mama urs > mama 's Quotes

“[V]iolence against women is a key element in this new global war, not only because of the horror it evokes or the messages it sends but because of what women represent in their capacity to keep their communities together and, equally important, to defend noncommercial conceptions of security and wealth.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaid
labor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, "wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of ies productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist societry cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation - an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives - nor CO the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity. and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, willie profiting from the wageless conclition of the labor involved.”
― Silvia Federici

“Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination--tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“Feminism is hated because women are hated. Antifeminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of woman hating.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her. Ask the politicians who exude delight when they advocate for the so-called traditional family how many women are beaten and children raped when there is no man in the family. Zero is such a perfect and encouraging number, but who, among politicians in male-supremacist cultures, can count that high?”
― Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation

“Virtually all ideologies are implicitly antifeminist in that women are sacrificed to higher goals: the higher goal of reproduction; the higher goal of pleasure; the higher goal of a freedom antipathetic to the freedom of women; the higher goal of better conditions for workers not women; the higher goal of a new order that keeps the sex exploitation of women essentially intact; the higher goal of an old order that considers the sex exploitation of women a sign of social stability (woman’s in her place, all’s right with the world).”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are. They all have the same vulnerability to rape, to battery, as children to incest. Poorer women have more vulnerability to prostitution, which is basically a form of sexual exploitation that is intolerable in an egalitarian society, which is the society we are fighting for.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“Because feminism is a movement for liberation of the powerless by the powerless in a closed system based on their powerlessness, right-wing women judge it a futile movement. Frequently they also judge it a malicious movement in that it jeopardizes the bargains with power that they can make; feminism calls into question for the men confronted by it the sincerity of women who conform without political resistance.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“To operate within the matrix of
power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice. Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualization has left us completely desexualized.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. This was a definition of feminism I offered in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center more than 10 years ago. It was my hope at the time that it would become a common definition everyone would use. I liked this definition because it did not imply that men were the enemy. By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult. It is also broad enough to include an understanding of systemic institutionalized sexism. As a definition it is open-ended. To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.”
― Bell Hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“The idealized woman becomes property, symbol, and ornament; she is stripped of her essential human qualities. The devalued woman becomes a different kind of object; she is the spittoon in which men release their negative anti-woman feelings.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“If women want a feminist revolution—ours is a world that is crying out for feminist revolution—then we must assume responsibility for drawing women together in political solidarity. That means we must assume responsibility for eliminating all the forces that divide women.”
― Bell Hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“The fear of being alone, or of being unloved, had caused women of all races to passively accept sexism and sexist oppression.”
― Bell Hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. I liked this definition because it does not imply that men were the enemy.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.”
― Bell Hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
― Audre Lorde

“I must no longer accept,” she said slowly, “being a stranger to you.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“Camilla, we did it right, didn't we?" Palamedes said, and now Nona knew he wasn't speaking to anyone else in the universe. "We had something very nearly perfect... the perfect friendship, the perfect love. I cannot imagine reaching the end of this life and having any regrets, so long as I had been allowed to experience being your adept.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“But when she was scared, she was a child again, and she was more afraid of being a child again than anything else in her life.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“My whole life, yes. Yes, forever, yes. Life is too short and love is too long.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“Harrow said, “But you're God.”
And God said, “And I am not enough.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“They kept saying cows watched sunsets. At that point I wished I’d used the fucking conspiracy theorists instead of the cows. Nobody would’ve cared if I’d turned people inside-out who think vaccines have nanites in them that mine cryptocurrency. But cows watch sunsets, man!”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“Being unexpectedly loved is so wonderful or terrible, isn’t it?”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“I died knowing you'd hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I'd had your full attention.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because—I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth