Conference turris::womannotes-v3

    
    "The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected."

    
    "I don't care who you are, I still think the best job you do in life is
    to just raise your children."
    
    	-- Barbara Bush

    re .2, I wonder if she meant men, too.
    
    Lorna
    

    "Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the
    ability to choose"

    "Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words"

"Man enjoys the great advantage of having a god endorse the code he writes; 
and since man exerts a sovereign authority over woman it is especially 
fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being. 
For the Jews, Mohammedans and Christians among others, man is master by 
divine right; the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse towards 
revolt in the downtrodden female."

	-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949
	(quoted in Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman)

    "The conviction that the matriarchy once existed in history has taken on
    programmatic character.  Anyone who doubts that there were matriarchies
    or who while acknowledging their existence depreciates them as a lower
    stage of human history, and finally anyone who thinks that there is no
    historical proof of a fully matriarchal culture incurs the feminist
    'anathema'.  Heide Goettner-Abendroth sees such people as ideologists
    or victims of the patriarchy, who do not belong to the community of
    those who believe in the matriarchate.  The confession of faith runs:
    'Without qualification I would describe the earliest religion of
    humanity as matriarchal.'"

                              Susanne Heine
                _Matriarchs,_Goddesses,_and_Images_of_God_

    "In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are
    irrational. One is free to avoid them."
    
    Ayn Rand

    "There are many subtle ways of giving one's time and energy to the
    patriarchy, and one (it seems to me) is to become over-occupied with
    male psychology, i.e., male violence, male sexuality, and the causes of
    male attitudes and male behavior.  Even those of us who detest the
    patriarchy still find it difficult to become morally free of male
    power, of the massive and constant pull of men's centrality, men's
    importance, and the supposed `profound' causes of men's behavior.  (Men
    themselves are awfully fond of analyzing the deep psychology of their
    own male misbehavior, expecially to feminists!)"
    
      - Joanna Russ

"When women gather, I observe that something almost archetypal happens: 
overflowing and abundance, complicity and lack of censorship, lack of the 
posturing that inevitably dominates a mixed group. Primitive rituals 
evolve. The women synchronize with the moon's phases. They have an instinct 
for the earth...for growing things.

"And men? This is not what happens when tribes of men come together. This 
is not the way men choose to act with one another. They seem to miss the 
closeness, the texture of the women's world, a world they enter only 
through association with women. In this view, the harem is a re-creation of 
a nostalgic need, a return to childhood and to mothers. For a man, it is an 
attempt to own a world of his own, utterly egocentric, without the 
intrusion of other men. No wonder 'valide' -- or mother -- was the axis of 
the harem.

"The roots of slavery and isolation are in the womb. And the womb, like the 
harem, is sacrosanct....

"An adult male...yearns to return to the womb, his very own womb, protected 
by his mother."

	-- Alev Lytle Croutier, Harem: The World Behind the Veil, 1989

In a footnote to the introduction to Robin Morgan's "Sisterhood is Powerful"
(1970), the editor notes "I have just learned that the book is being set
by a computer, keypunched by women.  Breakthrough!"

Martin.
ps: in all fairness, the quote was in the context of commenting that the
book was "conceived, written, edited, ... by women (The process broke
down for the first time at the printer's, that industry being one of
the many which are all but completely closed to women.)"

Of course, the computer revolution in typesetting (using primarily Dec
hardware) meant that the profession of hot-lead typesetter became the
trade of key-punch operator (and we don't expect key-punch operators to
have to carry buckets of molten "lead" or repair the mechanical monsters).

I wonder whether Morgan would think this is still a breakthrough.

    <--(.11)
    
�Of course, the computer revolution in typesetting (using primarily Dec
�hardware) meant that the profession of hot-lead typesetter became the
�trade of key-punch operator (and we don't expect key-punch operators to
�have to carry buckets of molten "lead" or repair the mechanical monsters).
    
    Martin, I think you're getting confused.  Keypunch operators are
    the folks who punched up "IBM cards".  The people who replaced
    Linotype operators (and indeed most "hot-type" folks) are called
    "cold-type compositors".  Moreover, the Lino ops never did "carry
    buckets of molten 'lead'" or repair their machines except in the
    same casual way that progs will carry or repair computer hardware.
    
    						=maggie

re: .12:

"keypunch" was Morgan's term, and dates from a time (1970) when cold-type
composition often was carried out using -- usually -- paper tape.  It is,
in any case, an accurate description of what the operator did.  The publisher
I worked for used a Flexowriter for typesetting, and we all did "keypunching"
at one time or another.

Martin
(I used to hand-set type in high-school and don't long for the good old days.)

    "It's a damn shame that good judgement isn't enforceable."
    
    Kathy Maxham

    (Paraphrased with permission from 126.75)

    
    "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is:
    I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express
    sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."
    
    	-- Rebecca West, 1913, quoted in A Feminist Dictionary

    "Men, reflected Praxis, are commonly expected to marry someone poorer,
    less educated and of lower status than themselves.  Women, likewise,
    are expected to marry above them.  Thus every wife in the world
    will automatically feel in her domestic life and status, inferior
    to her husband.  Because in fact she will be"
    
          from "Praxis" by Fay Weldon
    

    
In her book Three Guineas, written on the eve of World War II (1938), Woolf 
locates the origin of dictatorship in the tyranny of men over women:


"In [these] quotations, is the egg of the very worm that we know under 
other names in other countries. There we have in embryo the creature, 
Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes that he 
has the right, whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to 
dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall do. Let 
us quote...

'Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be 
idle. It is time the Government insisted upon employers giving work to more 
men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.'

"Place beside it another quotation:

'There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the 
world of women. Nature has done well to entrust the man with the care of 
his family and the nation. The woman's world is her family, her husband, 
her children, and her home.'

"One is written in English, the other in German. But where is the 
difference? Are they not both saying the same thing? Are they not both the 
voices of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not 
all agreed that the dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as 
well as a very ugly animal? And here he is among us, raising his ugly head, 
spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, 
but in the heart of England. Is it not from this egg...that 'the practical 
obliteration of our freedom by Fascists or Nazis' will spring? And is it 
not the woman who has to breathe that poison and to fight that insect, 
secretly and without arms, in her office, fighting the Fascist or the Nazi 
as surely as those who fight him with arms in the limelight of publicity?"

    
In her book Three Guineas (1938) Woolf advocates payment for mothers/wives/
daughters: 


"The world as it is at present is divided into two services; one the public 
and the other the private. In one world the sons of educated men work as 
civil servants, judges, soldiers and are paid for that work; in the other 
world, the daughters of educated men work as wives, mothers, daughters -- but 
are they not paid for that work? Is the work of a mother, of a wife, of a 
daughter, worth nothing to the nation in solid cash? That fact, if it be a 
fact, is so astonishing that we must confirm it....It seems incredible, yet 
it seems undeniable. Among all those offices there is no such office as a 
mother's; among all those salaries there is no such salary as a mother's. 
The work of an archbishop is worth 15,000 pounds a year to the State; the 
work of a judge is worth 5,000 pounds a year; the worth of a permanent 
secretary is worth 3,000 pounds a year; the work of an army captain, of a 
sea captain, of a sergeant of dragoons, of a policeman, of a postman -- all 
these works are worth paying out of the taxes, but wives and mothers and 
daughters who work all day and every day, without whose work the State 
would collapse and fall to pieces, without whose work your sons, Sir, would 
cease to exist, are paid nothing whatever? Can it be possible?"
                                               

    "Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal
    power is forged."
    
                              Audre Lorde, [from] This Bridge Called My Back

"You always have those who--when the sh*t is hitting the fan
real hard--get busy measuring the size of the t*rds to make sure
you don't overstate the oppression."

I like this one. I really do.

                                                      -Robert Brown III

_______________________________________________________________________________

   "The next time you women are present at a session that turns to demeaning
men, protest loudly and walk out. Women need to realize that the sensitive man
they want so badly is hurt by that kind of attitude and behavior. Moreover, to
lose his respect and friendship is a great loss indeed."

                                                     -Susan Deitz

In response to an interview question in 1968 (McCall's Magazine), "What 
would you do as President?" Rand (founder of "Objectivist" philosophy) 
states:

"I would not want to be President and would not vote for a woman President. 
A woman cannot reasonably want to be a commander-in-chief. I prefer to 
answer the question by outlining what a rational man would do if *he* were 
President."

Later, she offers by way of explanation:

"The essence of femininity is hero-worship--the desire to look up to man."

"The first step toward emancipation is self-consciousness, becoming aware 
of a distortion, a wrong: what women have been taught about the world, what 
they see reflected in art, literature, philosophy, and religion is not 
quite appropriate to them. It perfectly fits man, woman's "other." In here 
reversing the phrase by which Simone de Beauvoir defines woman as man's 
"other," I intend to indicate that there comes a moment in woman's self- 
perception, when she begins to see man as "the other." It is this moment 
when her feminist self-consciousness begins."

 		-- Gerda Lerner, The Female Experience

    "When I was in Catholic school, I loved the story of St. Clare and St.
    Francis.  Francis gets canonized because of his devotion to vague,
    general ideas like God and Christianity, whereas Clare gets canonized
    because of her devotion to Francis.  You see?  It sums it up: Even when
    a man's a saint, even when he's good and devoted, he's not good and
    devoted to anyone in particular."
    
          from Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
    

    "All right, all right, hold it...I just want to say something.  You
    know for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 63 cents.  Now fifty
    years ago, that 62 cents.  So -- with that kind of luck, it will be the
    year 3888 before we make a buck...for a...girl...."
    
    			Laurie Anderson "Beautiful Red Dress" from
    					 "Strange Angels"

    
    	Since Daniel's quote referred to the lack of progress made
    	in women's salaries vs men's salaries, I recalled this:
    
    	In 1978, Fortune magazine took a look at women in the
    	executive suite.  Of the officers and directors of 800
    	of the largest companies in the US, less than
    	one-half of one percent are women.
    
    	In 1990, Fortune repeated the survey.  Their findings
    	of the percentage of officers and directors who are women?
    	
    
    	(take a guess)
    
    
    	less than one-half of one percent.  
    
    	(The cover story of Fortune's July 20, 1990 issue is
    	 entitled "Why Women _Still_ Don't Hit The Top".)
    
    Well, I guess this note doesn't belong unless I include a 
    quote.  Here goes:
    
    	"He told me to walk more femininely, talk more femininely,
    	 wear makeup, and have my hair styled."
    
    			-- Ann Hopkins, Senior budget officer, World Bank
    

    Garland Medicine-Bear stood up.  "As I see it, we have two choices."
    
    Wanbli's head jerked up.  "No!  Never say that, flyer!  That's half
    the trouble in life: people believing that there are only a few
    possibilities.  Possibilities are infinite.
    
    "Most Wacaan are so willing to believe that: that paths only fork
    in two.  They think there ought to be a right way and a wrong way
    to go, and when both ways look punishing, they feel cheated, but
    they choose one of the two.
    
    "The training of the Third Eagle is to look for forks three, four,
    and five off the path.  Or blaze a new path."
    
    						-- R.A. MacAvoy

    
    "For a woman *qua* woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship
    -the desire to look up to man. "To look up" does not mean dependence,
    obedience or anything implying inferiority. It means an intense kind of
    admiration; and admiration is an emotion that can be experienced only
    by a person of strong character and independent value-judgments. A
    "clinging vine" type of woman is not an admirer, but an exploiter of
    men. Hero-worship is a demanding virtue: a woman has to be worthy of it
    and of the hero she worships. Intellectually and morally, i.e. as a
    human being, she has to be his equal; then the object of her worship is
    specifically his *masculinity*, not any human virtue she might lack.
    
    This does not mean that a feminine woman feels or projects hero-worship
    for any and every individual man; as human beings, many of them may, in
    fact, be her inferior..."

    Ayn Rand

    "In nature certain species, in order not to be eaten, will take on the
    characteristics of something that is an unpleasant meal.  The viceroy,
    for instance, as a caterpillar looks so much like a bird dropping, and
    as an adult so much like the ill-tasting monarch, that birds, as agents
    of natural selection, as Darwinian loser-zappers, leave the viceroy
    alone.  Similarly, the ant-mimicking spider is avoided because it
    appears to have the fierce mandibles of an ant, though it's really only
    a dressed-up spider making pretend.  The function of disguise is to
    convince the world you're not there, or that if you are, you should not
    be eaten.  You camouflage yourself as imperious teacher, as imperious
    lover, as imperious bitch, simply to hang out and survive."
    
               from Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
    

    "I had been able to document the greater number of interruptions
    performed by men (approximately 99%) and the greater extent to
    which men determined the conversation topics.  I had also found
    that `What you mean is...' is one of the most common utterances
    of men (on my tapes) as they talk to women.
    
    					-- _Reflecting_Men_, page 7
    					   Dale Spender

    
    "There's always someone who wants to yank your chain."
    
    -EMG

    "Freud observed that women envy men, and that was an excellent
    observation.  But why do women envy men? Because, said Freud, they do
    not have something men have - namely, a penis.  Freud's penis was
    extremely important to him.  So when he observed that women envy men,
    he assumed that women envied what he valued most.
    
    I have met very few women who really wish they had a penis.  In
    general, women prefer that penises stay right where they are - attached
    to men.  There is something men have that we would very much like to
    have though: the birthright of innate superiority, the power and
    influence one inherits by being born male.  A man can be less competent
    or knowledgeable than a woman, but he still has the advantage over her
    simply because he is a man.  It really does not matter whether or not
    men consciously know that they have this birthright.  Most assume it at
    a very basic level.  Women know it and this awareness affects the way
    we see ourselves, men and other women."
    
    from Women's Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef
    

    
    "A lady won't but a woman may....."
    
    		(Anita Baker - in concert)
    

    G'day,
    
    
     I would like to nominate my wife.....
    
    
      "I will".
    
    
    derek

    How sick one gets of being "good", how much I should respect myself if
    I could burst out and make every one wretched for twenty-four hours;
    embody selfishness. Alice James

    There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going
    monomania. Agnes Repplier

    Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their
    reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform.
    
    Susan B. Anthony
    
    This quote was used to head an article in today's Nashua Telegraph
    (newspaper).  The article, about Jarretta Copeland, social worker at
    the Nashua Soup Kitchen, is titled "Serving up compassion", subtitled
    "Soup kitchen's Copeland says she was born to help", reported by Hattie
    Bernstein of the Telegraph Staff, printed here without permission.  
    From the article:
    
    "From my childhood I was told, basically, I was going to have two black
    marks against me - being black and being female - but I was not to let
    it hinder me.  My father said, 'Women are sometimes looked down on and
    it's harder for black people, especially women...'  But he always told
    me:  whatever your dream and your goal is, you keep [it] up."

    "The difference from a person and an angel is easy.  Most of an angel
    is in the inside and most of a person is on the outside."
    
    -Anna, "Mister God, This Is Anna"
    

	"Do men have to go to war over and over again and in every generation 
	to find out that war is hell and should be avoided at all costs?"

			-- May Sarton, At Seventy

Her very close friend Marion Walker pleaded with her, she said, but
Gertrude Gertrude remember the cause of women, and Gertrude Stein said, you
don't know what it is to be bored.

    - "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", Gertrude Stein

    "Women" is a collective noun; it is not a collective consciousness!
    
    					Character in a British sit-com,
    					"On the Up" (?), when her `boss'
    					asked her to explain his wife's
    					behavior.
    
    Now I'm going to deviate from the custom of this topic to Expand and
    Discuss.
    
    "Men" is a collective noun; it is not a collective consciousness!
    
