Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don’t have to put on an act. If I’m not feminine enough for someone, I don’t care, because femininity is different in everyone’s mind.
As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun.
I had been silent and silenced about an abortion I’d had years before. Like many women, I’d been made to feel at fault, not realizing there were political reasons why female humans were not supposed to make decisions about our own bodies.
I was being measured against the expectation that any feminist had to be unattractive in a conventional sense – and then described in contrast to that stereotype. The subtext was: If you could get a man, why would you need equal pay?
The travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote that our nomadic past lives on in our “need for distraction, our mania for the new.”1 In many languages, even the word for human being is “one who goes on migrations.” Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.
If time is relative, doing new things actually makes us feel we’ve lived a longer life.
There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.
But, as historian Gerda Lerner has pointed out, it is a shared characteristic of women’s history – or the real history of any marginalized group – to be lost and discovered, lost again and re-discovered, re-lost and re-re-discovered, until the margins have transformed the center. As in a tree or a seed, the margins are where the growth is. Who would want to be anywhere else?
White people should have sued for being culturally deprived in a white ghetto. When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.
Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine?
Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India – which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, “It could have been worse – he could have thought he was in Turkey.
I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one. And.
IF EVERYONE HAS A full circle of human qualities to complete, then progress lies in the direction we haven’t been.
Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.
Then, as if in answer to a riddle posed years before, you will realize that this growth came from seeds you planted or watered or carried from place to place – and you’ll be rewarded in the way that we as communal beings need most: you’ll know you made a difference.
You can travel without traveling, and you can not travel – yet travel. Being on the road is a state of mind.
In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance.
In the words of so many daughters who don’t yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault, I told myself: I’m not going to be anything like my mother.
At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women’s “libbers”, bra burners, and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters... that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a “postfeminist” age...
Anybody can be with you when you’re right, but only friends are with you when you mess up.