Women’s place in the world.

S M

I tell you, Chickadee
I am afraid of people
who cannot cry
Tears left unshed
turn to poison
in the ducts
Ask the next soldier you see
enjoying a massacre
if this is not so.
People who do not cry
are victims
of soul mutilation
Paid for in Marlboros
and trucks

Resist

Violence does not work
except for the man
who pays your salary
Who knows
if you could still weep
you would not take the job.
Alice Walker

Alice Walker, author and feminist

The Friend

We sat across the table
he said, cut off your hands.
they are always poking at things
they might touch me.
I said yes.

Food grew cold on the table
he said, burn your body
it is not clean and smells like sex
it rubs my mind sore
I said yes.

I love you, I said,
that’s very nice, he said
I like to be loved,
that makes me very happy,
Have you cut off your hands,yet?

———————Marge Piercy

It is important for women to have a voice in their herstory.

The Second Sex

Men have vied with one another in proclaiming that love is a woman’s supreme accomplishment. ” A woman who loves as a woman becomes only the more feminine,” says Nietsche, and Balzec; “Among the first-rate, man’s life is fame, woman’s life is love. Woman is man’w equal only when she makes her life a perpetual offering, as that of man is perpetual action.” But therein, again, is cruel deception, since what she offers, men are in no wise anxious to accept.Man had no need of the unconditional devotion he claims, nor of the idolatrous love that flatters his vanity; he accepts them only on condition that he need not satisfy the reciprocal demands these attitudes imply. He preaches to woman that she shoule give—and her gifts bore him to distraction, she is left in embarrassment with her useless offerings, her empty life. On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weekness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself—on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”
excerpted, Simone de Beauvoir

The continual education of women is necessary

Homes of Single women

If women will not accept mariage with subjection, not men proffer it without, there is, there can be, no alternative. The woman who will not be ruled must live without marriage. And during this transition period, wherever, for the maintenance of self-respect on the side, and education into recognition of equality on the other,single women make comfortable and attractive homes for themselves, they furnish the best and most efficient object lessons for men.    -Susan B. Anthony