Book Summaries | Home
| |
Sunshine for
Women Book Summaries | Home |
To shorten this summary, I will limit my remarks about this work to Spender's comments on individual women. Her thesis is that women's work, including women's intellectual work, has been used to support the system which oppresses her. If her work cannot be stolen, it is discredited. Women have not been permitted to pass our insights along to new generations. Hence every generation must begin anew to learn what the previous generations strguuled to know. Until we can pass our insights along to new generations, we cannot free ourselves from oppression.
The chapter on suffrage is a great read and offers lots of tips on how to get things done in the political arena when you have no overt power.
Spender quotes many of these women. To conserve space, I have left out the details of each reference (specific page numbers for each quote) although I have general references for each woman's work. I also give references for works by these women that Spender does not reference. For some women, the most commonly read women such as Elizabeth Barret Browing, George Elliot, and Virginia Woolf, I give only a few references.
The index is ordered by subject's last name although the main section of this document is ordered by flourishing date.
***Anarchist-Feminists
Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)
Mary Astell (1668-1731)
Mary Ritter Beard (1876-1958)
Teresa Billington-Greig (1877-1964)
Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891)
Vera Brittian (1896-1970)
Josephine Butler (1828-1906)
Emily Davies (1830-1921)
Crystal Eastman (1881-1928)
George Elliot (1819-1880)
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
Maltilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898) and for info on her
involvement on writing The History of Woman Suffrage, try here
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
Angelina Grimke Weld (1805-1879)
Sarah Grimke (1792-1873)
Cicely Hamilton (1872-1952)
Ida Husted Harper fl 1920
Ruth Hershberger (1917- )
*History of Woman's Suffrage
Winifred Holtby (1898-1935)
Anna Jameson (1794-1860)
Viola Klein
Mirra Komarovsky (fl 1940)
Margaret Mead (1901-1978)
Catherine Macaulay (1731-1791)
Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ( 1689-1762)
Florence Nightengale (1820-1910)
Christabel Pankhurst (1880-1958)
Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928)
E. Sylvia Pankhurst (1882 - 1960)
Josephine Ruffin (1842-1924)
Dora Russell (1894- )
Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
Dorothy Sayers (1875-1958)
Sophia - attributed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)
Elisabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)
Lucy Stone (1818-1893)
Harriet Taylor (1807-1858) wife of John Stuart Mill (Subjection of Women)
Sojourner Truth (?-1883)
Angelina Grimke Weld (1805-1879)
Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)
Rebecca West (1894-1983)
Anna Wheeler (1785-?)
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
**Woman's Social and Political Union (WSPU)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Frances "Fanny" Wright (1795-1852)
* 6 volume book
** Organization, not a person
*** Movement
"A Letter to a Lady, Written by a Lady" (1696) humerous essay in defense of women
"Some Reflections on Marriage Occasioned by the Duchess of Mazarine's Case", reprinted in Katherine M. Rogers (ed) (1979) Before Their Time: Six Women Writers of the Eighteenth-Century, Fredrick Ungar, NY
Perry, Ruth, (1986) Celebrated Mary Astell - An Early English Feminist, U of Chicago Press
"But, unlike many women since who have believed that all that was necessary was to convince men of the justice of their cause, and 'rights' would be forthcoming, Astell knew that men would resist moves which threatened or undermined their power and consequent superiority." page 60
"For women, who see male power as problematic, who experience men as a source of restriction and limitation, to remove oneself from their presence, has a connotation of 'freedom', but this perspective rarely surfaces in records kept by men. So Astell was disappointed, but it was not only disappointment she had too deal with, but also calumny." page 61
"Not only does she [Mary Astell] ask where this idea comes from, and whose interest it serves, she also shows how women are manoeuvered into this submissive position - and then obliged to support it." page 64
"In so many ways Astell exposed the workings of patriarchy: she took up and developed the idea that it was men - not God, or woman- who was responsible for sexual inequality. In the seventeenth century she made the connection which today we would call the phenomenon of the double-bind, a product of a double-standard, where women were damned if they were foolish, and damned if they were responsible and serious. She knew that she could see things that men could not, she could see the inconsistencies in their arguments which were arranged to suit their own needs, and she knew of their need not to be threatened or contradicted by 'conflicting evidence' which had its origin in women's experience." page 66
Sophia, 1743, Women's Superior Excellence Over Man or a Reply by Sophia: A Person of Quality, J. Robinson, London
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 'Letters', reprinted in Katharine M. Rogers (ed.), 1979, Before Their Time: Six Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century, Fredrick Ungar, NY
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley and Robert Halsband (ed.), 1993, Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy, Clarendon Pr, Paperback ISBN: 0198122888 $22.00
Lowenthal, Cynthia, 1994, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter, Univ of Georgia Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0820315451 $40.0
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 1992, Mary Wortley Montagu: Letters (Everyman's Library), Knopf, Hardcover ISBN: 0679417478 $20.00
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley and Isobel Grundy(ed.), 1996, Romance Writings, Hardcover ISBN: 0198183194 $78.95
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 1995, The Turkish Embassy Letters, Virago Pr, Paperback ISBN: 1853816795 $13.95
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley and Malcolm Jack (Ed.), 1993, Turkish Embassy Letters, Univ of Georgia Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 082031580X $35.00
Sophia, a Person of Quality, "Women not Inferior to Man, fascimile reprint, 1975, Bentham Press, London
Sophia's [aattributed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's] philosophy: ". . . when men profit, as they do, from all the definitions of what is right and proper for women, their definitions are more than suspect. . . . women enjoy a status that they as men could not endure. . . . women are probably 'superior' because they can follow men's arguments, identify their limitations, and put forward more comprehensive explanations of their own, which account for women's experience, as well as men's." page 77
" 'Sophia' suspected that the power basis was elsewhere [not in institutions themselves] - in men's ability to decree the value system - and that in some ways the institutionalised power merely reflected and did not account for men's so-called superiority." page 80
"Here she [Sophia] touches upon what Adrienne Rich (1981) has suggested is the most fundamental threat to males and a rationale for the construction of patriarchy- the possibility that men are dispensable." page 82
"In her analysis it is male power which is the root of evil and injustice, for men have gone to evil and unjust lengths in the attempt to protect that power and to preserve their primacy. It is clear, she argues, that men have created 'superior' men and 'inferior' women but women do not have to accept the organization and the values that men have created - they are not immutable but can be undone and replaced. When she demands education for women, however, as a means of 'deconstructing' what men have done, it is by no means just a demand to share in the education men have designed for themselves; she is not arguing for the 'right', as women were to do later, to have access to the institutions men had created (the right to enter their educational establishments, to be equal before their laws, to participate in their political structures). She is demanding that women be free to develop their own reason, their own logic, their own intellect, free from abuse and harassment and on the basis of their own experiences. What value is the right to equal representation if men continue to count more than women- for after all, women are equally represented in the population and yet are inferior." page 83-84
" 'Sophia' [Lady Mary Wortley Montagu] (1739) warned against accepting assertions about women's deficiencies by those who had a vested interest in promoting such deficiency, and her advice is no less pertinent today. There can be no question that men stand to gain if women's struggle for liberation can be represented as lacking seriousness or significance. And this is the case regardless of the reasons used for discrediting the women and the movement." page 169
MacAulay, Catharine, 1995, Letters on Education 1790 (Revolution and Romanticism 1789-1834), Woodstock Books, Hardcover ISBN: 1854771841 $95.00 (1790)
"Virtue and knowledge are the same for both sexes, argues Macaulay; there can be no double standard, for what is good for one sex is good for the other." page 135
Wollstonecraft, Mary and Ralph Martin Wardle, 1979, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, Cornell Univ Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0801411645 $49.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary (Editor), 1980, Female Reader, Scholars Facsimilies & Reprints, Hardcover ISBN: 0820113476 $60.00
Wollstonecraft Mary, 1971, Letters to Gilbert Imlay (English Literature Series), Haskell House Pub Ltd, Hardcover ISBN: 0838312691 $75.00
Wollstonecraft, Mary , 1976, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Univ of Nebraska Pr, Paperback ISBN: 0803258321 $6.95; Hardcover ISBN: 0803208626 $25.00
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1788, Mary and Maria, reprinted Penguin Classic, New York & London
Wollstonecraft, Mary , Mary Shelley, and Janet Todd (Editor), 1992, Mary Maria Matilda (NYU Press Women's Classics), New York Univ Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0814792529 $50.00
Wollstonecraft, Mary and Mary Shelley, 1993, Mary/Maria/Matilda (Penguin Classics), Penguin USA, Paperback ISBN: 0140433716 $11.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1980, Mary and the Wrongs of Women, Oxford Univ Pr (Trade), Paperback ISBN: 019281527X $5.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary , 1994, Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, W W Norton & Co, Paperback ISBN: 0393311694 $7.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1996, Political Writings (World's Classics), Oxford Univ Pr (Trade), Paperback ISBN: 0192823116 $10.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary and Janet Todd (Editor), 1993, Political Writings : A Vindication of the Rights of Men : A Vindication of the Rights of Woman : An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, Univ of Toronto Pr, Paperback ISBN: 0802074456 $25.95; Hardcover ISBN: 0802029957 $65.00