    Yeah, yeah.  We all know the truth of both these statements -- but I
    have a dark suspicion that there are some people who, while they
    understand it, don't realize that *everyone*else* [in here] understands
    it too.
    
    Formally speaking, we're talking about statistical distributions.  A
    lot of them are in the shape of the bell curve:
    
                             * *
                           *     *
                        *           *
                    *                   *
             *                                 *
     *                                                 *
    W                1                 1                E
    
    some are Poisson distribution (which is pretty much a bell curve
    which has been mooshed up on one side), some are either-or sorts of
    things (but sometimes the coin lands on its edge), et cetera.  Most
    people fall in the area between the two 1's (for "one sigma"
    distribution) -- and "most people" means 75% to 80%.  The rest of the
    people are either to the West of this or to the East.  (You didn't
    think I was going to use value-based terms like "positive" and
    "negative" or "left" and "right", did you?)
    
    Now, here's an exciting bit:  Your position on one curve doesn't
    describe you.  Your position on ten curves doesn't describe you.  It
    takes umblety mumble curves to even begin to describe you -- as you
    were at the moment you took the test[s].  So, you're an individual,
    and I (and the other readers) know it.  (In fact, I even know that
    you are *so* individualistic an individual that you will contradict
    yourself at some point in your life.  How about that!)
    
    What am I talking about?  I'm talking about the whole field of "Women
    are <mumble>.", "Women feel <mumble>.", "Women think <mumble>.", "Men
    are <mumble>.", "Men feel <mumble>.", and "Men think <mumble>.".  These
    are statements without "all", and what I want you to do, dear reader,
    is to [continue to] *notice* this absence, AND to flash on that bell
    curve up above at the same time.
    
    Here's an example:  Spender and Cline said that women's greatest fear
    is of being killed by men.  (Did you flash?)  This statement does not
    mean that the #1 fear of 100% of women is that she will be killed by
    one or more men.  It means that if I take a giant bunch of women from
    the Western democracies  (See that?  There's an implied context to
    S&C's statement.  Things like that should be kept in mind too.) and
    ask each one "What is your greatest fear?", and you bet a dollar that
    each one will answer ~Some man is going to kill me.~, that you will
    go broke more slowly than if you bet on any other fear.  It further
    means that if I ask each women to list her top five fears, and you bet
    that ~Some man is going to kill me.~ will be on the list, that you will
    make more money than if you, again, bet on any other fear.
    
    This is called `playing the odds', and this is how I feel we should
    all view such statements.
    
    By the way, I do something beyond that, which I call "working the
    delta".  For example, in Digital conferences (yes, I mean this one too)
    I do that by assuming that NO ONE reading the conference has an
    intelligence level of normal or below.  So, dear reader, this means
    I'm assuming that you have an I.Q. of 110 or more, and that the worst
    I would ever assume about you is that you are not using your brains --
    just for that one moment.
    
    						Ann B.

              
    "We the people are not free. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What
    does that mean? It means that we choose between Tweedledum and
    Tweedledee. We elect expensive masters to do our work for us, and then
    blame them because they work for themselves and for their class."
    
			-- Helen Keller

	"I'm black and I'm a woman.  With reference to prejudice, I have 
	always found it infinitely more difficult to be a woman than to be
	a black person."

			- Barbara Jordan,
			  former congresswoman and current educator
			  "a dignified voice of reason for all" - me


This really does put it in perspective, doesn't it?

    You married me for my brains, remember?

-A friend of ours as her husband gave her ridiculously detailed 
   directions for a trivial task.

    
    "You always know when it's over.  Little things start grating on your
    nerves.  One day you just snap: "Would you please stop that--that
    breathing in and out, in and out.  It's so repetitious."
    
                                         -- Ellen DeGeneres

    re .45, I love it! :-)
    
    Lorna
    

    
"Western women have been excluded from the deity quest for thousands of 
years, since the end of Goddess worship in the West. The small exception is 
the veneration paid to the Virgin Mary, a pale remnant of the Great 
Goddess. So, if one purpose of deity is to give us an image we can *become*, 
it is obvious that women have been left out of the quest, or at least have 
been forced to strive for an oppressive and unobtainable masculine image."

		-- Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 1979
  

    The universe is made of stories,
    not of atoms.
                   - Muriel Rukeyser, from The Speed of Darkness
    
    
    Lorna
    

    "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
     The world would split open."
    					-Muriel Rukeyser
    

    not *directly* applicable, but seems appropriate lately.  Sorry for the
    paraphrasing.
    
    Bacall: "Who was she, Steve?"
    
    Bogart: "Who was who?"
    
    Bacall: "The one who gave you such a high opinion of women."

I'm really enjoying Ursula LeGuin's new non-fiction, I've recently
recommended it in the "good books" topic.  Here is an extract from
the commencement address she offered at Bryn Mawr in 1986.  The whole
piece is really great, this is just a page in the middle of it.

DougO
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[...]

"[The mother tongue] is a language always on the verge of silence
and often on the verge of song.  It is the language stories are told
in.  It is the language spoken by all children and most women, and so 
I call it the mother tongue, for we learn it from our mothers and speak 
it to our kids.  I'm trying to use it here in public where it isn't
appropriate, not suited to the occasion, but I want to speak it to you
because we are women and I can't say what I want to say about women in
the language of capital M Man.  If I try to be objective I will say,
"This is higher and that is lower," I'll make a commencement speech
about being successful in the battle of life, I'll lie to you; and I
don't want to.

"Early this spring I met a musician, the composer Pauline Oliveros,
a beautiful woman like a grey rock in a streambed; and to a group of
us, women, who were beginning to quarrel over theories in abstract,
objective language-- and I with my splendid Eastern-women's-college
training in the father tongue was in the thick of the fight and going
for the kill-- to us, Pauline, who is sparing with words, said after
clearing her throat, "Offer your experience as your truth."  There
was a short silence.  When we started talking again, we didn't talk
objectively, and we didn't fight.  We went back to feeling our way
into ideas, using the whole intellect not half of it, talking with
one another, which involves listening.  We tried to offer our experience
to one another.  Not claiming something: offering something.

"How, after all, can one experience deny, negate, disprove, another
experience?  Even if I've had a lot more of it, *your* experience
is your truth.  How can one being prove another being wrong?  Even
if you're a lot younger and smarter than me, *my* being is my truth.
I can offer it; you don't have to take it.  People can't contradict
each other, only words can: words separated from experience for use
as weapons, words that make the wound, the split between subject and 
object, exposing and exploiting the object but disguising and defending
the subject.

"People crave objectivity because to be subjective is to be embodied,
to be a body, vulnerable, violable.  Men especially aren't used to
that; they're trained not to offer but to attack.  It's often easier
for women to trust one another, to try to speak our experience in our
own language, the language we talk to each other in, the mother tongue;
so we empower one another.

"But you and I have learned to use the mother tongue only at home or
safe among friends, and many men learn not to speak it at all.  They're
taught that there's no safe place for them.  From adolescence on, they 
talk a kind of degraded version of the father tongue with each other-- 
sports scores, job technicalities, sex technicalities, and TV politics.
At home, to women and children talking mother tongue, they respond with
a grunt and turn on the ball game.  They have let themselves be silenced
and dimly they know it, and so resent speakers of the mother tongue;
women babble, gabble all the time...can't listen to that stuff.

"Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally
teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father
tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to hear
what the powerless say, poor men, women, children; not to hear that as
valid discourse.

"I am trying to unlearn these lessons, along with other lessons I was
taught by my society, particularly lessons concerning the minds, work,
works, and being of women.  I am a slow unlearner.  But I love my
unteachers-- the feminist thinkers and writers and talkers and poets
and artists and singers and critics and friends, from Wollstonecraft
and Woolf through the furies and glories of the seventies and eighties--
I celebrate here and now the women who for two centuries have worked
for our freedom, the unteachers, the unmasters, the unconquerors, the
unwarriors, women who have at risk and at high cost offered their
experience as truth.  "Let us NOT praise famous women!" Virginia
Woolf scribbled in a margin when she was writing _Three Guineas_, and
she's right, but still I have to praise these women and thank them
for setting me free in my old age to learn my own language."
 
