SHOUT! SHOUT!* Up with your song
*Quite right: let's be strident here, it's the only way to get heard.
A few quotations for International Women's Day:
A political system which denies women alike equality of opportunity and adequate special protection; an economic system which is iniquity and waste incarnate; and sexual institutions founded on the needs and preferences of a primitive type of man alone, and now in their debacle, creditable and satisfactory to neither sex - these can have no moral claim on women's bodies as instruments of propagation.
Stella Browne, 'Women and birth control' (1917)
In actuality, each month the ovum undertakes an extraordinary expedition from the ovary through the Fallopian tubes to the uterus, an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel.... One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15.
Mary Ellman, Thinking About Women (1968) )
They suppose that there is a certain thing called a Man, and another certain thing called a Woman, and that the combination of these two forms a third quite stereotyped thing called Marriage, and there is an end of it.
But by some kind of Providential arrangement it appears that the actual facts are very different -that there are really hundreds of thousands of different kinds of men, and hundreds of thousands of different kinds of women, and consequently thousands of millions of different kinds of marriage; that there are no limits of grace or comeliness, or of character and accomplishment, or even of infirmity or age, within which love is obliged to move; and that there is no defect, of body or mind, which is of necessity a bar - which may not even (to some special other person) become an object of attraction.
Edward Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age (first published 1896)
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.... Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1928)
Remember, when the nuns tell you to beware of the deceptions of men who make love to you, that the mind of man is on the whole less tortuous when he is love-making than at any other time. It is when he speaks of governments and armies that he utters strange and dangerous nonsense to please the bats at the back of his soul. This is all to your disadvantage, for in love-making you might meet him with lies of equal force, but there are few repartees that the female governed can make to the male governors.
Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942)
But the fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world. They are human beings.... This is the equality claimed and the fact that is persistently evaded and denied.
Dorothy L Sayers, 'The Human-not-quite-Human', Unpopular Opinions (1946)
Had woman been able to impose her secret wish on man as blandly as he upon her, had she been the first to capture that advantageous arrangement whereby she could accede to all the pleasures of being free, gay and attractive, all the convenience of evading responsibility, and gain in addition all the credit of being 'Just a little girl at heart', then we would have had the comic predicament of the Peter Pan instinct equally rampant in both sexes.
G B [Gladys Bertha] Stern, Monogram (1936)
In her own unanalytic fashion Mrs Brown realised that there was only one way to hold her husband in the manly pose--this was to lean on him. She leaned. He remained upright.
Storm Jameson, 'Man the Helpmate', in Mabel Ulrich (ed.), Man, Proud Man (1932)
Every woman member, I include myself, always speaks to the House as one who simply cannot get accustomed to the collective stupidity of so many men.
Ellen Wilkinson, MP, 1937, quoted in Johanna Alberti, Eleanor Rathbone (1996)
The behavior that causes women so much grief evidently brings men very little joy; on the contrary, men appear to be consumed with sexual frustration, rage, and anxiety.
Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls (1992)
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1600729.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.