Quote of the Day

Because women’s work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we’re the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it’s our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we’re nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we’re nymphos and if we don’t we’re frigid and if we love women it’s because we can’t get a “real” man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we’re neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we’re selfish and if we stand up for our rights we’re aggressive and “unfeminine” and if we don’t we’re typical weak females and if we want to get married we’re out to trap a man and if we don’t we’re unnatural and because we still can’t get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can’t cope or don’t want a pregnancy we’re made to feel guilty about abortion and…for lots of other reasons we are part of the women’s liberation movement.  

Author unknown, 
quoted in The Torch, 14 September 1987

Honoring Yesterday's Heroes

"When women are seen with pen in hand, they are met immediately with shrieks commanding a return to that life of pain which their writing had interrupted, a life devoted to the women's work of needle and distaff."

Archangela Tarabotti

Archangela, born February 24, 1604 in Venice, Italy was a Benedictine nun and a writer. The eldest of nine children, her father forced her to give up her dreams and enter the convent because she was lame and considered unmarriageable. It was also custom among the Italian republic’s richer families. Archangela  took her final vows under protest and spent her life protesting the practice of forcing young girls to enter a convent against their will.

Her book, 'Paternal Tyranny' was not only  a passionate condemnation of the family who dumped her into the convent, but also a carefully argued carefully argued declaration against the oppression of women by the Venetian patriarchy. She died of consumption in Sant'Anna on February 28, 1652, at the age of forty-eight. Archangela was a feminist who lived way before her time.

 "See for yourself the absolute truth of my words! Go and ask one of these [male] children, who as yet cannot put two syllables together, let alone a whole word: "What will become of your sisters?" Immediately, without a moment's hesitation, prompted by that cunning disposition shaped by his father's upbringing, he will say, "They'll become nuns, because I want to be rich." -- book 1, 74

Remembering Yesterday"s Heroes

I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves. 

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 

Mary, born August 30, 1797, was an English novelist.  Her mother, one of the foremost feminists her generation, Mary Wollstonecraft,  died from puerperal feverten days after the Mary's birth. By the time Mary was 19 had written one of the most famous novels ever published--Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. Mary was the wife of Percy Blythe Shelley.  

Sadly, throughout her life she suffered from psychosomatic illnesses and nervous attacks and died from a mysterious paralysis on February 1, 1851 and was buried between her mother and her father at St. Peter's churchyard in Bournemouth.

Today's Quote

Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life. What is it you would let go of today?

 Mary Manin Morrissey

Today's Quote

Goodbye, boys; I'm under arrest. I may have to go to jail. I may not see you for a long time. Keep up the fight! Don't surrender! Pay no attention to the injunction machine at Parkersburg. The Federal judge is a scab anyhow. While you starve he plays golf. While you serve humanity, he serves injunctions for the money powers.

Mother Jones--Just having been placed under arrest by a United States Marshall

Honoring Yesterday's Heroes

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."

Marie Curie

Marie Curie, bornNovember 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, was  a  physicist and chemist. Her discovery of the mysterious element radium led to a basic change in our understanding of matter and energy. In December 1903, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded, Marie along with  Pierre Curie,and Henri Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel. During her lifetime, she also led the way to a new era for medical knowledge and the treatment of diseases. She died of aplastic anemia on July 4, 1934, believed to have been a result of her long-term exposure to radiation. 

Today's Quote

It is past time for women to take their rightful place, side by side with men, in the rooms where the fates of peoples, where their children’s and grandchildren’s fates, are decided.

Hillary Clinton

Today's Quote

I'm not afraid of storms,

for I'm learning to sail my ship.

 Louisa May Alcott

Friday Quote

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Lewis Carroll

Today's Quote

"The day will come when men will recognize woman as his peer, not only at the fireside, but in councils of the nation. Then, and not until then, will there be the perfect comradeship, the ideal union between the sexes that shall result in the highest development of the race." 

Susan B. Anthony

British Suffragette Handbill