I read a lot and post quotes that I find interesting. Reading lists linked below.

Jan - Dec 2025

Jul - Dec 2024

Jan - Jun 2024

Jul - Dec 2023

I got tired of reading, I wasn’t getting anything new out of the books. I was struggling through them instead of enjoying them. I think I’ve gotten what I needed from that phase of my journey.

I’m now working on my fitness and spending more time on hobbies. I deleted this whole app for a while which helped me focus on myself instead of being in a constant state of anxiety for other women (too many of whom could help themselves but won’t).

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

ABBOTT, Grace (Nov. 17, 1878-June 19, 1939), social worker, director of the federal Children's Bureau, was born in Grand Island, Nebr. . . .

She . . . moved to Chicago in 1907, and earned a master's degree in political science in 1909. She also did some work toward a law degree, but found herself more attracted by the life at Hull House, of which she had become a resident in 1908. Under the leadership of JANE ADDAMS, this pioneer social settlement offered not only intellectual stimulus—here, she and her sister later recalled, they first came in contact with the world of ideas—but also an environment informed by social concern. . . .

It was, however, as head of the Immigrants' Protective League that she first attracted notice. This organization was founded in 1908 by SOPHONISBA BRECKINRIDGE and other Chicago social workers to combat the hordes of unscrupulous cab drivers, lawyers, travel agents, "white slavers," and operators of fraudulent "savings banks" and "employment agencies" who were preying upon the masses of confused and often frightened immigrants then arriving in Chicago. . . .

In 1917 Grace Abbott accepted a longstanding invitation from JULIA LATHROP, the head of the federal Children's Bureau (and an old Hull House friend), to join the bureau's staff. The offer attracted her not only because the flow of immigrants had fallen off during the war but because the recent enactment of the first federal child labor law (1916) had strengthened the authority of the Children's Bureau. As head of the bureau's child labor division, Miss Abbott supervised the painstaking investigations—verification of birth dates, proof that illegally produced goods had in fact entered interstate commerce, etc.—which effective enforcement of the law demanded. In June 1918, however, the child labor law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States. This discouraging development convinced Miss Abbott of the need for a constitutional amendment abolishing child labor, a cause she championed for the rest of her life. . . .

Although her cherished child labor amendment was never ratified by the required number of states, she was gratified in 1938 when at least a partial ban on child labor was effected through the Fair Labor Standards Act. In the spring of 1939 she was hospitalized with acute anemia, and that June she died at the age of sixty. Following Quaker services, her ashes were buried at Grand Island.

Working under somewhat trying circumstances, Grace Abbott achieved distinction in two different branches of social work. In a time of rising hostility toward immigrants, she contended steadily for liberal admission standards and against the exploitation of newcomers. Later, in a decade when reformist sentiment was at a low ebb, her strong voice in Washington was a continual reminder that social welfare was a legitimate—indeed an essential—concern of the state. Although her career did not stem from any conscious feminist bias, it encouraged those of her sex who were seeking a larger role in American life.

Gender demarcates the geopolitical boundaries of patriarchy. It divides us in half but its not a horizontal half. It's vertical. Gender is not some cosmic yin and yang. It's a fist and the flesh that bruises. It's a mouth crushed shut and a girl who will never be the same.

Gender is who gets to be human and who gets to he hurt. That has to be made clear because men know what they are capable of. They know. They know the sadism they've built into their own sex. Do it to her, is what they say to each other. Not to me, the human being.

But her, the object, the thing. And "her" has to be obvious, visually and ideologically. See, there she is, unable to walk. See, there she is, on display. Or there she is, secluded and covered, for your eyes only.

And how much easier if he can say God made her this way, to lie beneath me and obey. Or nature made her this way, an empty hole. Or her own brain made her this way, the slut who asks for it. Because she asks for all of it: the rape, the battering, the poverty, the prostitution, the murder.

Those conditions are what Andrea Dworkin named the barricade of sexual terrorism. That barricade defines the parameters of gender. It's really simple. Women are inside it. Men are outside it. Actually, men are building it, fist by fist and fuck by fuck. And it's exactly those violent, violating practices that create people called women. That's what men do to break us and keep us broken. That's what gender is: the breaking and the broken.

Both the dilemma and the strategy of the patriarchs, then, have to do with the maintenance and control of women's Elemental memories—our deep memories that connect us with the elements and with our own Elemental force. In order to destroy both women and wild nature (the elements), patriarchal males have chosen the strategy of maintaining these as "the living dead." In order to maintain life even in this degraded and comatose state, they have used the strategy of maintaining an officially approved and controllable conduit to Elemental memory.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

ABBOTT, Emma (Dec. 9, 1850-Jan. 5, 1891), opera singer, was born into an impecunious, modestly musical family whose roots were in rural New England. Her grandfather, Dyer Abbott, kept a tavern and conducted a church choir in Boscawen, N.H. Her father, Seth, after learning several trades, became an itinerant musician. With his wife, Almira Palmer of Woodstock, Vt., he moved west, living in various towns along the Rock River in northwestern Illinois and in Chicago, where Emma was born, before settling as a music teacher in Peoria. Emma—the first daughter and, apparently, fourth of six children—attended the public schools in Peoria. There she probably also gave her first public performance, singing and playing the guitar. Although her early poverty was perhaps exaggerated by the press in later years, she did during her girlhood supplement the meager family income by singing locally on various occasions, her audiences leaving voluntary contributions. In her teens she began to perform farther afield, gaining some renown; about 1867 the famous CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG heard her sing in Toledo and subsequently encouraged her to go to New York to study with Achille Errani. . . .

