If any proof were needed of the progress of the cause for which I have worked, it is here tonight. The presence on the stage of th...ese college women, and in the audience of all those college girls who will some day be the nation's greatest strength, will tell their own story to the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The best political economy is the care and culture of men; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individu...als, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here was a place where nothing was crystallized. There were no traditions, no customs, no college songs .... There were no rules a...nd regulations. All would have to be thought of, planned, built up, created--what a magnificent opportunity!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man... can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive;" or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture--in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential cour...age of the woman who gives birth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether t...hey are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the... games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values--or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be--to be through her son, to live through her son.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most... of the time we do not even notice it. Instead of "I am afraid," we say, "I don't want to," or "I don't know how," or "I can't."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Separatism of any kind promotes marginalization of those unwilling to grapple with the whole body of knowledge and creative works ...available to others. This is true of black students who do not want to read works by white writers, of female students of any race who do not want to read books by men, and of white students who only want to read works by white writers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must continually remind students in the classroom that expression of different opinions and dissenting ideas affirms the intell...ectual process. We should forcefully explain that our role is not to teach them to think as we do but rather to teach them, by example, the importance of taking a stance that is rooted in rigorous engagement with the full range of ideas about a topic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »