“… it is not men that most women worry about when they rise to the defense of the status quo. Their apparent endorsement of male supremacy is, rather, a pathetic striving for self-respect, self-justification, and self-pardon. After fifteen hundred years of subjection to men, Western woman finds it almost unbearable to face the fact that she has been hoodwinked and enslaved by her inferiors — that the master is lesser than the slave.”

— Elizabeth Gould Davis , book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 21 - The Prejudice Lingers On (1971).

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Elizabeth Gould Davis 12

American writer 1910–1974

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

n. p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

“Barack Obama’s campaign of empty self-contradictory promises has apparently hoodwinked the state of Wyoming…”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

March 8, 2008 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=29193&only

“There is little to envy in the woman's position either. For perhaps the first time in history, she has a general sense of herself as an individual apart from men. This self-confidence gives her drive and makes her want to succeed. As a result she is eager to join the system. She does not have a clear idea of what it will do to her. Her focus is on her own past and on what men did to women — not on the male structure and what it does to men.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

“Do women need sovereignty—not only over their own bodies as currently understood in the United States…; but control of a boundary further away from their bodies, a defended boundary? Do women need land and an army…; or a feminist government in exile…? Or is it simpler: the bed belongs to the woman; the house belongs to the woman; any land belongs to the woman; if a male intimate is violent he is removed from the place where she has the superior and inviolate claim, arrested, denied parole, and prosecuted….. Could women "set a high price on our blood"? Could women set any price on our blood? Could women manage self-defense if not retaliation? Would self-defense be enough? Could women execute men who raped or beat or tortured women?…. [¶]…. Could the acts of women in behalf of women … have a code of honor woman-to-woman that weakens the male-dominant demands of nationalism or race-pride or ethnic pride? Could women commit treason to the men of their own group: put women first, even the putative enemy women? Do women have enough militancy and self-respect to see themselves as the central makers of legal codes, ethics, honor codes, and culture?”

Andrea Dworkin book Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation

Source: Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (2000), p. 246.

“Freedom is not an abstraction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more of it is not enough either. Having less, being less, impoverished in freedom and rights, women then inevitably have less self-respect: less self-respect than men have and less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life. Intercourse as domination battens of that awful absence of self respect.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7

“The fact is that men need women more than women need men; and so, aware of this fact, man has sought to keep woman dependent upon him economically as the only method open to him of making himself necessary to her. Since in the beginning woman would not become his willing slave, he has wrought through the centuries a society in which woman must serve him if she is to survive.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 22 - Woman in the Aquarian Age (1971).

“Ah, wasteful woman, she who may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing man cannot choose but pay,
How has she cheapen'd paradise;
How given for nought her priceless gift,
How spoil'd the bread and spill'd the wine,
Which, spent with due, respective thrift,
Had made brutes men, and men divine.”

Coventry Patmore (1823–1896) English poet

Book I, Canto III, III Unthrift.
The Angel In The House (1854)

“Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible. I would fain teach women that self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton book The Woman's Bible

The Woman's Bible (1898)
Source: The Woman's Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective

“There are two kinds of morality—the kind of morality that one imposes on oneself and the kind of morality that one imposes on others. For the first kind of morality, that is, for self-restraint, I have the greatest respect. The second kind of morality I do not respect except when it constitutes self-defense. (For example, when women say that rape and wife-beating are immoral, that is self-defense.) I have noticed that the people who try hardest to impose moral code on others (not in self-defense) are often the least careful to abide by that moral code themselves.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

"Morality and Revolution"
The Road to Revolution (2008)

“I'd rather see you poor men's wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queen's on thrones, without self-respect and peace.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

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Elizabeth Gould Davis 12

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