[...]

Ursula K Le Guin, "Bryn Mawr Commencement Address", 1986, pp. 150-1, in
_Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places_,
published by Harper & Row, New York, 1989.

    Thanks for -.1!  I graduated from Bryn Mawr in '86!  Actually I
    graduated in Dec. '85, so I took vacation from work for my ceremonies,
    and I also consider the address from May '85 (Katherine Hepburn!) as
    part of my graduation...(BTW, Katherine Hepburn is a graduate of BMC).
    
    Thanks for the memories.....
    
    LAF
    

    "I will not be voting this year. The principle of 'the lesser of
    two evils' has limits."
    
    Ayn Rand 1980

>    "I will not be voting this year. The principle of 'the lesser of
>    two evils' has limits."
    
>    Ayn Rand 1980
    
    But did/how did she vote in '72?  now _that_ was a hard one!

                                                                        
"The conditions under which women write are not dissimilar to the 
conditions under which women talk: They can attend to their own needs only 
*after* they have met some of the physical and psychological needs of men. 
Tillie Olsen [Silences, 1980] has movingly attested to the way in which
women are required to do the 'sh*twork' in the home, and the extent to
which marriage and motherhood curtail women's opportunities to write.
Pamela Fishman in her classic study of mixed sex talk ['Interactional 
Sh*twork' in Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Arts and Politics, 1977]
has shown how women are required to do the 'sh*twork' in conversation -- to
do all the routine and invisible chores which keep conversations going and
which, of course, put women in the position of developing men's talk and
topics at the expense of their own. All those helpful touches -- the clean
shirts and the supportive comments -- the 'emotional management' as women
put their energy into making men feel comfortable." 

	-- Dale Spender, The Writing Or The Sex? Or, Why You Don't Have to 
	Read Women's Writing to Know It's No Good, 1989 (asterisks mine.)

    
    Re -1
    How very apt...
    'gail

  From an Ellen Goodman column entitled 

    "Love conquers almost all; dustballs can rend asunder"

  "Opposites may attract when you are talking about class and age.  But
  housekeeping?  If this were a pre-nuptial quiz, the question would 
  be: Which makes marriage happier: (A) the simultaneous orgasm or
  (B) the single standard of cleanliness.  The answer, of course, is
  B.  But it's much harder to achieve."

  JP

    	"For more than four years I was involved with my research to
    	establish that men talked more than women.  After I had com-
    	pleted my report (for the daily research still continues,) I
    	experienced some satisfaction at the thought that I had helped
    	to challenge the conventional wisdom that it was women who were
    	the talkative sex.  Then I found an account of the first women's
    	rights conference in the United States.  It was held in Salem,
    	Ohio, in 1850 and it had one peculiar characteristic.  It was
    	officered entirely by women; not a man was allowed to sit on
    	the platform, to speak, to vote.  'NEVER DID MEN SUFFER SO,'	
    	wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had played a part in setting 
    	up this peculiar arrangement.  'They implored just to say a
    	word; but no - the President was inflexible - no man should be
    	heard.  If one meekly arose to make a suggestion he was at once
    	ruled out of order.  For the first time in the world's history,
    	men learned how to sit in silence when questions they were
    	interested in were under discussion' (Stanton et al, 1881, vol I,
    	p. 110, original emphasis).
    
    	"Some of the men were enraged by this treatment.  How could women
    	expect to present a convincing case if they treated men in this
    	barbarous fashion?  Neither then nor now have men taken kindly
    	to being silenced in the presence of women.  But apart from
    	seeing my own satisfaction sliding away when I realized that
    	Elizabeth Cady Stanton had come to the same conclusions as I had
    	- 130 years before and without benefit of a research degree - I
    	realized that her 'strategy' had potential.
    
    	"Whenever I tried to discuss these research findings, however, I
    	met with many protests.  'Your material might be all right but
    	your manner lets you down.  It's too threatening.  You have an
    	accusing tone,' I was told.  On one occasion I was speaking at
    	a conference and was listing my findings - that males talk more,
    	interrupt more, and are more likely to insist on telling you what
    	is *really* meant.  Before I could finish I was interrupted by
    	two men in the audience.
    
    	"This was not true, they protested.  It wasn't at all the way I
    	described it.  Men did not talk more, interrupt more, or insist
    	that they knew all the answers.  They would tell me what it was
    	really like - and they proceeded to do so at great length.  They
    	were angry and emotional as they repudiated my aggressive,
    	embittered and negative image of men.  I presented my research
    	findings - and they accused me of being a man-hater.  It was clear
    	that my facts were violating the social laws.
    
    	"Later I was congratulated on setting up such a good example of
    	male behavior to illustrate my thesis.  I didn't know whether it
    	was an admission of success or failure to say I had nothing to do
    	with it, that it hadn't been staged.  But I kept thinking about
    	those words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton..."
    
    						"Reflecting Men at Twice
    						   Their Natural Size" 1987
    						Sally Cline and Dale Spender

    I long to hear that you have declared an independancy, and, by the
    way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary
    for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more
    generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.  Do not put
    such unlimited power into the hands of husbands.  Remember, all men
    would be tyrants if they could.  If particular care and attention
    are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion,
    and will not hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have
    had no voice or representation.
    
    						Abigail Smith Adams,
    						March, 1776
    						to her husband John

    "Your writing is much more compelling when you offer evidence than when
    you express opinions"
    
    English teacher to my 17yr old daughter

    	"Reflecting Men at Twice Their Natural Size" - Dale Spender 1987:

    	"When I have tried to 'teach' this topic, I have generally encountered
    	some fierce resistance, from women as well as men.  It is as if there
    	is a fear that *all* will come tumbling down if the cover is blown.
    	I once tried to teach to some postgraduate students that body posture
    	(looking up to him), and smiling, are part of the elaborate ritual of
    	reflection.  I pointed out that women were expected to smile at men,
    	to indicate that they were noticed, that women were pleased to see 
    	them.

    	"If women did not fulfill this role, there was trouble.  I used as
    	evidence the smile boycott of the New York receptionists (first
    	proposed as a strategy in 1970 by Shulamith Firestone).  For one
    	week the receptionists refused to smile.  And there was one disaster
    	after another.  It was not just the immediate, and interminable,
    	queries of 'What's wrong with you?' although these responses were
    	significant enough, and difficult to handle.  Some men got abusive
    	- wildly so.  Receptionists were accused of 'ruining the day' of
    	many a man, of deliberate 'sabotage', and cases of physical threat
    	were not uncommon.

    	"My students questioned the validity of this research (which has
    	not been written up in a respectable academic journal), so I
    	suggested we conduct our own experiment.  Accordingly, three
    	unsmiling women students set off to run the gauntlet of a short
    	pathway, and their fellow students (who were observing) were
    	astonished.  All three women were accosted; 'What's wrong with
    	you?' was the standard demand.  One was told 'Cheer up, love;
    	it's not that bad', and the same woman was twice physically
    	stopped and abused.  Because they were unsmiling.  Because they
    	did not indicate that they were pleased to see a man.

    	"After that, I had no need to reassert that women are expected
    	to smile for men, even expected to smile at total strangers.
    	I did, however, need to explain: to them - why it happens; to
    	myself - why I still do it."

    "....no woman can ever look as serious as a man in a dark grey suit."
    
                                          Sarah Baylis, "Utrillo's Mother"
    

    "I'm appalled even today...how whole populations can find themselves
    led into battle, docile as lambs, by very simple men."
    
                                     Sarah Baylis, "Utrillo's Mother"
    

--In your book you mention that male chimpanzees do not have much respect for
--human women.

That's right, they don't.  For example, one male, Goblin, would often hit and
pound on me.  He wouldn't do that to men.  It has something to do with fear:
They're less frightened of women.  I think it may also have something to do
with the voice; the male's deeper voice sounds more like their threat call...

--Did it surprise you to discover how warlike chimps are?

It shocked me at first.  It shouldn't have surprised me, though.

--Why not?

Because chimpanzees are so like us in every way.  Why wouldn't we expect them
to have a dark side to their nature?  So I'm afraid it's likely that we do have
these aggressive, territorial traits, which stem directly from our ancient
primate heritage.  That doesn't mean, however, that we have to go on being
warlike, because we can control those impluses.

--What are the most striking similarities between chimps and man?

Do I dare say male dominance?  I'm half kidding, but actually it is interesting
that some male chimpanzees will devote a tremendous amount of energy, and run
serious risks, to get to the top.  But unlike most animal species, where getting
to the top gives you definite reproductive advantage -- you get more access to
the females, in other words -- that's not necessarily true for the chimps.  So
perhaps we're not the only creature where power for power's sake is an end.
There are also similarities in nonverbal communication.

--Like what?

Like kissing, embracing, patting on the back, holding hands.  And they do these
things in the same contexts as we do them, and they seem to mean the same sorts
of things...

		Jane Goodall
		excerpted (no permission) from D.C.Denison's interview
    			Boston Globe Magazine, Sunday Dec. 2

    	Does dancing pay.  Yes if they call for it.
    	Call for it however whatever identify more than have a satisfactory
    be alike this is what ever they plan as they make which makes it be
    more often a coldly and deceived done with it as if ever after a pansy
    at her attract deploying deploring the event which makes it do
    fortunately their devotion to indicate in abundance like and whatever
    it will in dotting theirs in difficulty which is generous in once in a
    while attributed decline for and to be not without an acquaintance as
    chanced a gaining of where it was more than a very little all that they
    could it would do.  They like best to have all of it walked in a
    literal diagonal prevailing in a carefulness that may make does it and
    dozens claim mine with a permission it is very often thought full of
    declaration as called a part of in her chance come with it to be forth
    coming gone futher which is might just as well in for plenty of
    privately theirs that is where they very well know hours of it.
    	Right.
    	Right right right right left.
    	Right left right left I had a good job and I left.
    	Right left right left right I had a good job and I left.
    
    	-- from "How to Write" by Gertrude Stein

    Woman 1: "I'm sure George felt closer to God after the circumcision."
    
    Woman 2: "I don't know why they make such a big deal out of it.  After
    all, they say the pain is very temporary.  It's probably something
    psychological."
    

    
    "As a woman I have no country.  As a woman I want no country.  As a
     woman my country is the whole world."
    
    - Virginia Woolf
    

    "Good thing I was born a woman,
     or I'd have been a drag queen!"
    
    -Dolly Parton

    "Acting is easy.  Shirley Temple could do it at 4!"
    
    		-- Katherine Hepburn

    
    "To dance is human, but to polka is divine."
    
     - k.d. lang
    

"I want to make the connection between sexual violence in relationships and 
world peace because I believe they are directly related. As long as the 
model of sexual relationships between men and women is built on the 
assumption that males are violent aggressors and women are passive, 
masochistic vessels, we are assenting to inequality, and to victimization 
as a norm. By maintaining this dominant-subordinate model for any type of 
relationship, we are supporting oppression and violence. Until we question 
all we have been taught by our families and the culture, we may remain 
captive to these values. Only when we learn to see a soul every time we see 
a body, male or female, will we feel that stirring in our hearts that leads 
us to care for and respect all people. Only then will we move to a level of 
consciousness in which the thought of war or of violence toward others 
becomes totally unacceptable."

	-- Charlotte Davis Kasl, Women, Sex, and Addiction: A Search for 
	Love and Power, 1989

"On this one point...the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior 
to that of man; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; 
he does not."

-- Olive Schreiner, quoted in Militarism versus Feminism: Writings on Women 
and War, by Catherine Marshall, C.K. Ogden, and Mary Sargent Florence, 1915

"A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky 
turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of 
keeping himself in place."

	-- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792

    
    'you must come into the room of your mother unarmed'
    
    	-dorothy thompson as quoted by anna quindlen, nyt 1/13/91
    

    From Sonia Johnson:
    
    Violence cannot solve problems.
    
    Cooperation is more supportive and life-enhancing than competition.
    
    Life, including the quality of life of all living things, is the
    foremost consideration in making decisions.
    
    

	"War will pass when intellectual culture and activity have made
possible to the female an equal share in the governance of modern national
life; it will probably not pass away much sooner; its extinction will not
be delayed much longer. 

	"It is especially in the domain of war that we, the bearers of
men's bodies, who supply its most valuable munition, who not amid the
clamour and ardour of battle, but, singly, and alone, with a three-in-the-
morning courage, shed blood and face death that the battle-field may have
its food, a food more precious to us than our heart's blood; it is we
especially, who in the domain of war, have our word to say, a word no man
can cay for us. It is our intention to enter into the domain of war and to
labour there till in the course of generations we have extinguished it." 

		-- Olive Schreiner
    

	I've re-read this, and thought of Maggie Thatchers role in the
	Fualklands, and somehow, although it's a great quote, it just doesn't 
	ring true.

	Heather

Women can pursue violence/retribution with more determination than men.
Thatcher, Boadicea, Elizabeth I, Queen Margret(Henry VI wife) etc...

    Equality does not mean that a female Einstein can get tenure, it means
    that even mediocre women get as far in life as mediocre men do.
    
                                    (I can't remember who said it)

    
    I like to think of Thatcher as the exception that proves the rule.
    
    Also, notice the quote refers to the female as having an "*equal* share in
    the governance of national life"!
    
    One Thatcher does not an equal share make, methinks...
    
    D.

>    Also, notice the quote refers to the female as having an "*equal* share in
>    the governance of national life"!
 
	There aren't many people to choose from, as this is the only female 
	prime minister we've had, she's the only one I can compare closely.
   
>    One Thatcher does not an equal share make, methinks...
    
 
	Yes well, I don't think Maggie was going for equal shares of anything!


	Heather

    Please save this topic for quotes, and feel free to take Thatcher
    discussions to the Thatcher note....
    
    -Jody
    

    
    
From the January 27th San Francisco Chronicle, with no permission
whatsoever:

"Women are an endangered species. I think it's wonderful that people
are worried about dolphins and spotted owls. But the violence against
women is so pervasive, so much a part of our culture now, that we're
totally desensitized to it... There are men who want to be free of this
compulsion. And once they are, they can listen to classical music,
do the ... crossword puzzle every Sunday, and they're not going to be
climbing through your bedroom window...As soon as I mention castration,
people have a heart attack. So why don't they react that way to rape?"

				Lisa Sliwa, national director of the
					Guardian Angels

    
[On the same page of the paper, in the very next column, about 3" down:

"FBI officials are refusing to identify three men who allegedly fled Friday
night from a fire in the Marin Headlands that turned out to be the burning
body of a woman."]

    
    "I will not grow more conservative with age."
    		-Elizabeth Cady Stanton
    
    "Those who love war, lack the love of an appropriate sport - the art of
    living."
    		-Natalie Clifford Barny
    
    "Surely the earth can be saved by all who insist in love."
    		-Alice Walker
    
    "Ordinary women of grace are, in a sense, my real role models.  They had
    the capacity to keep struggling.  I think that is a message that this
    quick-fix culture needs."
    		-Marian Wright Edelman
    
    

"A patriarchal state is one which is either rehabilitating from war, is 
presently at war, or is preparing for war."

	-- Berit As, quoted in The Demon Lover (1989) by Robin Morgan

    "While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy
    is to allow part of us to die - whether it is our spirit, our
    creativity or our glorious uniqueness."
    
    Gilda Radner "It's Always Something" (4 **** recommendation for
    this book)

    "Product management is not a pretty sight."
    
