I only read sections of this work. So many books, so little time . . .

Introduction
Judith Sargent Murray (1751 - 1820) : On the Equality of the Sexes (c. 1795)
Charlolette Perkins Gilman (1860-1935): Women and Economics (1898)
Suzanne Lafollette (b. 1893): Concerning Women (1926)
Introduction to Section 4

Introduction

      1) "There is strength in the vision of a sisterhood that has roots in the past and extends into the future. I hope this volume enables its readers to share in that vision." page xi

      2) "These considerations suggested two criteria by which to judge candidates for inclusion. For one, the book would not be confined to the movement for political rights for women but would include feminist efforts to secure economic, sexual, educational, and reproductive liberation as well. Secondly, room would have to be made for those whose contribution was made by activity, rather than including only those with skillful pens, who left books and essays for us to examine. In this book, then, as 'essential work' could be a published book or a life or outstanding participation in some pioneering action dedicated to expanding the life options of women." page xiv

      3) "Pioneers in any movement for social change will include persons with disturbed family histories and sometimes unusual personality tendencies, for the wellsprings of societal change tend to be fed, not by conformists, but by individuals who are alienated by the world around them. That is as true of men pioneers as of women pioneers, though there has been an unfortunate tendency to view such men as deeply creative and the women as deeply neurotic." page xvi

From On the Equality of the Sexes by Judith Sargent Murray (1751 - 1820)

      1) "Yes, ye lordly, ye haughty sex, our souls are by nature equal to yours; the same breath of God animates, enlivens, and invigorates us; and that we are not fallen lower than yourselves, let those witness who have greatly towered above the various discouragements by which they have been so heavily oppressed; and through I an unacquainted with the list of celebrated characters on either side, yet from the observations I have made in the contracted circle in which I have moved, I dare confidently believe, that from the commencement of time to the present day, there hath been as many females, as males, who, by the mere force of natural powers, have merited the crown of applause; who thus unassisted, have seized the wreath of fame." page 21

Charlolette Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

      "As a result of this major work [Women and Economics], Gilman became the leading intellectual in the women's movement in the United States during the first two decades of the twentieth century." page 568

From Women and Economics (1898) by Charlolette Perkins Gilman

      1) "It is revolting so to consider them; and, if we dare face our own thoughts, and force them to their logical conclusion, we shall see that nothing could be more repugnant to human feeling, or more socially and individually injurious, than to make motherhood a trade." page 575

      2) "In spite of her supposed segregation to maternal duties, the human female, the world over, works at extra-maternal duties for hours enough to provide her with an independent living, and then is denied independence on the ground that motherhood prevents her working!" page 576

      3) "When we confront this fact boldly and plainly in the open market of vice, we are sick with horror. When we see the same economic relation made permanent, established by law, sanctioned and sanctified by religion, covered with flowers and incense and all accumulated sentiment, we think it innocent, lovely, and right. The transient trade we think evil. The bargain for life we think good. But the biological effect remains the same. In both cases the female gets her food from the male by virtue of her sex-relationship to him. In both cases, perhaps even more in marriage because of its perfect acceptance of the situation, the female of genus homo, still living under natural law, is inexorably modified to sex in an increasing degree. . ." page 579

      4) "Now that she is a person as well as a female, filling economic relation to society, she is welcomed and accepted as a human creature, and need not marry the wrong man for her bread and butter. So sharp is the reaction from this unlovely yoke that there is a limited field of life to-day wherein women choose not to marry, preferring what they call "their independence," - a new-born, hard-won, dear-bought independence. That any living woman should prefer it to home and husband, to love and motherhood, throws a fierce light on what women must have suffered for lack of freedom before.

      This tendency need not be feared, however. It is merely a reaction, and a most natural one. It will pass as naturally, as more and more women become independent, when marriage is not the price of liberty. The fear exhibited that women generally, once fully independent, will not marry, s proof of how well it has been known that only dependence forced them to marriage as it was. There will be needed neither bribe nor punishment to force women to true marriage with independence." page 583

      5) "The more absolutely woman is segregated to sex-functions only, cut off from all economic use and made wholly dependent on the sex-relation as a means of livelihood, the more pathological does her motherhood become." page 587

      6) "Motherhood is the work of grown women, not of half-grown children; and, when we honestly care as much for motherhood as we pretend, we shall train the woman for her duty, not the girl for her guileless maneuvers to secure a husband. We talk about the noble duties of the mother, but our maidens are educated for economically successful marriage." page 591

      7) "If there should be built and opened in any of our large cities to-day a commodious and well-served apartment house for professional women with families, it would be filled at once. The apartments would be without kitchens; but there would be a kitchen belonging to the house from which meals could be served to the families in their rooms or in a common dining-room, as preferred. It would be a home where the cleaning was done by efficient workers, not hired separately by the families, but engaged by the manager of the establishment; and a roof-garden, day nursery, and kindergarten under well-trained professional nurses and teachers, would insure proper care of the children." page 592

      8) "A baby who spent certain hours of every day among other babies, being cared for because he was a baby, and not because he was "my baby", would grow to have a very different opinion of himself from that which is forced upon each new soul that comes among us by the ceaseless adoration of his own immediate family. What he needs to learn at once and for all, to learn softly and easily, but inexorably, is that he is one of many." page 596

      9) ". . . The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty. She will love her child as well, perhaps better, when she is not in hourly contact with it, when she goes from its life to her own life, and back from her own life to its life, with ever new delight and power. She can keep the deep, thrilling joy of motherhood far fresher in her heart, far more vivid and open in voice and eyes and tender hands, when the hours of individual work give her mind another channel for her own p0art of the day. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to the home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now." page 598

From Concerning Women (1926) by Suzanne Lafollette (b. 1893)

      1) "It seems also to be characteristic of the dominant sex. . . to regard itself as humanity, and the other sex as a class of somewhat lower beings created by Providence for its convenience and enjoyment; just as it is characteristic of a dominant class, such as an aristocracy, to regard the lower classes as being created solely for the purpose of supporting its power and doing its will." page 542

      2) "There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained. . . . " page 542

      3) "The unconscious movement was the outgrowth of the revolution in industry, brought about by the introduction of the machine. . . With domestic conditions so changed, what was more natural than that the daughters should go into the factory; or , if the family were well-to-do, into the schools, which were forced reluctantly to open their doors to women? And what was more natural than that women, as their minds were developed thorough education, should perceive the injustice and humiliation of their position, and organize to defend their right to recognition as human beings? . . .

      Women in the factories and shops; women in the schools - from this it was only a moment to their invasion of the professions, and not a very long time until they would be invading every field that had been held the special province of men. This is the great unconscious and unorganized woman's movement which has aroused such fear and resentment among people who saw it without understanding it." pages 544 - 545

      4) "The reason why marriage is "an incomparable protection to society" lies in the fact that the continuance of the power of the exploiting State depends upon the relative helplessness of its exploited subjects; and nothing renders the subject more helpless against the dominance of the State than marriage. For monopoly, under the protection of the State, has rendered the support of a family extremely difficult, by closing free access of labour to natural resources and thus enabling the constant maintenance of a labour-surplus. Where there is little or no land not legally occupied, access to the soil is impossible save on terms that render it, if not downright prohibitive, at least unprofitable. The breadwinner who has neither land nor capital is thus forced to take his chance in a labour-market overcrowded by applicants for work who are in exactly his position: they are shut out from opportunity to work for themselves, and obliged to accept such employment as they can get at a wage determined not by their capacity to produce, but by the number of their competitors. Not only is the wage-earner thus obliged to content himself with a small share of what his labour produces; he is forced to pay out of that share further tribute to monopoly in most of the things he buys. . . .

      Such disadvantages tend not only to keep wages near the subsistence-level, but to keep opinions orthodox - or if not orthodox, unexpressed. For the wage-earner gets his living on sufferance: while he continues to please his employer he may earn a living, however inadequate, for himself and family; but if he show signs of discontent with the established order, by which his employer benefits or thinks he benefits, he is likely to find himself supplanted by some other worker whose need makes him more willing to conform, in appearance at least. . . [T]he average wage-earner with a family to support will be under greater pressure to dissemble than will the worker who has no family; for where the single worker risks privation for himself alone, the married worker takes this risk for his family as well. . . .