Wollstonecraft , Mary and William Godwin, 1987, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Women, Penguin USA, Paperback ISBN: 0140432698 $11.95 (original published posthumously in 1798)
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1994, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (Revolution and Romanticism, 1789 - 1834), Woodstock Books, Hardcover ISBN: 1854771957 $48.00
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1994, Vindication of the Rights of Men (Revolution and Romanticism, 1789-1834), Woodstock Books, Hardcover ISBN: 1854771744 $48.00
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1996, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Great Books in Philosophy) Prometheus Books, Paperback ISBN: 1573921068 $4.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary and Sylvana Tomaselli (Editor), 1995, A Vindication of the Rights of Men With a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints : A Vindication of the Rights of Men and a Vindication of the Rights of Women, Cambridge Univ Pr, Paperback ISBN: 0521436338 $14.95; Hardcover ISBN: 0521430534 $44.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1988, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd Edition, W W Norton & Co, Paperback ISBN: 0393955729 $9.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1989, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Prometheus's Great Books in Philosophy Series), Prometheus Books, Paperback ISBN: 0879755253 $6.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1992, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Everyman's Library, No 86), KNOPF, Hardcover ISBN: 0679413375 $15.00
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1993, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Penguin USA (reissue) Paperback ISBN: 0140433821 $9.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1995, Rights of Woman, J M Dent & Sons Ltd, Hardcover ISBN: 0460008250 $14.95
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1993, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, South Asia Books, Hardcover ISBN: 8171004652 $24.00
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1996, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd Edition (Dover Thrift Editions) Dover Pubns, Paperback ISBN: 0486290360 $2.00
Wollstonecraft, Mary and Ashley Tauchert (Editor), 1995, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman : With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (Everyman Library), Everymans Library, Paperback ISBN: 0460876155 $6.50
Todd, Janet M. (Editor), 1990, A Wollstonecraft Anthology (Columbia U Edition),Morningside Bookshop, Paperback ISBN: 0231072511 $17.50
Wollstonecraft, Mary and Janet Todd (Editor), 1990, A Wollstonecraft Anthology, Columbia Univ Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0231072503 $48.50
Wollstonecraft, Mary, Janet Todd (ed.), Marilyn Butler (ed.), 1989, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Pickering & Chatto Ltd, Hardcover ISBN: 1851960066 $495.00
Todd, Janet and Marylin Bulter (eds.), Wollstonecraft (7 vol of collected works), New York University Press, New York, 1989
"Why is it, asks Wollstonecraft, that men are in a position to decide what is valid and what is not: 'Who made man the exclusive judge', she asks, 'if women partake with him the gift of reason?' (ibid., p 87) By what authority do men judge what is best for women?" page 139
"If women were to suggest that men's existence should be governed by the whim of women, that men were to have no identity apart from their relationship to women, no needs but the need to serve women, that therefore they must learn to please women, to blame no one other than themselves for their own inadequacies, such advocates would be condemned as irrational, would no doubt be accused of man-hating, and certainly of emasculating men. But while men make such statements about women, their rationality can be applauded and their woman-hating perceived as perfectly acceptable. The only difference between the two is the worth attributed to the sexes in a male-dominated society." page 143
"Wollstonecraft is asserting the autonomy of women, the right of women to define themselves and their world from their own position, and to place men in relation to women. This is a concept that Rousseau (as a representative of mankind) cannot or will not accept. As Adrienne Rich (1981) has suggested, this concept prompts fear among many men, the fear that if women are independent men might be irrelevant. It was a concept that 'Sophia' [Lady Montagu] had not been averse to using, and one that Wollstonecraft implied on occasion." page 144
"Wollstonecraft lists all the qualities men think desirable in a woman (making use of Rousseau, in this respect), from passivity, weakness, lassitude, and dependency to frivolity, a fondness for dress, and a dislike of serious purpose, and declares that if such qualities are indeed natural, then women could simply be left alone to allow them to unfold. But this is not the case; on the contrary, women are subject to rigid discipline in order that these qualities can be cultivated." page 146
"For example, quite a few of Wollstonecraft's critics have noted that she was the first person to apply the phrase legal prostitution to marriage (Tomalin, 1977, p. 137), that she saw wife and prostitute as equally oppressed, and tried to work out the connection between the two (Margaret Walters, 1976), that she recognized that selling their bodies was a form of work, for women, and that: 'Necessity never makes prostitution the business of men's lives' (Wollstonecraft, in Kramnick, 1978, p. 165)" pages 151-152
" 'Mary Wollstonecraft was an extreme neurotic of a compulsive type,' argued Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham (1959) in Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. 'Out of her illness arose the ideology of feminism, which was to express the feelings of so many women in years to come. Unconsciously . . . Mary and the feminists wanted . . . to turn on men and injure them .
. . . Underneath her aggressive writings, Mary was a masochist like her mother, as indeed all the leading feminist theorists were in fact. . . . By behaving as she did Mary indicated , , , that she was unconsciously seeking to deprive the male of his power, to castrate him. . . .It came out . . . in her scolding of men. The feminists have ever since symbolically slain their fathers by verbally consigning all men to perdition as monsters' (pp.159-61). Really?" page 155
". . . if women do not cheerfully confine themselves to the place to which men have relegated them, then there is something wrong with the women rather than the place they are expected to occupy." page 156
Thompson, William, Anna Wheeler, and Dolores Dooley (Editor), 1996, Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men to Retain Them in Political . . . , Cork Univ Pr, Paperback ISBN: 1859180582 $13.00 (1825)
"Not content with their natural advantage, argues Thompson, men have made even more terms designed to ensure that women are eliminated from competition and unable to acquire financial resources. They have set up 'the existing system of marriage: under which for the mere faculty of eating, breathing, and living, in whatever degrees of comfort husbands may think fit, women are reduced to domestic slavery, without will of their own, or power of locomotion, otherwise than as permitted by their respective masters' (ibid., p. xi).
Apart from Mary Astell, I think the critique of marriage as embodied in the Appeal is the most scathing I have ever encountered. I have often argued that if tomorrow every woman - in London, for example - were financially independent, few would be the marriages or heterosexual relationships that would last to the following day. Thompson makes the same point, stating that the true test of the relationship between women and men is that of unbought and uncommanded affection, and that if women had no need to be bought and no necessity to be commanded, men might find themselves confined to each others company (ibid., xii). He makes short shrift of the argument that women freely enter marriage." page 393
"Pankhurst says that Thompson 'considered the championship of the emancipation of women was basically interrelated to opposition to private property, the State and organized religion,' and that, "Marriage was the legalized prostitution by which man seized upon woman for his pleasure, taking advantage of her dependence to force her into virtual slavery' (ibid., p. 68), and that his position 'was undoubtedly intensified by his close friend and collaborator, Anna Wheeler, whose forceful personality and bitter experiences added poignancy and emphasis to his writings (ibid., p.70). I suggest she also added a great deal more!" page 397
Grimke-Weld, Angelina , 1863b, Letters to Catherine Beecher, Issac Knapp, Boston
Grimke, Sarah M., ????, Letters on Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, Addresses to Mary S. Parker, reprinted in 1991 by Reprint Services Corp ISBN: 078128158X Hardcover $59.00
GrimkE, Sarah Moore, ????, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, Addressed to Mary S. Parker, reprinted in 1970 by Burt Franklin ISBN: 0833714597 Hardcover $7.50
"In many respects their demand for women's rights was thrust upon them, for they found that they had to establish their right to their own voice before they could raise it against slavery, and they found that the right of self-determination which they were claiming for others was a right which they themselves had been denied." page 216
"Angelina's argument was based on the premise that it was God to whom she owed he allegiance, not man- made laws, and in God's terms slavery was sinful; no number of man-made laws could disguise this or make the institution more acceptable." page 217
"What with the clergy, the press, and the public, the [Grimke] sisters felt some obligation to defend themselves and were drawn more into the issue of women's rights in order to justify their stand. And this did not please the abolitionists: the 'woman question' became a divisive issue in the abolition movement." page 219
"Characteristic of the response to women's protest across the centuries is the assertion that the time is not yet ripe, that there are other issues that are more important, and that the 'women question' will be settled after this particular revolution, or war!" page 219
"Given that they [the Grimke sisters] had antagonized the south by their opposition to slavery, and the north by their accusations of race prejudice, that they had upset the Anti-Slavery Society, were a source of unease to the public and the press, and a major threat to the clergy, one wonders who comprised the constituency for the Grimkes- if one leaves out women, of course, as a male - dominated society is prone to do." page 220
"Men have displaced women from their rightful sphere, she argues, and they have stooped to deceitful means to effect and justify this state of affairs." page 221
" ' . . . if [superiority due to] brute force is what my brethren are claiming, I am willing to let them have all the honor they desire; but if they mean to intimate that mental or moral weakness belongs to woman, more than man, I utterly disclaim the charge.' " page 222