    	-- "It Was the Heat", by Pat Cardigan

	In Aeschylus' Agamemnon, a king is trying to do his best to lead 
	his army off to Troy.  Suddenly he finds that his expedition is
	becalmed, and he's told that the reason is that the gods are
	demanding a sacrifice.  He has to kill his own daughter in order 
	to complete that expedition.

	So here we have two deep and entirely legitimate commitments
	coming into a terrible conflict in which there's not anything the
	king can do that will be without wrongdoing.  On the one hand, if
	he doesn't sacrifice his daughter, he's disobeying the gods, and 
	his entire expedition is probably going to perish; on the other
	hand, he's got to kill his own daughter.  Thinking about this, as
	the play says, with tears in his eyes, he says, "A heavy doom is
	disobedience, but heavy too if I shall rend my own child, the 
	pride of my house, polluting my father's hands with steams of
	slaughtered maiden's blood close by the alter.  Which of these
	is without evils?"

	...
	
	Tragedy is trying to live well.

	...

	Tragedy happens ONLY when you are trying to live well, because
	for a heedless person who doesn't have deep commitments to others,
	Agamemnon's conflict isn't a tragedy.  Somebody who's a bad person
	could go in and slaughter that child with equanimity or could 
	desert all the men and let them die.  But it's when you are trying
	to live well, and you deeply care about the things you're trying 
	to do, that the world enters in, in a particularly painful way.  It's
	in that struggle with recalcitrant circumstances that a lot of the 
	value of the moral life comes in.

	...

	Sometimes it's pretty clear which one you ought to choose, but
	it's very, very important to separate the question, " Which is
	the better choice?" from the question, "Is there any choice available
	to me here that's free of wrongdoing?"  Agamemnon has to sacrifice his
	daughter because it's clear the gods are going to kill everyone, 
	including the daughter, if he doesn't.  Looked at that way, he
	had better make that choice.  Still, he has not got the right to
	think that just because he's made the right choice, everything
	is well.  In the play, he says, "May all be for the best,"
	and the chorus says that he's mad.  You don't accept an artificial,
	easy solution to this, but the hope would be that through that kind
	of pain, you understand better what your commitments are and how 
	deep they are.  That's what Aeschylus means when he says that 
	through suffering comes a kind of learning--a grace that comes 
	by violence from the gods.


				-- Martha Nussbaum in _a World of Ideas_

     "If you don't love yourself, then you won't get anywhere in life. If 
you don't respect yourself, then you have no right to expect anyone else to 
respect you."

                                            -Bernice Louise Thomas

	   Nussbaum: I wake up at night thinking about Euripides' _Hecuba_,
	a story that says so much about what it is to be a human being in
	the middle of a world of unreliable things and people.  Hecuba is 
	a great queen who has lost her husband, most of her children, and
	her political power in the Trojan War.  She's been made a slave, 
	but she remains absolutely firm morally, and she even says she 
	believes that good character is stable in adversity and can't be
	shaken.
	   But then her one deepest hope is pulled away from her.  She had
	left her youngest child with her best friend, who was supposed to
	watch over him and his money and then bring him back when the war
	was over.  When she gets to the shore of Thrace, she sees a naked
	body washed up on the beach.  It's been so badly eaten by the fish
	that she at first doesn't recognize it.  She looks at it more closely,
	and then sees that it's the body of her child, and that the friend
	has murdered the child for his money and just flung the body 
	heedlessly into the waves.  All of a sudden the roots of her moral
	life are undone.  She looks around and says, "Everything that I
	see is untrustworthy."  If this deepest and best friendship proves
	untrustworthy, then it seems to her that nothing can be trusted, and
	she has to turn to a life of solitary revenge.  We see her end the 
	play by putting out the eyes of her former best friend, and it is 
	predicted that she will turn into a dog.  the story of metamorphosis
	from the human to something less than human has really taken place
	before our very eyes in the fact that she's become totally unable
	to form a relationship of trust with anything outside herself.
	   Now this comes about not because she's a bad person, but in a 
	sense she's a good person, because she has had deep friendships on
	which she's staked her moral life.  So what this play says that's
	so disturbing is that a condition of being good is that it should
	always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something
	that you couldn't prevent.  To be a good human being is to have a
	kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things
	beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very 
	extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame.  That says 
	something very important about the condition of the ethical life:
	that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness
	to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a
	jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty
	is inseparable from that fragility.

	...

	   Moyers: Maybe the unintended moral of Hecuba's story was that by
	transposing herself into a dog, she relieved herself of all emotions,
	of all necessity to make moral choices.  A certain contentment comes 
	from being a dumb beast.

	   Nussbaum: This can happen.  Being human means accepting promises
	from other people and trusting that other people will be good to you.
	When that is too much to bear, it is always possible to retreat into
	the thought, "I'll live for my own comfort, for my own revenge,
	for my own anger, and I just won't be a member of society any more."
	That really means, "I won't be a human being any more."
	   You see people doing that today where they feel that society
	has let them down, and they can't ask anything of it, and they can't
	put their hopes on anything outside themselves.  You see them actually
	retreating to a life in which they think only of their own 
	satisfaction, and maybe the satisfaction of their revenge against
	society.  But the life that no longer trusts another human being and
	no longer forms ties to the political community is not a human life
	any longer.

    
    "We are like VISA and Mastercard.  We are everywhere you want to
     be."
    
     - Suzanne Westhoeven, on lesbian invisibility
    

    >everywhere you want to be
    
    Now _there's_ a double, no, triple-entendre if ever I heard one

For me, anything that gives new hope,
new possibilities and new positive feelings
about ourselves
will make us more whole people
and thus more human, real and loving
in our relationships with others.
If enough of this happens,
the world will become a better place
for all of us.
I matter.
You matter.
What goes on between us matters.
Since I always carry me with me,
and I belong to me,
I always have something to bring
to you and me --
new resources,
new possibilities to cope differently
and to create anew.


		Lovingly,

		Virginia Satir
    

    RE: -97
    
    I love Virginia Satir,  and haven't seen anything of her work in
    years...I got turned on to her writing in college...an interpersonal
    communications class that used her book 'PEOPLEMAKING".  If no one has
    read it...it's wonderful, and good for a few laughs along the way.
    
    Thanks for reminding me that she's still around!
    
    Jill
    

    
    Don't have a clue who Rita Rudner is... but it's an interesting 
    "observation".
    
    		"Men with pierced ears are better prepared
                 for marriage   - they've experienced pain
                 and bought jewelry."
                                         -- Rita Rudner
    
    
    lsn
                                

    re .99, she's a stand-up comic who is hilarious.  She says that when a
    man she's dating asks her when she's going to invite him over for
    dinner she says, "Oh, what kind of cold cereal interests you?"
    
    Lorna
    

    Shirley is in her 50s, works for my husband.  She's a riot most of the
    time, I like her a *lot*, and anyone who can keep Bob in line deserves
    a lot of respect!
    
    She and Bob were talking about a female person, whom Shirley referred
    to as a 'lady'.  Bob said, 'you should be calling her a woman, no?' and
    Shirley answered:
    
    There are girls, women, and ladies.  Yes, no, and maybe.

    "Humor. It is a difficult concept."
    
    Lt. Saavik in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"

"...sex or nudity alone is not violence, but the continual stereotyping 
of women as sex objects, as the always willing, vulnerable, and youthful 
sexual playthings of men, *is* violence, and it is this stereotype that the 
majority of pornography promotes.

"Pornography is just one link in the chain of a patriarchal culture that 
subordinates women, just one interdependent element in a society where one 
in four women are sexually assaulted, a society where women are more likely 
than professional soldiers to live lives of violence."

