What Kind Of Beast Would Turn Its

Each Feminist Work Has Tended To Be Received As If It Emerged From Nowhere; As If Each One Of Us Had Lived, Thought, And Worked Without Any Historical Past Or Contextual Present. This Is One Of The Ways In Which Women's Work And Thinking Has Been Made To Seem Sporadic, Errant, Orphaned Of Any Tradition Of Its Own.

Any Woman's Death Diminishes Me.

Sexist Grammar Burns Into The Brains Of Little Girls And Young Women A Message That The Male Is The Norm, The Standard, The Central Figure Beside Which We Are All Deviants, The Marginal, The Dependent Variables. It Lays The Foundation For Androcentric Thinking, And Leaves Men Safe In Their Solipsistic Tunnel-vision.

In Order To Live A Fully Human Life We Require Not Only Control Of Our Bodies (though Control Is A Prerequisite); We Must Touch The Unity And Resonance Of Our Physicality, Our Bond With The Natural Order, The Corporeal Grounds Of Our Intelligence.

I Believe That Words Can Help Us Move Or Keep Us Paralysed, And That Our Choices Of Language And Verbal Tone Have Something - A Great Deal - To Do With How We Live Our Lives And Whom We End Up Speaking With And Hearing; And That We Can Deflect Words By Trivialization, Of Course, But Also By Ritualized Respect, Or We Can Let Them Enter Our Souls And Mix With The Juices Of Our Minds.