"It is without foundation in scripture, she argues, 'that what is virtue in man is vice in woman' (ibid., p.310) and it is perversity and blasphemy on the part of men to suggest that arrangements they have made for their convenience- which is precisely what the double-standard is- are sanctified by God." page 222
Jameson, Anna, 1976, Sisters of Charity and the Communion of Labour, Hyperion Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 088355268X $24.75 (1855 and 1856, respectively)
"In speaking of her persecutions she [Fanny Wright] said: "The injury and inconvenience of every kind and every hour to which, in these days, a really consistent reformer stands exposed, none can conceive but those who experience them. Such become, as it were, excommunicated, after the fashion of the old Catholic Mother Church, removed even from the sympathy of society, for whose sake they consent to be crucified" ' (Stanton et al., 1881, p. 36). Fanny Wright was a very serious and very courageous woman: any other portrayal of her is purely patriarchal (see Perkins and Wolfson, 1939). " page 166
"Consciousness comes first in Wright's list of priorities: she wants all women to begin with themselves - not men - and to analyze what we know, how we know it and whether we should begin to know very different things." page 167
Martineau, Harriet, 1859, 'Female Industry', Edinburgh Review, vol 109, p. 336
Martineau, Harriet and Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle (ed.), 19??, Harriet Martineau in the London Daily News : Selected Contributions 1852-1866 (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Vol 1600), Hardcover; $75.00
Lipset, Seymor Mrtin (ed.), 1962, Harriet Martineau: Society in America, Doubleday, New York
Martineau, Harriet and Gayle Graham Yates (ed.), 18??, Harriet Martineau on Women, reprinted in 19?? by ?? (Douglass Series on Women's Lives and the Meaning of Gender); Paperback; $14.00(?), Hardcover; $32.00
Martineau, Harriet, 18??, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, reprinted in 19?? by, hardcover; $52.00
Martineau, Harriet and Michael R. Hill (ed.), 18??, How to Observe Morals and Manners, reprinted in 19?? by ??, Paperback; $21.95
Martineau, Harriet, 18??, Martyr Age of the United States (Anti-Slavery Crusade in America), reprinted in 19?? by ?? Hardcover; $14.00
Martineau, Harriet, 1837, 'Politicial Non-Existance of Women', Society in America, Saunders & Otley, New York, vol I, pp 199-207
Martineau, Harriet, 18??, Retrospect of Western Travel, reprinted in 19?? by ?? (American History and Americana Series, No 47), Hardcover; $79.95
Martineau, Harriet, 18??, Society in America, reprinted in 19?? by ?? (Social Science Classics Series), Paperback $11.10 ; Hardcover, $21.95 (Special Order)
"She [Harriet Martineau] was adamant that men had organized society so that: 'Nothing is thus left open to women but marriage' (ibid., p. 126) and so that men's interest could consistently be catered for. This pattern 'must remain while women continue to be ill educated, passive and subservient; or well educated, vigorous and free only upon sufferance' (ibid., p.130), she argued." page 178
" " She [Harriet Martineau] added, ' is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race? If so, what is the ground of this limitation?' (ibid., p. 143)." page 180
"Martineau had great faith in the power of reason and assumed that once the arguments against women's inferiority and subordination were clearly put the justice of the case would be undeniable, and men - who continually portrayed themselves as just, as one of the justifications for holding power - would take steps to remove the injustices that were perpetrated against women." page 180
"Too readily today the pressure that women such as Harriet Martineau worked under is quickly dismissed. Few would be the contemporary feminists, I suspect (myself included), who could withstand the harassment, the taunts, the jibes, the abuse, that were par for the course for feminists in years past. I am sure they took their toll, and perhaps it is why some of them elected to present a public and not a personal face to the world. " page 182
Harriet Taylor (1807-1858) was the wife of John Stuart Mill, author of (Subjection of Women. Mill attributed many of the ideas in Subjection to his wife.
"Harriet Taylor is not puzzled as the origin of this peculiar arrangement: women have been denied access to every form of power or possible independence, and restricted to the realm of administering to men and their needs, and 'the only reason that can be given is that men like it. It is agreeable to them that men should live for their own sake, women for the sake of men' ...." page 192
"Men have discouraged every form of growth and development in women, asserts Taylor, in order to channel them into marriage, maternity, and maids for men, and have insisted that they passively conform to this oppressive role, for 'a man likes to have his own will, but does not like that his domestic companion should have a will different from his' ...." page 192
"Male experience is not the sum total of human experience, claims Taylor, and men are not the yardstick for humanity; the world does not exist simply to meet their needs, although they have managed to impose such arrangements upon it." page 193
"She [Harriet Taylor] exposes the absurdities of the male reasoning process when she says - in what I see as 'classic feminist style' - that if men are so sure that nature intended women for marriage, motherhood, and servitude, why then do they find it necessary to erect so many barriers to other options, why are they required to force women to be restricted to this role? For if women's 'preference be natural', she says, 'there can be no necessity for enforcing it by law' and it has never been considered necessary in any other area 'to make laws compelling people to follow their inclination' ...." page 193
"But apart from this, a woman's survival-social and economic- will 'usually depend on the good-will of those who hold the undue power' so that if she wishes to survive, she must cultivate the good will of a man, she must be agreeable, she must even oft agree that he is content with her oppression. And foolish are the men, says Taylor, who take such statements as accurate, or voluntary: they are the statements of an oppressed group and they are made to please the masters on whom women depend." page 194
"Perhaps it was personal experience that made her [Harriet Taylor] so angry about marriage arrangements - 'in the present system of habits and opinions, girls enter into what is called a contract perfectly ignorant of the conditions of it, and that they should be so is considered absolutely essential to their fitness' (Hayek, 1969, p.77) - and so disposed toward liberal divorce laws (see also Constance Rover, 1970)." page 194
Fuller, Margaret and Jeffrey Steel Editor), 1992, The Essential Margaret Fuller (American Women Writers Series), Rutgers Univ Pr, Paperback ISBN: 0813517788 $18.00
Fuller, Margaret (Editor), 1984, Letters of Margaret Fuller : 1842-1844 (Volume 3), Cornell Univ Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0801417074 $45.00
Fuller, Margaret and Robert N. Hudspeth (Editor), 1988, Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1848-49 (Volume 5), Cornell Univ Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0801421748 $45.00
Fuller, Margaret and Robert N. Hudspeth (Editor), 1994, The Letters of Margaret Fuller : 1850 and Undated (Volume 6), Cornell Univ Pr, Hardcover $45.00 ISBN: 0801430690
Fuller, Margaret Fuller and Catherine C. Mitchell (Editor), 1995, Margaret Fuller's New York Journalism : A Biographical Essay and Key Writings, Univ of Tennessee Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0870498703 $32.50
Fuller, Margaret and Mary Kelley (Editor), 1994, The Portable Margaret Fuller (Viking Portable Library), Penguin USA, Paperback ISBN: 0140176659 $13.95
Fuller, Margaret, 1991, Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (Prairie State Book Series), Univ of Illinois Pr (Trd), Paperback ISBN: 0252061640 $10.95 (1844)
Fuller, Margaret, Larry J. Reynolds , and Susan Belasco Smith (Editor), 1992, These Sad but Glorious Days : Dispatches from Europe, 1846-1850, Yale Univ Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0300050380 $44.50
Fuller, Margaret and Bell Gale Chevigny, 1994, The Woman and the Myth : Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings, Northeastern Univ Pr, Paperback ISBN: 1555531814 $16.95; Hardcover ISBN: 1555531822 $45.00
Fuller, Margaret and Donna Dickenson (Editor), 1994,Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings (The World's Classics), Oxford Univ Pr (Trade), Paperback ISBN: 0192830856 $10.95
So blatant is the misrepresentation of Margaret Fuller in the authoritative records, and so readily has this misrepresentation been accepted (or excused where exposed), that it is possible to dismiss completely any claims of objectivity or veracity, or even fairness, and to argue that male fantasies abound in what we have been led to believe are unchallengeable sources. The image constructed of Margaret Fuller suggests that men may invent anything they choose and pass it off as truth. We are worse than gullible if we take their truths at face value- particularly when they portray women negatively." page 201
"For those men who argue that women are content, or that they are well provided for, there is, she says, an acid test of their conviction: 'early I perceived that men never, in any extreme of despair, wished to be women. On the contrary, they were ever ready to taunt one another at any sign of weakness, with, "Art thou not like the women, who" - The passage ends various ways, according to the occasion and rhetoric of the speaker', says Fuller (ibid., p.30)." page 206
"She [Margaret Fuller] did not believe that men were innocent and that the whole edifice of sex inequality was a terrible accident." page 208
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1992, Eighty Years and More : Reminiscences 1815-1897, Northeastern Univ Pr, Paperback ISBN: 1555531377 $19.00 ; Hardcover ISBN: 1555531369 $42.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1977, Elizabeth Cady Stanton : As Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, Ayer Co Pub, Hardcover ISBN: 0405001142 $56.95
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady and Ellen Carol Dubois (Editor), 1992, The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader : Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, Northeastern Univ Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 1555531490 $42.50
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1881, The History of Woman Suffrage vol 1 , co-authored with SB Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1882 , The History of Woman Suffrage vol 2 , co-authored with SB Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1886, The History of Woman Suffrage vol 3 , co-authored with SB Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, ????, History of Women Suffrage Vol 5, Ayer Co Pub, Hardcover ISBN: 0405001126 $48.50
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, ????, History of Women Suffrage Volume 6, Hardcover ISBN: 0405001134 $56.50
