Feminist Quotes

I bristle every single time I hear someone say that young women need to be educated so they don’t take the freedoms they’ve gained for granted. First because not every woman has gained the freedoms we’re told feminism has won. But also and especially because it’s so insulting. Talking down to young women is anti-feminist. Presuming young women are not capable of identifying and articulating and fighting for what they need to live as full human beings is anti-feminist. Treating young women as sidekicks in a women’s movement is anti-feminist, particularly in a legislative context where older white men are obsessed with controlling and restricting younger women’s bodies, and demonizing those who dare to have sex and live their lives anyway.

One reason it’s easy to dismiss black women with mental illness like this is that the media rarely, if ever, tells our stories. When the topic of mental illness is brought up in television shows or the media generally, the character with mental illness is almost always young, white, and wealthy. I have yet to see a black woman written into a plot that deals with mental illness. Movies like Silver Linings Playbook, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, made-for-TV movies, and the like portray mental illness as something white people go through, and rarely anyone else.

But things don’t exist in a vacuum, and the truth is that misogynists actually do threaten, hurt and kill women on a regular basis. So when men “ironically” call themselves misogynists, what they’re conveniently forgetting is that misogyny is a very real thing that women live with every day and I promise you—without a hint of hyperbole—that it’s a force that makes us actually fear for our lives. On the other hand, there are no feminists out there shooting up fraternity houses because of misandry a la Elliot Rodger.

I don’t think it ever occurred to me before how much and how often women are praised for displaying traits that basically render them invisible. When I really think about it, I realize the culprit is the language generally used to praise women. Especially mothers. “She sacrificed everything for her children… She never thought about herself… She gave up everything for us… She worked tirelessly to make sure we had what we needed. She stood in the shadows, she was the wind beneath our wings.” Greeting card companies are build on that idea. “Tell her how much all the little things she does all year long that seem to go unnoticed really mean to you.” With a $2.59 card. Mother’s Day is build on that idea. This is good, we’re told. It’s good how Mom diminishes and martyrs herself. The message is: mothers, you are such wonderful and good people because you make yourselves smaller, because you deny your own needs, because you toil tirelessly in the shadows and no one ever thanks or notices you… this all makes you AMAZING.

While white women are praised for altering their bodies, plumping their lips and tanning their skin, black women are shamed although the same features exist on them naturally. This double standard is one string in the netting that surrounds black female sexuality – a web that entraps black women when they claim sexual agency. Deeply ingrained into culture is the notion that black female bodies, at the intersect of oppression, are less than human and therefore unattractive.

As I see it, the mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism for all women! But that is not all. Mainstream feminism has adopted a thin, market-centered view of equality, which dovetails neatly with the prevailing neoliberal corporate view. So it tends to fall into line with an especially predatory, winner-take-all form of capitalism that is fattening investors by cannibalizing the living standards of everyone else. Worse still, this feminism is supplying an alibi for these predations. Increasingly, it is liberal feminist thinking that supplies the charisma, the aura of emancipation, on which neoliberalism draws to legitimate its vast upward redistribution of wealth.

At its most basic level, all of this emotional labour is saying to another human being “you matter. I will take my time to show you that you matter.” And maintaining that glue is something that devolves mainly onto women, 24 hours a day. It feels like most men are taught (ex- or implicitly) to do emotional work only when it gets them something they want now, whereas most women are taught to do emotional work as part of an ongoing exchange that benefits everyone.

Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.

Rather than fighting for every woman’s right to feel beautiful, I would like to see the return of a kind of feminism that tells women and girls everywhere that maybe it’s all right not to be pretty and perfectly well behaved. That maybe women who are plain, or large, or old, or differently abled, or who simply don’t give a damn what they look like because they’re too busy saving the world or rearranging their sock drawer, have as much right to take up space as anyone else. I think if we want to take care of the next generation of girls we should reassure them that power, strength and character are more important than beauty and always will be, and that even if they aren’t thin and pretty, they are still worthy of respect. That feeling is the birthright of men everywhere. It’s about time we claimed it for ourselves.

There’s this process by which anything girls love becomes disdainful, cliched, sad, in a way that the things boys love never do. Boys can love pulp SF and westerns and comic books, and they become greater, they become epics and serious films and graphic novels. But for every girl who ever loved Sylvia Plath in high school, for every one who watched that crocus of a girl slipping away into the earth and saw herself, there is a invisible choir of derisive laughter, there is an instant satire of that love - just another one of those sad, dirty girls, another goth girl who thinks she’s special, how can anyone bear that emo poetry, how can anyone take a girl seriously who loves Morgan le Fay and Persephone and ankh-wearing Death, just like all the other girls?

With that said, openly suffering by no means addresses or fixes all issues that black women with disabilities face. Between white people literally believing that black people are magic (and therefore impervious to feeling pain) and the ‘strong, independent black woman’ stereotypes, there’s not much room for people to believe that black women can suffer in the first place. And if a black woman is impervious to pain, why would anyone help her? It seems ridiculous, but even when a black woman with a disability doesn’t internalize these toxic beliefs and tries to reach out for assistance—professional or otherwise—the roadblocks become so petty and consistent that it’s hard to distinguish which prejudices she’s facing and when. Any black woman who’s been in an emergency room can attest to this. Black people in general are faced with longer wait times, overcrowding, and lower quality of healthcare compared to all non-blacks. But having sat with other Sicklers in discussion of our healthcare experiences on multiple occasions, what I’ve noticed is that black women especially had complaints about their experiences in the emergency room, particularly in regards to dismissal by the ER staff and the perception that we’re inherently hostile.

“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.”