feminish

Typewriters and duplicators are actual facts and even cheaper [than a printing press]. By using these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments you can at once rid yourself of the pressure of boards, policies and editors. They will speak your own mind, in your own words, at your own time, at your own length, at your own bidding. And that, we are agreed, is our definition of ‘intellectual liberty.’

‘But,’ she may say, ‘“the public”? How can that be reached without putting my own mind through the mincing machine and turning it into sausage?’

‘“The public,” Madam,’ we may assure her, ‘is very like ourselves; it lives in rooms; it walks in streets, and is said moreover to be tired of sausage. Fling leaflets down basements; expose them on stalls; trundle them along streets on barrows to be sold for a penny or given away. Find out new ways of approaching “the public”; single it into separate people instead of massing it into one monster, gross in body, feeble in mind. And then reflect—since you have enough to live on, you have a room, not necessarily “cosy” or “handsome” but still silent, private; a room where safe from publicity and its poison you could, even asking a reasonable fee for the service, speak the truth…

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)

What does a woman need to know? Does she not, as a self-conscious, self defining human being need a knowledge of her history, her much politicised biology, an awareness of the creative work of women in the past, the skills and crafts and techniques and powers exercised by women in different times and cultures, a knowledge of women’s rebellions and organised movements against our oppression and how they have been routed or diminished?

Without such knowledge women live and have lived without context, vulnerable to the projections of male fantasy, male prescriptions for us, estranged from our own experience because our education has not reflected or echoed it. I would suggest that not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness.

Adrienne Rich, “Taking Women Students Seriously,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1980)

“For feminist thinkers the first and most fundamental act of our own emancipation is to grant ourselves authority as perceivers”

“Advertisements… bound the cosmetic and psychological feminine traits they promoted to a consumer identity. According to advertisements, women were completely dependent on commercial products to accomplish household tasks, attract men, raise children and win social acceptance. …
By identifying femininity with objects, advertisements encouraged women to identify themselves as objects.”

source: A.Higonnet “Women, Images & Representation” in A History of Women in the West, Vol.V