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, ????, History of Women Suffrage, Ayer Co Pub, Hardcover ISBN: 0405001088 $56.95
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1979, History of Woman Suffrage, Ayer Co Pub, Hardcover ISBN: 040500107X $364.00
Stanton, Elizabeth, 1972, The Woman's Bible (American Women: Images and Realities), Arno Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 040504481X $47.97
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1989b, The Woman's Bible, European Publishing House, New York, reprinted 1978 Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, Seattle
Stanton, Elizabeth C., 1985, Womans Bible, Dufour Editions, Paperback ISBN: 090491996X $18.95
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1993, The Woman's Bible, Northeastern Univ Pr, Paperback ISBN: 1555531628 $21.00
"Few and far between are the references in literature to the bonds between women, yet they are described on page after page of History of Woman Suffrage, and this deep friendship and commitment among women is not just confined to Stanton and Anthony. But it was Stanton and Anthony who together appreciated how important it was that women's lives and activities and ideas be described from the perspective of women and 'handed on' to future generations who would then receive an important gift, which they themselves had not inherited." page 259
"It is characteristic of Elizabeth Cady Stanton when she comments on a letter received from a reverend gentleman- who, in keeping with the spirit of her response, shall remain nameless - who criticised Stanton for using one of his anecdotes on Lucretia Mott, without giving him due credit. 'I laughed him to scorn', she writes, 'that he should have thought it was my duty to have done so. I told him plainly that he belonged to a class of "white male citizens" who had robbed me of all civil and political rights: of property, children and personal freedom; and now it ill became him to call me to account for using one of his little anecdotes that, ten to one, he had cribbed from some woman. I told him that I considered his whole class as fair game for literary pilfering. That women had been taxed to build colleges to educate men, and if we could pick up a literary crumb that had fallen from their feasts, we surely had a right to it.' With a final flourish, she adds: 'Moreover, I told him that man's duty in the world was to work, to dig, and delve for jewels, real and ideal, and lay them at woman's feet, for her to use as she might see fit,' for after all, was not this what men were urging as the proper pedestal for women and the desired relationship between the sexes, and therefore, should he not 'feel highly complimented, instead of complaining, that he had written something I thought worth using?' ...." pages 262-263
"And, if anything, we are better informed than were some of our foremothers on the invisibility of women and the way in which it is realised. We have been lulled into a sense of security which might prove to be false, for frequently we assume that we are different that it simply would not be possible to make the current women's liberation movement 'disappear' to future generations." page 266-267
"The women who were responsible for the wording of the Declaration [of Sentiments of the 1948 women's rights conference] were well aware that it was in the power of men to bring about change. If the prevailing situation were unsatisfactory to men, they could do something about it and unless and until they did 'put their own house in order', women were justified in claiming that the oppression of women suited men, that men were nothing other than tyrants, regardless of the account they gave of their own behaviour." pages 282-283
"Again and again she [Elizabeth Cady Stanton] tried to make it clear that it should not be important to women to be acceptable to men and that if all women became 'unacceptable' and defined their own terms of their own existence, much of the battle would be won, because men would have no alternative but to 'accept' unacceptable women- or go without! She deplored the strategy of being 'feminine' to achieve women's rights, because she thought that it was ultimately self-defeating." page 287
"Reading just some of the things that Stanton said and wrote, it becomes impossible to believe that there is anything new in the modern women's movement." page 288
"... it was men who talked more, that they dominated talk, and that they were likely to suffer anything ranging from resentment to apoplexy when they were prevented from talking and were required to be silent and to listen. It thus came as something of a shock to realise that Elizabeth Cady Stanton had known this (without benefit of a research degree) a century before." page 288
". . . she [Elizabeth Cady Stanton] stated that: 'When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer books, catechisms and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brain of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions' delivered so readily by men, in the guise of divinely ordained authority ...." page 289
"Could the dark secrets of those insane asylums be brought to light', adds Stanton, 'we would be shocked to know the countless number of rebellious wives, sisters, and daughters that are thus annually sacrificed to false customs and conventionalisms, and barbarous laws made by men for women' (ibid.)." page 304
"There is no doubt that once the issue of the vote became 'respectable', so too did Susan B. Anthony. Those who 'moved on' to other issues associated with women's oppression also tended to 'move out' of the records we have inherited of woman suffrage. This raises the question of why Anthony is to some extent honoured while some of her sisters have 'disappeared'. " page 309
"It is sobering to read of the hardship and harassment Stone endured as she toured the country on her own lecturing against slavery and for woman's rights. She was thwarted and abused by many members of the clergy who obstructed her attempts to gain a hall in which to speak, she confronted mobs and jeering faces and was often greeted with a hail of spitballs. Missiles were hurled at her and, 'Once, in the winter, a pane of glass was taken out of the window behind her, the nozzle of a hose was put through, and she was suddenly deluged with cold water in the midst of her speech. She put on a shawl and went on with her lecture.' (ibid., p.80)." page 353
"Stone firmly advocated a woman's right to her own body and counseled male continence, and contraception. She was constantly concerned over women's economic dependence and sought better education and better jobs for women, to reduce such dependence. Initially disillusioned by organised religion, she became silent on the issue of the Church, in later years. She came to accept that the family - with some modifications - constituted the best context for women. She upheld the sanctity of hearth and home with the proviso that women had some money and an interest." page 356
"George Elliot finds herself confronted with the same contradiction experience by both Fuller and Wollstonecraft (and Aphra Behn too), the very contradiction she is indirectly addressing, of trying to declare her endorsement and support for women, while at the same time retaining her reliability and respectability." page 239
"She [George Elliot] recognizes - even if McGuinn does not - that it has been a much-used strategy to condemn a woman's personal life so that it removes the necessity to address her ideas." page 241
"That it is men who have the vested interest in the status quo, that it is men who are benefiting from denying women's intellectual existence and that it is men who are insisting that what is best for them is what is best for women, too, are not the only aspects of feminist theory that George Elliot shares with her predecessors and that she left as a legacy to her successors." page 241
"Elliot if perfectly aware that masculinity is prestigious because men have power. She is also aware that the male perspective on the world - while prestigious - is not necessarily desirable, for it ignores much, distorts much, and yet is not open to challenge of change because of the power of men. 'Men pay a heavy price for their reluctance to encourage self help and independent resources in women,' ...asserts Elliot, emphasizing that there is much which men cannot or will not see." page 242
"I have always thought that one of the crucial features of the analysis of John Stuart Mill was his assertion that it was insufficient for women to be slaves, but that they must be willing slaves if patriarchy is to continue." page 402
"The lives of women says, Nightingale, how frivolous, how unworthy they are, once women make available all their sexual, emotional, intellectual, verbal resources to men. There is nothing left but the constant lie that they are happy, the constant denial of their own humanity. [my emphasis] And why is this so? Why must one sex sacrifice itself, while the other profits? It is because men have made the world and they have made it to their liking; they enjoy the benefits it bestows. It would be less beneficial for them - even inconvenient - if women were to cultivate any interests of their own. It would also be psychologically disturbing for a man if he were not the sole centre [sic] of a woman's existence." page 403
"Out of the experience of double oppression Sojourner Truth made many of the links between the two, and helped to expose many of the limitations, contradictions and falsities in the standard white-male justification for white, and male, supremacy. Stating that women were the slaves of men when one had been a black slave of whites was not only radical, but very forceful." page 370
Gage, Maltilda Joslyn, 1880, 'Who Planned the Tennessee Campaign of 1862?', National Citizen Tract, no 1
Gage, Maltilda Joslyn, 1890, Dangers of the Hour
Gage, Maltilda Joslyn, 1893, Woman, Church, and State: The Original Expose of Male Collaboration against the Female Sex, Charles Kerr, Chicago, reprinted 1980, Persephone Press, Watertown, Mass. and 1992, Ayer Co., Salem, New Hampshire
"I could have read such an entry [Warbasse's discussion of Gage in Notable American Women, 1971] and still not made the links between the woman being described and the woman who wrote the three chapters of the History (among other things), which, to put it bluntly, make Stanton look less than really radical, and Anthony positively reactionary." page 313
" 'Although woman has performed much of the labor of the world, her industry and her economy have been the very means of increasing her degradation' (ibid., p.27) asserts Gage, and goes on to explain with clarity and precision that, because men own women's labour, the harder women work, the richer men get. This, says Gage, means that the financial distance between women and men increases as women work harder and display more initiative, for the women do not reap the products of their toil - the products go to men! This is the touchstone of Gage's analysis, that 'woman has always been robbed of the fruits of her own toil' (ibid., p.28), and that the more she toils, the more men profit and in contrast, the more 'degraded' does woman appear.