      Thus the economic conditions brought about by the State operate to make marriage the State's strongest bulwark; and those who believe that the preservation of the State, or of a particular form of it, is a sacred duty - their number among its victims is legion - are quite logical in taking alarm at the increasing unwillingness of men and women to marry, or if they do marry, to have children." pages 549 - 550

      5) ". . . Meretricious standards of respectability, among them the idea that a married woman must not work outside her home even when she is childless, tend to make marriage from the outset a burden on the man of the middle class. For it must be remembered that since the so-called feminine occupations have been taken out of the home, a man no longer gains an economic asset in taking unto himself a wife. Rather, he assumes a liability." page 550

      6) "But for the present, and for some time to come, marriage and parenthood will continue to make men and women virtual slaves of the economic order which they help to perpetuate. . .

      Both as a personal relationship and as an institution, marriage is at present undergoing a profound modification resulting from the changing industrial and social position of women. The elevation of woman from the position of a chattel to that of a free citizen must inevitably affect the institution in which her subordinate position has been most strongly emphasized - which has been, indeed, the chief instrument of her subordination. The woman who is demanding her rightful place in the world as man's equal, can no longer be expected to accept without question an institution under whose rules she is obliged to remain the victim of injustice. There is every reason therefore, assuming that the process of emancipation shall not be interrupted, to expect a continuous alteration in the laws and customs bearing on marriage, until some adjustment shall be reached which allows scope for the individuality of both parties, instead of one only." page 551 - 552

      7) "Instead of joining in the universal condemnation of illegitimacy, it seems more reasonable to question the ethics of a society which permits it to exist. Certainly no social usage could be more degrading to women as mothers of the race than that which makes it a sin to bear a child; and nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitution and self-destruction. I know of no word that may be said in justification of such a code or of a society that tolerates it. As marriage ceases to be a vested interest with women, and as their growing freedom enables them to perceive the insult to their humanity that this kind of morality involves, they will refuse to stand for it. Those who prefer to regard her as a human being, they will naturally demand the abolition of all discriminations based on sex; while all women must certainly repudiate the barbarous injustice of organized society to the illegitimate child." page 555

      8) "But the community has a more direct and less disinterested concern in the welfare of children: every child is a potential power for good or ill; what its children become, that will the community become. It is knowledge of this that prompts the establishment of public schools and colleges, and all the manifold associational activities intended to promote the physical and spiritual welfare of children. . . From all this activity it is only a step to the assumption by the community of entire responsibility for the upbringing and education of every child. This idea has some advocates; it is a perfectly logical corollary of the modern conception of the child's relation to the community. Yet it invites a wary and conditional acceptance. It is fair that the community should assume the burden of the child's support and education, particularly so long as the community sanctions an economic system which makes this burden too heavy for the great majority of parents, and a political system which may force male children to sacrifice their lives in war as soon as parents have completed the task of bringing them up." page 560

      9) "Nothing augurs better for the elevation of marriage to a higher plane than the growing economic independence of women and the consequent improvement in the social position of the unmarried woman; for only when marriage is placed above all considerations of economic or social advantage will it be in a way to satisfy the highest demands of the human spirit." page 562

From the Introduction to section 4

      1) "If we take a very loose overview of the whole history of feminism over the past hundred years, there seem to have been three peaks of activity, roughly separated by fifty years: a first peaking in the 1850s; a second in the period 1900-1920; and a third peak beginning in the late 1960s. An alternating generational phenomenon is suggested in this dialectic pattern, with the feminist impulse acted out publicly in one generation and more privately in the nest. Thus the late 1870s and 1880 were decades of great expansion in women's higher education and in white-collar clerical and professional jobs for women. The daughters of the 1850s activists may have been deflected from direct political activity and public visibility into private education and employment. Even the elder stateswomen of the movement, such a Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton, devoted a good deal of their energies in the 1880 to writing the History of Woman Suffrage. Many of the daughters of suffragists seem to have done the same in the 1930s; they retreated into private consolidation of the gains made by their mothers. During the 1930s when feminism was supposedly dead, women earned the highest proportion of advanced degrees in the history of American higher education. So too, the proportion of women in the labor force continued to climb dramatically throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and they came to a disproportionate degree from the ranks of married women." pages 616- 617

      2) "He [Hansen] noted that ethnic historical societies emerged roughly sixty years, or two generations, after a peak in a particular group's immigration to the United States, just as Southern history and literature flourished two generations after the Civil War. If sons forget what grandsons wish to remember, perhaps, daughters, too , forget what granddaughters wish to remember." page 619

      3) "After a generation of testing feminists' ideas in work and in the family, the limitations of those ideas may be realized, and the third generation returns again to challenge and action." page 619

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