 	-- from a letter to the Utne Reader, Jan/Feb 1991, p. 13

    found in the Washington Post 3/12/1991:
    
    "Those Persian Gulf War generals obviously didn't realize that the
    language they used to describe their tactics and strategies was
    offensive to some.  Ms. magazine Editor in Chief Robin Morgan, in a
    recent interview with the Baltimore Sun, said the officers used
    'ejaculatory language and tactics.'  She cited such phases as
    'super-hardened bunkers' and 'rigid deep earth penetrating missiles' to
    make her point...."
    
    sue

"During World War I, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George confessed, 'If 
people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course, they 
don't know, and they can't know.' So we become resigned to coverage labeled 
'Censored by the U.S./Saudi/French/Iraqi/Israeli Military' with the 
impeccable rationale that censorship saves soldiers' lives. (Is it a 
digression to recall how feminists who protest that pornography destroys 
*women's* lives are denounced for promulgating -- you guessed it -- 
censorship?)"

	-- from Robin Morgan's Editorial "Digressions", Ms. Magazine,
	   March/April 1991 

"Wouldn't it be interesting if our concern for the safety of female POWs 
were extended to a concern for battered women held captive in abusive 
relationships all over the world? If our alarm about women risking injury 
or death in a combat zone included the realization that for most women, 
daily life is a combat zone?"

	-- from Robin Morgan's Editorial "Digressions", Ms. Magazine,
	   March/April 1991 

    I have neither heard nor read this, but I said it and a friend
    thought maybe I should post it, since it seemed so strangely apt 
    at the time, in light of our impending humanity.
    
    
    "We're all soft and squishy and screaming inside...."
    
    
    -Jody
    

    hmmmmmm....I think you must have a very wise friend.
    
    
    E Grace

--> .108,
	*impending* humanity?
I think we're all there already! :-)

	re: this version =wn=, 22.1857

	"  The fact of the matter is that crime has feet and any
    	   woman could be a target, even in her own home. "
           

This passage is from V. Woolf's *Orlando* (pub. 1928) -- one of the
funniest books I've read! -- 


	"...it cannot be denied that when women get together -- but hist --
they are always careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word
of it gets into print. All they desire is -- but hist again -- is that not
a man's step on the stair? All they desire, we were about to say when the
gentleman took the very words out of our mouths. Women have no desires,
says this gentleman,..only affectations. Without desires...their
conversation cannot be of the slightest interest to anyone. 'It is well
known,' says Mr. S.W., 'that when they lack the stimulus of the other sex,
women can find nothing to say to each other. When they are alone, they do
not talk; they scratch.' And since they cannot talk together and scratching
cannot continue without interruption and it is well known (Mr. T.R. has
proved it) 'that women are incapable of any feeling of affection for their
own sex and hold each other in the greatest aversion,' what can we suppose
that women do when they seek out each other's society? 

	"As that is not a question that can engage the attention of a 
sensible man, let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and 
historians from any sex whatever, pass it over, and merely state that 
Orlando professed great enjoyment in the society of her own sex, and leave 
it to the gentlemen to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is 
impossible."

    
    Great quote! Great book!
    
    'gail
    

    "Why should we need extra time in which to enjoy ourselves? If we 
    expect to enjoy our life we will have to learn to be joyful in all of
    it, not just at stated intervals, when we can get time, or when we have
    nothing else to do.
         
    It may well be that it is not our work that is so hard for us as the
    dread of it and our often expressed hatred of it. Perhaps it is our
    spirit and attitude towards life and its conditions that are giving us
    trouble instead of a shortage of time. Surely the days and nights are
    long as they ever were."
    
    		Laura Ingalls Wilder
                "It Depends on How You Look at It"
    

    "Political Correctness" is a myth of the Patriarchy.

	"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win,
	 you're still a rat."

					- Lily Tomlin

    Hee hee!  That's great... and, along the same lines:
    
    "When you can run with the river, why run with the river rat?"
    
    	-- Ferron
    

'Neither church nor society sufficiently values women's role, particularly 
as the doorway through which all human life arrives. "A woman could truly
say, 'This is my body given for you. This is my blood given for you.'"'


	-- from an article "Women leaders voice anger at church," Boston
	Globe, 5/12/91, p. 27. The quote is from Elizabeth Dodson-Gray, who 
	gave the keynote address at a conference sponsored by the Massachusetts
	Council of Churches, called to promote an international program called 
	the "Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women, 1988 - 
	1998." 

The other day following a small car driven by a young-ish woman(hard to tell
for sure as I got only a partial look) two bumper stickers on the car:

   "HOMOPHOBIA IS A SOCIAL DISEASE"
      then right under that one,  purple background with black letters
   "I AM ONE TOO"

I thought it was a great brave statement

Amos

    
    one what ?

    	"It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own
    property, etcetera, if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my
    absolute right."
    
    				Lucy Stone, 1855

    	"the contemporary backlash is so violent because the ideology of
    beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that
    still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism
    would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable.  It has grown
    stronger to take over the work of social coercion that myths about
    motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity can no longer manage.
    It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the
    good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly."
    
    				Naomi Wolf, 1991

    "Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. 
    The fearful are caught as often as the bold."
    
    					- Helen Keller

	Bush has a small one.
	Schwarzkopf has a big one.
	The Pope has one but doesn't use it.
	Madonna doesn't have one.

	What is it?


	A last name.

				- Pat Schroeder
				  Women + Business Conference
				  Seattle, Washington
				  May 17, 1991

    before I read the answer....
    
    ;-)
    
    last name ;-)?

    "At sixteen Marie left school to become a telephone operator.  For two
    years she'd plugged people into each other.  "Number please" for nine
    hours a day on a high metal stool in an enormous room that never
    stopped buzzing, as if a million flies were trapped in it.  A good job
    compared with some she could have gotten.  The telephone company
    drilled its girls in politeness and enunciation - they expected them to
    be perfect ladies, of course.  They fired her for lack of "moral
    character," for the big ugly belly she had, thanks to Tom Murphy, that
    had nothing to do with her diction or the speed of her fingers. 
    "You're through at Bell Telephone, miss," they said."
    
    
    from In The Night Cafe by Joyce Johnson, Washington Square Press 1990
    

    
    "The search for a relationship is [very often] a search for permanent
    childcare."
                   -- Pat Gary, adult play group leader, Boston area
             

    
Fielding Dreams
by Deborah Wessell
The Weekly (Seattle) June 5, 1991

excerpted w/o permission

...Baseball, we are told, is the national pastime, the American game, the 
field of dreams. One PBS special spent a solemn hour tracing the links between 
baseball and the American psyche, and a new fiction anthology, 'Baseball and 
the Game of Life', devotes a ten-page foreword to the same task. Baseball, 
according to these and other analyses, is the expression of the frontier 
spirit, a metaphor of human existence, and playing hardball in the big leagues 
has been the dream of just about every red-blooded American child since 1876.

Every male child, I chime in silently, as I watch or read. Your half of the 
species, not my half. The analysts never seem to mention that girls didn't 
play the American game, not until late in its history, and they don't really 
play it now. They play softball, of course. They've been allowed into Little 
League. They can pitch and hit and field all they want. But they can't dream- 
not of going to the majors- and a dream isn't the same if you can't ever, ever 
be the hero...

It shouldn't matter to me so much, this particular way of being 
disenfranchised. I hated sports as a girl, and as a woman I'm more concerned 
with political power and economic inequity and whether women should be combat 
soldiers. Who cares if we can't be utility infielders?

I care, every April since I got married. My husband's family is Red Sox 
Orthodox, and like many a bride, I converted. I root for the Mariners, play 
catch in the yard, and marvel at how sweet it feels when the bat meets the 
ball just so. I read baseball stories, and the more I enjoy them the more 
excluded I feel, because, even now, coming late and laughably to the game, I'd 
like to dream.

...it was Virnie Mitchell who really gave me a story to cherish. Virnie 
Mitchell was a 17-year-old southpaw for the otherwise-male Chattanooga 
Lookouts in 1931. Trained by her father, she pitched just one inning in an 
exhibition game, striking out two batters before she was pulled. She left the 
sport after that, but she'll never leave my imagination, because the batters 
she struck out were Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig...