And there is no doubt in Gage's mind, how this has been allowed to happen, how such a monstrous practice has been made 'acceptable' and seen within society as a reasonable and justifiable arrangement. The Church, says Gage, has provided the 'logic' and rationale for this gross inequality. Under male control, the church has declared woman to be inferior and men have then been free to steal woman's creative and physical energy. When women's resources have been taken away, then the Church stands vindicated for it is demonstrable that women are without resources and are therefore inferior! To Gage it was patently obvious that men - under the guise of religious legitimation - were constructing sexual inequality, were taking away women's resources and then blaming women because they had no resources.
Gage's documentation of women's past achievements was not just an interesting 'extra', but a fundamental part of her analysis; it was her 'proof' of male theft of female labour. Integral to her thesis was that men had not just deprived women of the fruits of their toil in the physical sense (in domestic terms, and in the pitifully low remuneration women received when they did engage in paid labour) but that men were stealing women's creative, spiritual and intellectual energy as well. This was why these women had disappeared- this was why women's creative and cultural contribution was not transmitted from one generation to the next - it did not belong to women, it was not theirs to pass on! It was taken over by men and used to further their own interests (which may have meant anything from suppressing it to passing off the ideas, contributions, as their own)." pages 318-319
More of Gage's analysis: "The men get richer, the women get poorer, no matter how hard women work, how creative they are, how profound their insights, no matter how much they contribute." page 322
Gage on Christianity: "It is a rationale produced by men in the attempt to explain and make acceptable their violent and barbarous treatment of women; if they did not treat women in this way they would have no need of Christian ideology." page 324
"If we are content to believe, argues Gage, that the Church was misogynist but that its influence has now waned, that things are 'better', that the outrages committed against women in its name are but features of the past, explained by reference to ignorance and superstition - then we are dangerously misled. The principles that informed the Church now inform the State; there has been a transfer of power from one patriarchal agency to another, but the fundamental premise that women are inferior, and that this calls for punishment - a premise given more substance during the ascendancy of the Church - has now been transferred, and is embedded with social sanction, in the principles of the State. For society in a 'Christian civilization' takes much of its 'meaning' from the system and symbols constructed by the Christian religion. The practices, the fashions, the outward manifestations may have changed, argues Gage, but not the innermost belief.
In putting forward this thesis that the Church and the State are manifestations of patriarchy (with the Church providing the rationale for the functions of the State), Gage is bringing together those many strands which in a patriarchal frame of reference are usually perceived as unrelated. Taking woman as the central starting point and assessing historical practices in relation to her, and through her eyes, Gage is immediately able to make links between the sexual double standard, the appropriation of women's bodies, the enslavement of women, the practice of witch-hunting. Historical periods, practices, values, which when viewed by men have often seemed bizarre, inexplicable, unaccountable outbursts with no identifiable causes, become within Gage's framework the pattern of patriarchy, the systematised oppression of women.
Theft is a fundamental concept in Gage's work: women had power, and full humanity, says Gage (and provides example after example), and men seized it. Even in the early days of the Christian religion the Church was open to both sexes, but from the fourth to the ninth centuries groups of men progressively deprived women of these rights - they took away ordination, then deaconship, then forbade women to serve at the altar, and they robbed abbesses of all priestly functions. Their justification was that it was women who had brought sin into the world; this was the source of their inferiority and the reason they had to be punished.
But where does this idea of original sin come from, asks Gage, for in the early stages of the Christian religion the doctrine of original sin was denied. She traces its introductions to Augustine and shows how convenient it was for him to produce such a theory, and how quickly it was taken up by the fathers of the Church who found it a most attractive, self-enhancing, and profitable idea to promote." pages 325-326
More of Gage's analysis: " 'What was termed magic among men, was called witchcraft in woman. The one was rarely, the other invariably, punished' .... It was the sex that was the crime.
While evidence of witchcraft assumed many forms (attractive, wealthy, or old and infirm woman all being likely suspects), it was knowledgeable women that the fathers of the Church and State feared most and did their utmost to eliminate, argues Gage. The term witch used to mean simply a woman of superior knowledge, she says. It signified a wise and learned woman, and it was this idea of women possessing some knowledge and some power that men found so frightening. It was outside the control of men, it detracted from rather than contributed to male resources and for this reason it had to be seized from women and made the property of men." page 328
More Gage:" Patriarchy is based on the appropriation of women's bodies and energy by men." page 328
"In Gyn/Ecology (1978) Mary Daly comments on this aspect of Gage's analysis. Gage named the problem accurately, says Daly, she recognized that 'the church feared and hated women's knowledge and power. She correctly named women the healers, who were therefore hated by the church and its sons' (1978, p. 217). The Church, adds Daly, 'had to erase women with the power to heal, not only by killing them, but by denying they healed of their own power' (ibid., p.218). If women were seen to be a source of knowledge, power, and healing, then the only way to sustain the belief that women had no resources of their own was to insist that this power originated in another source - it must have come from the devil. If woman was not serving god/man - the two being conflated under christianity - she must be serving the enemy, for she could not exist of her own, serving herself or her own needs; patriarchy has no such autonomous category for woman." page 329
Gage on witchcraft and the christian church: "But it also gave husbands an option: 'Husbands who had ceased to care for their wives or by reason of their sickness or for any other cause found then a burden . . . now found an easy method' of ending their marriages (ibid., p.127): they accused their wives of witchcraft. And fear was instilled in women: violence against women, by men, from which there is no protection, no immunity. Women were forced into their place that men had decreed, robbed of all their material and psychological resources - enslaved to meet the needs of men.
In the last chapter of Woman, Church, and State, Gage brings all these strands together, under the title "Past, Present, and Future'; it is incredible. 'The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that of the church towards woman,' says Gage, 'a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her own judgement, her conscience, her own will' (ibid., p.238). 'The whole theory, regarding woman, under Christianity, has been based upon the conception that she has no right to live for herself alone. Her duty to others has continuously been placed before her and her training has ever been that of self-sacrifice. Taught from the pulpit and legislative halls that her position must always be secondary even to her children, her right to life has been admitted only insofar as its reacting effect upon another could be predicated' (ibid. , p. 239)." pages 330-331
"She [Gage] acknowledges that some people may find this difficult to believe - it goes against everything society teaches, it is 'outside' the meanings and assumptions of patriarchy: 'The superstitions of the church, the miseries of woman, her woes, tortures, burnings, rackings and all the brutalities she has endured in the church, the state, the family, under the sanction of christianity would be incredible had we not the most undeniable evidence of their existence, not alone in the past, but as shown by the teachings, laws, customs of the present time' (ibid., p.241), argues Gage. 'The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it' (ibid., p.243).
Despite what we may have been taught, argues Gage, the Church has never been the leader in great reforms, has never advanced justice, equality, or humanitarian concerns: 'the world has not grown wise' under christianity (ibid., p.244). On the contrary, the patriarchal Church has been a primary source of evil: 'Slavery and prostitution, persecutions for heresy, the inquisition with its six hundred modes of torture, the destruction of learning, the oppression of science, the systematized betrayal of confiding innocence, the recognized and unrecognized polygamy of man, the denial to woman of a right to herself, her thought, her wages, her children, to a share in the government which rules her; . . . all these and a myriad more, are parts of what is known as christian civilization' (ibid.).
