If a writer does not produce what is consistent with the ideology of the dominant culture, no one will hear her voice. If a writer produces what is consistent with the ideology of the dominant culture, she may choke on her words.
--Sharon H. Nelson
. . . [the] challenge for men has been to tame women, to neutralize their otherness. . . the solution has been to marry them.
--Robert Emmet Meager, Helen: Myth, Legend and the Culture of Misogyny
In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.
--Lucy Stone, "Disappointment is the Lot of Women" (speech given in 1855)
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
--Eleanor Roosevelt
. . . civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. . . the harmony of interest and view which belong to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband. So firmly fixed was this sentiment in the founders of common law that it became a maxim of that system of jurisprudence that a woman had no legal existence separate from her husband. . .
--Bradwell v. The State
83 US 130 (1872)
I take myself back, fear.
You are not my shadow any longer.
I won't hold you in my hands.
You can't live in my eyes, my ears, my voice
my belly, or in my eyes, my ears, my voice
my belly, or in my heart my heart
my heart my heart
--Joy Harjo, from "I give you Back"
There is a silence that cannot speak.
There is a silence that will not speak.
Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate
sea. The speech that frees comes forth from the amniotic deep.
To attend to its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence.
But I fail the task. The word is stone.
I admit it.
I hate the stillness. I hate the stone. I hate the sealed vault with
its cold icon. I hate the staring into the night. The questions
thinning into space. The sky swallowing the echoes.
Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with
speech, there is in my life no living word. The sound I hear is only
sound. White sound. Words, when they fall, are pockmarks on the earth.
They are hailstones seeking an underground stream.
If I could follow the stream down and down to the hidden voice, would
I come at last to the freeing word I ask the night sky but the silence
is steadfast. There is no reply.
--Joy Kogawa, Obasan