ministers, who had come to the convention in an attempt to disrupt it, read aloud passages from the Bible to disprove Antoinette Brown's contention of equality. They read passages like "Let your women be silent in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience," and "Likewise, ye wives, be in subection to your own husbands.