Gage names men and their Church as the enemy, as a form of legalised crime against women, and she is completely convinced that there can be no 'reform', there can only be overthrow and elimination." page 333
"But she predicts that there will be conflict - 'looking forward, I see evidence of a conflict even more severe than any yet fought' (ibid.) as one half of humanity rebels against the other half and takes back its rightful resources. it is her own uncompromising attitude, her own insistence on men and their Church and their State (and to which I would add, their science), as the enemy of women, that made Gage unacceptable to many women in the woman's rights movement, for they were often intent on reform, on avoiding confrontation, bent on persuasion rather than rebellion, concerned with compromise not revolution; and many of them were committed Christians." page 334
On Gage's disappearance from history: "There was at least one controversial incident at this convention [ the 1888 'National' sponsored convention of the International Council of Women]: all the sessions began with a prayer, and the session Gage chaired began with a prayer to a female deity. Some women expressed outrage; Gage expressed dismay that women could believe themselves to be excluded from the deity and she went to considerable lengths to point out that the translations of the bible had been undertaken by (very) fallible men who had systematically eliminated women from the imagery of the deity in the attempt to enhance their own image of themselves as 'closer to god'. But, insisted Gage, women were equally part of the deity and it was their duty to assert their presence and visibility." page 341, several versions of what follows on next few pages
" 'Through listening to Gage, we hear the story of a radical feminist movement which raised almost every issue of woman's oppression explored by the current wave of feminism . . . the story ends in 1890 [with the union of the National and the American suffrage organizations], when the woman's movement was replaced by a conservative caricature of feminism committed only to achieving the vote' (ibid., p. xxxix)." page 347
"Gage's worst fears were realised. Despite her analysis, her energy, her actions, she has been negated and denied. Unable to use her ideas, patriarchy has elected to lose them. It is as if she had not existed. Yet it seems to me from the few fragments I have been able to piece together, that she, more than any other woman of the past (with the exception of Mary Beard, 1946), identified and understood the process of denial of woman's existence, the theft of woman's being, in a male-dominated society." page 347
"It is irrefutable that those who write and edit the records select evidence which confirms and justifies their own scheme of values; it is what men have done from the bible to Margaret Fuller; it is what Susan B. Anthony (with a little help from her friends) did to Gage; it is what I am doing here. By such a process of selection, many individuals and activities that are inconsistent with the values being put forward by the writers and editors are omitted, and are in danger of becoming consigned to obscurity, if not oblivion." page 48
Bodichon, Barbara, 1866, Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women, Social Science Association, Pamphlet reprint, Fawcett Library, London
. . They did not realize how preposterous and subversive their whole conception seemed, but continued to believe that because it was just it must soon be popular. And so they were filled with hope' (1928, pp. 109-10)." pages 419-420
Butler, Josephine, 1898, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade, Marshal, London, reprinted in 1989 by Hyperion Press
Fawcett, Millicent, and E. M. Turner, 1927, Josephine Butler: Her Work and Principles and their Meaning for the Twentieth Century, Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, London
"There was too much work to do, she argued, for every woman to think it was her duty to marry and rear children. The world was in need of women without domestic ties, women who could move freely into the public arena and represent women's interests so that male power did not continue to go unchecked. Once women could overcome their feeling that it was woman's destiny to be a wife and mother and that 'failure' to achieve this end was failure to live a full life- and women should overcome this feeling because it was certainly not in their own interest to retain it - then women would be breaking free of the sexual economics which had kept them in subordination." page 480
"Judith Walkowitz says that: 'Bulter's feminism combined two distinct tendencies - advocating sex equality while celebrating the virtues of a distinctive women's culture' (1980, p.117). Her brand of feminism is not so far removed from that of today. I wonder whether with our current campaigns against pornography and violence against women, we will be portrayed to future generations as repressed, prudish missionaries." pages 480-481
"Speaking on behalf of black women in Boston in 1895, Josephine Ruffin clearly stated the white image of black women, its false, pernicious and divisive nature and asserted that the time had come 'to stand forth and declare ourselves and our principles, to teach an ignorant and suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all good, aspiring women. Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges,' she said." page 365
Pankhurst, Christabel, (n.d.b.), 'Militant Methods', Votes for Women, leaflet 63, The Woman's Press, London
Pankhurst, Christabel, (n.d.c.), 'A Challange', Women's Social and Political Union, leaflet 91, The Woman's Press, London
Pankhurst, Christabel, (n.d.d.), 'Burnt Letters', Women's Social and Political Union, leaflet 100, The Woman's Press, London
Pankhurst, Christabel, 1912, 'Broken Windows', Women's Social and Political Union, leaflet 88, The Woman's Press, London
Pankhurst, Christabel, 1913, The Great Scourge and How to End It, E. Pankhurst, London
Pankhurst, Christabel, 1959, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote, Hutchinson, London
Pankhurst, Emmeline, 1914, My Own Story, Eveleigh Nash, London, reprinted 1979 by Virago, London
Pankhurst, E. Sylvia and Kathryn Dodd (ed.), 1993, A Sylvia Pankhurst Reader, Manchester Univ Pr, Paperback, $19.95; Hardcover; $59.95 (1931?)
Pankhurst, Sylvia, 1911, The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement 1905-1910, Gay & Hancock, London
Pankhurst, Sylvia, 1931, The Suffragette Movement, Longmans, London reprinted 1977 by Virago, London
"What Christabel [Pankhurst] discovered in the process was an insight not unknown to many of her foremothers (Florence Nightingale among them) even if not previously recognized by herself: that when women cease to be willing, men are either obliged to give way to women's demands or else they are required to demonstrate their greater power and force to keep women in their place. The manners of chivalry can only be maintained while women willing abide by the restrictive rules men have imposed upon them; once women challenge those rules, chivalry is dead. It would be impossible for men to argue that women have all the rights and respect that they need, that they are treated with deference and consideration, at the same time as the same men abused and assaulted women. For Christabel this policy of challenging men had much to recommend it, for either way women could gain; either men would immediately concede the vote for women, or the whole pretense of respect for women would be dropped and would stand exposed as a pretense.
This was the analysis behind the 'altercation' that Christabel provoked at the Manchester Free Trade Hall on 13 October 1905. She planned that she and Annie Kenney should go to goal (she set out from home on the night of the meeting stating gaily, 'I shall sleep in prison tonight!' S. Pankhurst, 1931, p.189), not for the publicity (although it was important, for there was no point to the exercise unless people knew about it), but because it would demonstrate- perhaps even once and for all - that men were prepared to use their power to imprison women for stepping out of their sphere. . . . the whole point was to make 'the enemy show his hand' and in this respect, Christabel was certainly successful." page 562-563
"The style of the WSPU [Women's Social and Political Union, an English woman's suffrage organization] had emerged. It was a woman's organization which not only functioned independently of men but took the unprecedented step of setting itself up in opposition to men. Parliament was referred to as the 'Men's Parliament'; women started to hold their (huge) meetings in nearby premises and to refer to them as the 'Women's Parliament'. Whereas previous suffrage organizations had tried to convince men that they had nothing to fear from women's enfranchisement, the WSPU began its policy of convincing men that they had much to fear if women were not enfranchised." page 568
"The women who joined the WSPU had nothing to lose and were therefore able to call men's bluff. The argument that they were putting back women's cause would stand up no longer. As far as the WSPU were concerned it couldn't go back any further. The argument that men wouldn't like them if they behaved in this way was not valid. Men didn't like women anyway; if they did they would concede women the vote. The argument that it was unladylike and uncivilized to behave in this militant fashion could be readily countered with the argument that they took their stands from men who were behaving in an ungentleman-like, uncivilized, and treacherous fashion in relation to women's suffrage, and women's struggle. The women of the WSPU began to set their own terms to which men were required to respond, instead of simply reacting to the terms set by men. The WSPU became an alternative political power base, and this contrasted starkly with the male definition of women's powerlessness, which many women had learnt to accept. Christabel Pankhurst made it perfectly plain that this was a glorious struggle, that it was waged in the name of dignity and freedom, that those who joined in were of heroic dimensions, and that for women entry to the militant suffrage campaign meant entry to a realm of purpose, confidence, self-esteem." page 569-570
"That past and present women's movement can so readily be disparaged by assertions which, not unintentionally, are almost impossible to repudiate (or to substantiate - but that, of course, is a very different matter) is not the only similarity share by rebellious women over time. In the period of the suffragettes there were members of parliament, members of the press, and members of the public who professed to be in sympathy with the women's aims, but because they 'deplored their tactics' found themselves unable - unfortunately - to offer support. Having been informed myself on numerous occasions that my arguments are sound but my (aggressive) manner 'spoils my case', I can sympathise with the members of the WSPU who, on encountering the same dismissal, were enraged, frustrated, and totally unconvinced by this line of reasoning. It was seen by militant suffragettes then (as I suggest it should be seen by feminists today) as merely an excuse for not dealing with women's ideas and experience." pages 572-573
"This brings me to a glaring omission in the appraisals of the theory and practice of the militants. It is undeniable that the success of their movement depended greatly on attracting large numbers of women to their cause, and it goes without saying that in order to do this, the movement had to be attractive to women. It seems, however, that there is little that is attractive about assault, imprisonment, hunger striking and forcible feeding, yet there were always far more volunteers for these ordeals than were ever needed. Besides, the movement was rarely presented as attractive in the popular press, where the suffragettes were condemned - often crudely, as embittered women, but sometimes more insidiously: 'Officialdom everywhere treated this militancy as a pernicious form of hysteria,' says Sylvia Pankhurst (1931, p.229) indicating the way women's actions were undermined." pages 576-577
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins and Carol Farley Kessler (ed.), 1995, Charlotte Perkins Gilman : Her Progress Towards Utopia With Selected Writings (Utopianism and Communitarianism), Syracuse Univ Pr, Paperback ISBN: 0815603045 $16.95
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, 1980, The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader : The Yellow Wallpaper, and Other Fiction, Random House, Paperback ISBN: 0394739337 $14.00
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Concerning Children, Small Baynard, Boston
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins and Denise D. Knight (Editor), 1994, The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Univ Pr of Virginia, Hardcover ISBN: 0813915244 $93.25
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, 1979, Herland, Pantheon Books, Paperback ISBN: 0394736656 $12.00
Gilman, Charlotte P., 1992, Herland, Peter Smith Pub, Hardcover ISBN: 0844666114 $22.50
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Barbara H. Solomon (Editor), 1992, Herland and Selected Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Signet Classic), (includes 'the Yellow Wallpaper,' New American Library, Paperback ISBN: 0451525620 $5.95
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, 1976, His Religion and Hers : A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers, Hyperion Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0883553775 $31.00 (1923- Century Company)
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1903a, The Home: Its Work and Influence, McClure, Phillpis, New York, reprinted 1972 with an introductions by William L. O'Neill, University of Illinois Press
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Denise D. Knight (ed.), 1996, The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Univ of Delaware Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0874135869 $32.50
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1935, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, D. Appleton - Century, New York
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1991, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman : An Autobiography (Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography), Univ of Wisconsin Pr, Paperback ISBN: 0299127443 $15.95; Hardcover ISBN: 0299127400 $37.50
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1911, The Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture, Charlton, New York
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1899, Women and Economics: The Economic Factor between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Revolution, Small Maynard, Boston, reprinted in 1994 by Prometheus Books of Amherst, New York, Paperback ISBN: 0879758848 $11.95
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper, 1990, Orchises Pr, Paperback ISBN: 091406116X $2.00
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elaine Hedges(ed.), 1996, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Feminist Pr, Paperback ISBN: 1558611584 $5.95
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Thomas L. Erskine, 1993, The 'Yellow Wallpaper' (Women Writers : Texts and Contexts), Rutgers Univ Pr, Paperback ISBN: 0813519942 $8.00; Hardcover ISBN: 0813519934 $30.00
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins and Robert Shulman (Editor), 1996, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (World's Classics), Oxford Univ Pr (Trade), Paperback ISBN: 019282449X $8.95
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1994, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings, Bantam Books (Classic & Loveswept), Paperback ISBN: 055321375X $5.95
Gilman, Charlotte, 1994, The Yellow Wallpaper : The Wallpaper Replies, Slough Pr, Paperback ISBN: 0941720888 $9.95
Regarding mental illness: "Gilman suspected that in a 'sick' society, women who reacted, far from being ill, were demonstrating a healthy and positive response.