Despite a fairly enthusiastic initial reception, however, Emma Abbott never achieved great popularity in New York. Critics objected to her freedom with scores, finding her interpolations—such as "Nearer, My God, to Thee" in the midst of La Sonnambula—in poor taste; her voice, a lyric soprano of considerable carrying power, was of good but not extraordinary quality.

With the formation of the Emma Abbott English Opera Company in 1878 the singer found her element. Managed by her husband, Eugene Wetherell, a New York druggist whom she had secretly married while abroad, the company toured the country, primarily in the West, for thirteen consecutive seasons, presenting abridged versions of contemporary operas. . . . Miss Abbott maintained a good company of up to sixty members, frequently young artists, who received steady employment over a full season. Without in any way relinquishing her position as star, she supervised every department of her business. She began preparing a new work by studying the wardrobe, often commissioning lavishly extravagant costumes from leading Paris design-ers, and ended with the choice of conductor. The resulting productions were good to look at, interesting to follow, and tolerable to hear. Although in many ways unorthodox, and disdained by sophisticated Eastern operagoers, the Abbott Company gave its less cosmopolitan audiences an introduction to opera, receiving in return affectionate loyalty and profits that reached $10,000 in one week. Rather large of feature and inclined to plumpness, "the people's prima donna," as Emma Abbott was sometimes called, was amiable in expression and had an appealing manner doubtless enhanced by the fact that she was artlessly American and sang in English.

Miss Abbott's company opened thirty-five new opera houses, beginning in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1878 and concluding in Ogden, Utah, in December 1890. In Ogden an unheated dressing room caused the singer to contract pneumonia. She died shortly thereafter in Salt Lake City at the age of forty. Skilled in the handling of funds, investing in bonds and in real estate, she and her husband, who had died in 1889, had amassed an estate estimated at half a million to a million dollars. Her will provided for foundling homes and other charities and left $5,000 each to twelve churches of several denominations which she had enjoyed attending. (She was herself a Congregationalist.) In a life untouched by scandal, Miss Abbott was an eager defender of the stage professional, sometimes taking issue with clerical critics. After a public funeral in Central Music Hall, Chicago (the boxes were reserved for newspaper reporters, with whom she had always been on friendly terms), her ashes were buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Gloucester, Mass., her husband's early home. She had no children. A hardworking, dedicated woman in a calling often marked by temperament and instability, Emma Abbott was important primarily as a popularizer rather than as an artist.

Cheap tractable labor was needed for these giant enterprises: in the decade after 1880, immigration from impoverished European countries topped five million. Women workers were in rising demand, always for the lowest-paying jobs; the 2,647,000 gainfully employed in 1880 grew to 4,005,500 ten years later, from 15.2 per cent to 17.2 per cent of the total working labor force.

Outside of the large number classified as housekeepers, stewards, hostesses, and family servants of all kinds, totaling almost a million, the greatest number were to be found in the same occupations they had carried on at home before the era of industrialization: making cloth and clothing, keeping these clean, and other so-called service occupations. . . .

Although the demand for labor appeared insatiable, soaring immigration enabled employers to keep wages down. The 1880's consequently saw the first really serious attempt to build a national labor organization. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 as a secret fraternal order, discarded the bulk of its ritualistic features in 1881 and began organizing working men and women on an equal basis. . . .

. . . Mrs. [Leonora] Barry herself admitted that in the face of such conditions as she described, the response of women to attempts at organization was disappointing, due to ignorance, apathy, hopelessness, and

the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them, with the pessimistic view of life in which they see no ray of hope. Such people cannot be said to live, as living means the enjoyment of nature's gifts, but they simply vegetate like partially petrified creatures. Every effort has been made to perfect and extend the organization of women, but our efforts have not met with the response that the cause deserves—partly because those who have steady employment, fairly good wages, and comfortable homes seem to see nothing in organization outside of self-interest, and, because they are what they are pleased to term "all right," do not feel it incumbent upon themselves to do anything to assist their less fortunate co-workers. Again, many women are deterred from joining labor organizations by foolish pride, prudish modesty and religious scruples; and a prevailing cause, which applies to all who are in the flush of womanood, is the hope and expectancy that in the near future marriage will lift them out of the industrial life to the quiet and comfort of a home, foolishly imagining that with marriage their connection with and interest in labor matters end; often finding, however, that their struggle has only begun when they have to go back to the shop for two instead of one. All this is the results or effects of the environments and conditions surrounding women in the past and present, and can be removed only by constant agitation and education.

While this outburst reflects the bitterness of a woman who knew from her own experience that marriage was no guarantee against the problems of a wage earner, it also shows that Leonora Barry understood the source of such illusions. By and large the reluctance of women to join trade unions, and the difficulties encountered in trying to organize them, are still very much with us. In any case, attempts to organize them into the Knights of Labor came to an end when Mrs. Barry resigned her post in 1890, to marry a St. Louis printer, Obadiah R. Lake; she never returned to the labor movement.

It was a hospitable neighborhood composed chiefly of bachelors, who found comfort in mobilizing at meal times at the homes of the few married men in the township . . . I, if not washing, scrubbing, churning or nursing the baby, was preparing their meals in our lean-to kitchen. To bear two children in two and a half years from my marriage day, to make thousands of pounds of butter every year for market, not including what was used in our free hotel at home; to sew and cook, and wash and iron; to bake and clean and stew and fry; to be, in short, a general pioneer drudge, with never a penny of my own, was not pleasant business for an erstwhile school teacher.

Mrs. Duniway also learned the hard way that, although they had no legal rights of their own, married women were jointly liable for commitments made by the husband; the farm into which she had put as much work as he did was lost because he signed three notes for a friend, and then had to meet them. During the years she was raising a family of six and also supporting them (for Mr. Duniway became incapacitated by an accident), she absorbed a mulitude of such bitter lessons; at the age of thirty-six she was ready to make woman suffrage her life work.