Women and Economics (1899) begins with her fundamental thesis that marriage is not a union of two souls or a partnership of equals and that, far from representing the most developed form of relationship in the animal kingdom, it constitutes the most degraded: 'We are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, and the only animal species in which the sex relation is also an economic relation. With us an entire sex lives in a relation of economic dependence on the other sex' (in Gilman, 1899, p.5). So much for progress and civilization!" page 522
"Gilman challenged the whole conceptual framework of economics in much the same way was as[sic- should be 'as ' with no 'was'] Lisa Leghorn and Kathy Parker were to do in 1981; economics as a system has its origin in a male frame of reference and is designed to account for male experience. And women's experience, argues Gilman, is fundamentally and drastically different. What work women do - particularly in terms of emotional management and psychological support - does not count as work, for the very reason that men don't do it. For women there is no relationship between education and remuneration, between work and wealth (unless it be an inverse one where middle-class and upper-class women who work less have access to more resources by virtue of the wealth of the men to whom they belong.) But when women's economic basis is sex attraction, Gilman asserts, access to male resources can be a very precarious business indeed (as she well knew) and ultimately women can find that they are all of one class: 'when the woman, left alone with no man to "support" her, tries to meet her own economic necessities, the difficulties which confront her, prove conclusively what the general economic status of the woman is' (ibid., p10)." page 523
"Marriage - which men have claimed to be the only legitimate relationship between the sexes - as socially, psychologically and economically constructed,
Asserts Gilman, has nothing to offer women. 'The fear exhibited that women generally, once fully independent will not marry, is proof of how well it has been known that only dependence forced them to marriage as it was' (ibid., p.91)" page 524
Kennedy, Lisa, 1996, The Ida B. Wells Reader, William Morrow & Co, Hardcover ISBN: 0688132669
Wells, Ida B, Al I Obaba (Editor), 1912, Ida B. Wells Tells About Lynchings, African Islamic Mission Pubns, Paperback ISBN: 0916157636 $3.95
Wells, Ida B., and Miriam Decosta-Willis (Editor), 1996, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, Beacon Pr, Paperback ISBN: 0807070653 $14.00
Wells, Ida B., 1969, On Lynchings : Southern Horrors, a Red Record Mob Rule in New Orleans, Ayer Co Pub, Hardcover ISBN: 0405018495 $37.96
Wells, Ida B., Harris Trudier (Editor), 1991, Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers), Oxford Univ Pr, Hardcover ISBN: 0195062027 $42.00
"This marked her entry into journalism, and during 1884-1891 she wrote for black newspapers across the country. Everywhere she traveled she found conditions for blacks worsening (another challenge to the thesis of history as a process of gradual evolutionary improvement), as 'legal' means were used to deprive blacks in the southern states the few rights they had been granted after the Civil War. Segregation was everywhere becoming the rule in the south and was frequently enforced by violence." page 358
"Ida Wells-Barnett was not the only woman to encounter such treatment from some of her white sisters in the suffrage movement. This was in stark contrast to the early days, when Angelina and Sarah Grimke had come to acknowledge their oppression as women through their anti-slavery activities. Gerda Lerner (1981) states that 'most of the early feminists came to their convictions because of their interest in abolition. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelly, and scores of others found that if they wished for reforms in general, they would first have to fight for their right as women to engage in public political activity' (p. 98). Although in general many of the anti-slavery women had shown a much greater awareness and refusal to condone racism, that was in the days when the demand for suffrage was itself a radical issue, when both black women and white women who claimed their rights had together been vilified. By the end of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth century, women who were working for suffrage were not necessarily radical at all, but at times were even the pillars of the respectable community, who endorsed many of the values of the status quo- including racism - in most respects, except those which related to the position of white women. The argument that upper- and middle- class white women were denied the vote while immigrant and black men were not was not an uncommon one, as an illustration of injustice. And the premise that association with black women would be harmful in the attempt to secure the vote also had its adherents - particularly when it was believed that southern white men would support the enfranchisement of white women - but not black women - precisely because it would help to strengthen white supremacy.
Stating that the passage of the federal amendment for woman suffrage was so close that nothing should be done to jeopardise it, Ida Husted Harper asked Mary Church Terrell to withhold the application from a federation of black women's clubs which sought affiliation with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (Sterling, 1979, p.146). The suffrage movement had shifted from identifying with the cause of blacks, to trying to ensure that there were no links between the suffrage movements and blacks.
It was this position- and many, many actions which reflected it, that led Josephine Ruffin to take a stand." pages 3636-364
Hamilton, Cicely M., 1971, Marriage As a Trade, Gale Research, Hardcover ISBN: 0810333945 $32.00 (1909)
"Her [Cicely Hamilton's] contrariness and her defiance found encouragement and support in the context of women's militancy, and Hamilton assumes (in 1909) that there is a conflict of interests between women and men, and that it is because men have the power and the wealth that their interests have prevailed. However, contrary to what men would like women to believe, Hamilton was convinced that women were not powerless. She argued that women could begin to claim their own autonomy, they could start by being psychologically independent and defining their own lives in their own terms. Men will have to react, she argued (as they have had to react to militancy), and part of the power nexus will be broken; women will then be in a better position to claim their share of the world's resources." page 612
"What a useful arrangement, she says, for men; they have forceful women to undertake the tasks which they find distasteful and have thereby removed women as competitors from tasks that are more to male tastes. But they have gone even further than this for, not only have they failed to pay women for their labour, they have insisted that women undertake these tasks because they want to, because they like it, because it is 'natural' to them. 'One wonders why it should be 'natural' in woman to do so many disagreeable things,' says Hamilton. 'Does the average man really believe that she has an instinctive and unquenchable craving for all the unpleasant and unremunerative jobs?' (ibid., p68).
Of course not. The average man believes - because he wants to - that women is his inferior and it is therefore proper - and even her duty - for her to perform those tasks he would find demanding and demeaning. Because he has made sure that other more rewarding and remunerative jobs are not readily available, the average woman has no choice but to go along with these arrangements and to accept man's explanation that they are 'natural'. The only thing that is natural about this division of labour, argues Hamilton, in tones which echo many of her foremothers, is that the group who has power gets its own way. It is nothing other than the 'right of the strongest to avoid payment' (ibid., p.60); it is men stealing women's labour.
Hamilton's thesis and her style are in many ways comparable to those of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Marriage as a Trade could have aptly been entitled Women and Economics. Like Gilman, she is concerned to show that men's economic explanations apply only to themselves and that it is no mere accident that women and their work are omitted from consideration. Like Gilman, she wants to demonstrate that man sees himself as the representative human being, and sees his experience and explanation as total, and valid, while woman - who exists only in relation to him - is of a different order, having no autonomy, and no claim to the same human needs and rights that he accords himself." page 615
b. 1876 - d. 1958
"This was the thesis of Mary Beard and many of her predecessors - Virginia Woolf and Matilda Joslyn Gage among them. The invisibility (and ostensible powerlessness) of women is not a by-product of patriarchy but a foundation stone of it: to challenge the patriarchal representation of women is to challenge patriarchy at its roots. This is a common and central idea among women who have questioned male power, and been 'victims' of it as they have fulfilled patriarchal expectations and disappeared. From Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich it has been suggested that among the most subversive and powerful activities women can engage in are the activities of constructing women's visible and forceful traditions, of making real our positive existence, of celebrating our lives and of resisting disappearance in the process." pages 695-696
Billington-Greig, Teresa, 1911, The Militant Suffrage Movement, Frank Palmer, London
"The only time that power changes hands, argues Billington-Greig, there is a struggle." page 574
"It will be the fact that women are in revolt, rather than the revolt itself, which will win the day, argues Billington-Greig, because in the end men will just not have the energy or the resources to maintain their position once women cease supporting them and start opposing them. While she does not put her case in these precise words, she is suggesting a strategy that is completely consistent with the thesis of Matilda Joslyn Gage and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (and later Mary Ritter Beard) - that men's power depends on the appropriation of women's resources, and when women will not permit their resources to be appropriated, when they cease to make their support available to men, men's power is undermined.
What Billington-Greig does say is that it has to be all men. The divisions among them are irrelevant to women, she argues, and should not be taken into account." page 575
Sanger, Margaret H., 1991, Margaret Sanger : An Autobiography (Americn Biography Series), Reprint Services Corp, Hardcover ISBN: 0781283388 $99.00 (1931?)
Sanger, Margaret, 1931, My Fight for Birth Control, Farrar-Rinehart, New York
Sanger, Margaret, 1920, Woman and the New Race, Brentano, New York
Sanger, Margaret, 1976, Woman Rebel, Archives of Social History, Hardcover ISBN: 0914924028 $32.95
"This raises the question of women's attitude towards sex- or more precisely, towards heterosexuality. I am weary of reading about prudish women of the nineteenth century who failed to adjust to adult sexual relationships and whose refusal to risk unwanted pregnancies (and venereal disease) is viewed as neurosis. Had women been writing the records (as did Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, 1919, and Christabel Pankhurst, 1913), these women would have appeared as rational. I can only envisage what it must have been like for women when every act of sexual intercourse brought with it the risk of pregnancy, but I can perfectly well understand any decision (or rationale according to the conventions of the time) to be sexually unavailable to men. It seems to me a fairly healthy and independent response.
When Margaret Sanger took it upon herself to find a means of preventing conception and realised that a 'side' effect could be a threat to capitalism and male power, she recognized nothing less than many men had seen. This was one of the reasons that their attitude towards birth control was so repressive. Sanger aroused even greater fear among men when she insisted that contraception was a woman's problem and that the knowledge and its application should reside in women's hands. It was one thing to suggest that it might not be necessary for women to be consistently pregnant, even though this in itself was threatening, but it was quite another to insist that it should be women who made the decisions about pregnancy, for what role did this leave for men? Sanger argued that it might be possible in an ideal society for birth control to be a parental issue, but in a society which was far from ideal, in which men held power and women bore the consequences, it was a woman's right to protect (defend?) herself. Women needed their own resources, she argued, and not dependence on male benevolence, which could be conditional." page 513
"Birth control (or its nor euphemistic and less-threatening counterpart 'family planning') may be acceptable in most quarters today. Once won, like the vote, it no longer constitutes a radical demand. But in Margaret Sanger's day it was one of the most radical and outrageous demands, and many men and some women thought its introduction would secure drastic changes in the balance of power. It was a source of freedom for woman, argued Sanger, which would give her time, energy, and resources 'not to enhance the masculine spirit' nor 'to preserve a man made world' but to create a world in which women were fully represented and in which their values and concerns would prevail - at least half the time (ibid.)." page 515
Eastman ,Crystal, 1969, Work Accidents & the Law, Ayer Co Pub, Hardcover $28.95 (1910)
"This does not mean that she advocated that women should behave in the same way as men - she was more likely to argue that what was good for the goose was good for the gander and that it was about time that the gander tasted the 'joys of life' he so carefully circumscribed for the goose. But she did insist that the same opportunities be available to both sexes, that they be permitted the same education, the same employment prospects, the same pay (and if protective legislation were to be introduced that it be the same for both sexes); and, of course, she argued that both sexes be subjected to the same moral standards." page 530
Woolf, Virginia, 1928, A Room of One's Own, Hogarth Press, London, reprinted 1974, Penguin, Harmondsworth
Woolf, Virginia, 1929, 'Women and Fiction', The Forum, March, reprinted 1972 in Leonard Woolf (ed.) Collected Essays: Virginia Woolf, vol2, Chatto, Windus, London
Woolf, Virginia, 1938, Three Guineas, The Hogarth Press, London, reprinted 1977
McNeillie, Andrew, 1986, Essays of Virginia Woolf ( 2 vols - collected works) Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York & London
When Florence Howe asserts that women's studies is not a ghetto but the centre [sic] of the construction of knowledge, based on the experience of half the population (with the implication that is men's studies which is on a side-track), she is doing nothing less than Virginia Woolf, who made it a virtue to be an outsider in an exploitative and oppressive society. " page 675
"But Woolf did not make a cult of the patriarchal opposite of aggression, nurturance. She saw nuturance, as it was constructed under patriarchy, as an enemy of women, as a means of depleting their resources and depriving them of independence and identity. When Virginia Woolf evokes the image of 'The Angle in the House', the woman who is 'utterly unselfish', who excels 'in the difficult art of family life', who sacrifices herself daily, who is pure (1929, p. 285), she sets up the image only to knock it down. Woolf says of her own battle with The Angel, 'I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. . . . Had I not killed her, she says she would have killed me' (ibid., p.286)." page 676
Russell, Dora, 1977, The Tamarisk Tree: My Quest for Liberty and Love (vol I), Virago, London
Russell, Dora, 1982, The Tamarisk Tree: My School Years and the Uears of War (vol II), Virago, London
"In her autobiography, The Tamarisk Tree (1977), Dora Russell makes no attempt to analyse Russell's treatment of his first wife, Alys, and in her account of the Pearsall Smith family, Barbara Strachey makes no reference to his treatment of his second wife, yet when the two marriages are viewed side by side they reveal some remarkable similarities. Both expose Russell's attitude to women, and both indicate that he showed little compunction in robbing his wives of their youthful resources, and then leaving them with few of their own.
This is, of course, not the usual portrayal of [Bertrand] Russell which is coloured by reverence for his ability as a scholar, and by admiration for his pro-feminist stands. But then, the source of this representation is often Russell himself." page 663
"Where I do detect a difference between Dora Russell's philosophy and that forged in the last decade is on the issue of heterosexuality . Russell acknowledged the necessity of the sex-wars, but suggested that the unsatisfactory nature of heterosexual relationships could be resolved; she believed that men could change, that they could accommodate woman's full humanity, even to the extent of learning from women and adopting some of women's more productive values. I think that men will not change, unless they have to. Their investment in the present arrangements - no matter how absurd or destructive those arrangements may be shown to be - is so great (I would argue) that it is unlikely that they will voluntarily abandon them and willingly follow, rather than deny, women." page 671
"She [Rebecca West] was and always had been for the emancipation for women, which in her words had little to do with the vote and a lot to do with the repudiation of an obligation for women to be what men alleged they were." page 643
"For all her working life Rebecca West has shown her defiance of male authority and demonstrated her audacity. She has shown not the slightest respect or deference to men and has been passionately concerned with (and I would say has in many respects succeeded in) preserving her autonomy and integrity. The implicit and explicit theme of much of her writing over the decades has been the responsibility and the necessity for women to define and develop their own intellectual area, which fosters their own values and reflects their own priorities. She has reversed the patriarchal order and assumed the negative nature of many male qualities (which men pride in themselves), equating male aggression, mastery and control with exploitation and destruction; she has presumed the positive nature of women's attributes - seeing women as life-giving and constructive. And she has never hesitated to make her own opinions known nor to express them in a manner which may be unacceptable to men. On many counts she could be classified as 'disagreeable' in a 'man-governed' (her term) world." page 644
"Where do we get the idea that women become increasingly 'unreliable' with age? Why do we practise (even if we do not explicitly preach) the tenet that there are no words of wisdom, no 'old wives' tales' which can be profitably passed from one generation to the next? Why do we make it so easy for male domination to continue, for men to divide and rule?" page 645
Brittian , Vera, 1957, Testament of Experience, Victor Gollancz, London, reprinted 1979 by Virago, London, and in 1981by Fontana, London, and in 1993 by Penguin, Middlesex, England
"To Vera Brittain it was largely the emotional demands made on females which were responsible for