*She struck them out*. The very sound of those pronouns rings in my head when 
I heft a bat or pound a glove. I don't play any better because of Virnie 
Mitchell, and men don't respect women any more than they would otherwise, but 
at least once a woman, somebody like me, played some serious baseball. 
Sometimes, somehow, she makes a difference to me...

I play first base, not quite as badly as I bat, with my two meager assets: 
long limbs and an occasional ability not to flinch when the ball comes my way.

One summer I explained these assets to the shortstop at a company picnic, and 
he had the grace to take me at my word. The first batter up, a sober adult, 
smoked a line drive past the pitcher and accelerated down the bas epath at me 
like a semi on a down-grade. Inside a few eternal seconds, the shortstop 
swooped, snatched, pivoted and drilled th ball straight toward my sternum and 
hard enough to restart my heart, which had stopped. In the same few seconds, I 
planted my left foot on the base, lunged out and down on my gimpy right knee, 
and positioned my glove at my chest. I didn't so much catch the ball as let it 
hit me, like an arrow hitting the bull's eye, but I closed my glove around the 
glorious sound it made and I didn't take my foor off the bag...

A casual game on a forgotten Sunday, and that first putout meant nothing at 
all, except to me. Because for one private moment, I was the hero. Just like 
Vernie Mitchell.

    
    
    	"If I've got a leak in my roof,
    
    		I don't go out and buy new shrubs."
    
    
    					Martha "Twinkle Toes" Walker

    
    "There are two ways to approach a subject that frightens you
    and makes you feel stupid: you can embrace it with humility
    and an open mind, or you can ridicule it mercilessly"
    
    Judith Stone
                

  Paraphrased from memory from an article in the 16-JUN-1991 Boston
  Sunday Globe Business section:

  The woman who started (and still owns a significant portion of
  ASK software, the largest woman-owned business in the United States)
  was describing her first software product, a manufacturing inventory
  automation program.  She intended to call it "MAMA" both as a pun
  and as a semi-acronym for MAnufacturing Materials Automation.  But
  a colleague suggested that men would never buy a software product
  called "MAMA".  So she changed the software's name to "MANMAN",
  both to make the product's name acceptible and as a private (and
  now public) joke that it took two men to do the job of one woman.

  (Perhaps someone with the actual article handy can post a more exact
  quote.)
  
                                   Atlant

I didn't know where to put this---this is not exactly poetry, it's
    the lyrics from a Raw Sugar song sung by Jan Luby at the
    Folkway. Jan sings it acapella and snaps her fingers while
    singing it. It's quite powerful.
    
    
Message From the Media
        Kirsten Anderberg and Linda Shearman

I got the message from the media
It tells me what I can be
Vidal Sassoon and Max Factor
Clairol and Maybelline
And Estee Lauder 
Tells me that I gotta
Buy a bottle of glamour
To get a man enamoured of me

I got the message from the media
It tells me what I can be
And it says
Girls should only look a certain way
Or else they ain't a-ok
You gotta wear the right makeup on your face
Or else you're grossing out the whole human race
Forget about the beauty that comes from within
To be beautiful, be an anorexic thin
All girls've gotta look a certain way
Or else they ain't a-ok

I got the message from the media
It tells me we should be thin
Diet Cola, Tab & Diet Shasta
Weight Clinics and Dexadrin
And Pierre Cardin tells me that I can't win
'Less I buy his jeans and I'm lookin' real lean
Yeah

I got the message from the media
It tells me we should be thin
And it says
Girls should only look a certain way
Or else they ain't a-ok
You gotta wear the right makeup on your eyes
If you ain't no package, honey, you can't be no prize
Forget about the qualities of being honest and strong
If you look like yourself, honey, you just don't belong
All girls have gotta look a certain way
Or else they ain't a-ok

I got the message from the media
It tells me what I can be
Compulsive cleaning lady
Meddling mother-in-law
Prostitute or Beauty Queen 
And always a victim
A helpless sex kitten
Victim of the rape, and the stabbing kidnapping

I got the message from the media
It tells me what I can be
And it says
Girls should only act a certain way
Or else they ain't ok
Always be willing
Never get mad
Or they call us bitch
They tells us we're bad
And girls never fart
They only fluff
We're all body and heart
Never think serious

All girls 've gotta look a certain
Or else they ain't a-ok
Girls have gotta act a certain way
Or else they ain't a-ok
Girls have gotta sing a certain way
Or else they ain't a-ok
All girls have gotta look a certain way
Or else---
       

    "The trouble lies in distribution: not in production.  Machines serve
    us: technology serves us; our habits oppress us, and enslave us.  One
    man has a house with twelve rooms: another lives in a cardboard box. 
    The man with twelve rooms is a decent guy.  What stops him sharing? 
    He'll put a coin or a note in a charity box: he uses money to salve his
    conscience: the very money that causes in its plenty the rich man's
    grief, in its absence the poor man's woe: it is the symbol of our
    failure, not our success.  'Let them spend more on health!' we cry. 
    'On schools! On happiness!' Spend what? Coins, notes?  'Money' has
    stopped working.  Pour millions upon millions into a nation's health
    service, it makes no difference: still the people hack and cough and go
    untended, die for lack of attention, because money no longer represents
    what it did - labour, skill, concern, capital, organization,
    involvement.  It has become a commodity itself, to be bought and sold
    by people skilled only in doing just that, and they have taken the guts
    out of money, weeded it out."
    
                                 - Fay Weldon from Darcy's Utopia, 
                                   William Collins Sons & Co Ltd
                                   Great Britain, 1990
    
    

    
    don't ever underestimate the ability of a man to underestimate the
    ability of a woman.
    
                                       kathleen turner - that new detective
                                                               movie(?)

This is one quotable woman quoting and commenting upon another; too good
to go unremarked; -DougO

"The primary intent of women who choose to be present to each other, 
however, is not an invitation to men.  It is an invitation to our Selves.  
The Spinsters, Lesbians, Hags, Harpies, Cones, Furies who are the Voyagers
of Gyn/Ecology know that we choose to accept this invitation for ourselves.
This, our Self-acceptance, is in no way contingent upon male approval.  Nor
is it stopped by (realistic) fear of brutal acts of revenge.  As Marilyn
Frye has written:

    Male parasitism means that males *must* have access to women; it is
    the Patriarchal Imperative.  But feminist no-saying is more than a
    substantial removal (re-direction, re-allocation) of goods and services
    because access is one of the faces of power.  Female denial of male
    access to females substantially cuts off a flow of benefits, but it
    has also the form and full portent of assumption of power.

"The no-saying to which Frye refers is a consequence of female yes-saying
to our Selves.  Since women have a variety of strengths and since we have
all been damaged in a variety of ways, our yes-saying assumes different 
forms and *is* in different degrees.  In some cases it is clear and intense;
in other instances it is sporadic, diffused, fragmented.  Since Female-
identified yes-saying is complex participation in be-ing, since it is a
Journey, a process, there is no simple way to divide the Female World into
two camps; those who say "yes" to women and those who do not."

Mary Daly, 
from the Preface to Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-Ethics of Radical Feminism

    sort of a quotable woman:
    
    In this dirty-minded world, she thought, you are either somebody's wife
    or somebody's whore - or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.
    If you don't fit into either category, then everyone tries to make you
    think thre is something wrong with you. But, she thought, there is
    nothing wrong with me.
    
    	Irving, John. The World According to Garp. London: Gollancz, 1978.
    	p. 11.
    
    Alice T.

    	Check it out! Here you go, little nails... Rest awhile... You've
    got my support now... Rest.
    	You know... I always sit back and watch this bookcase... this...
    freak bookcase... Y-you know... it's like... built wrong... not like
    this... But... you know... and the nails... they have to, like... work
    harder...
    	 I can always hear the little nails crying for help! "Help us!
    Please! Have mercy! We can't hold on for any longer! There's too much
    pressure! We never did anything bad in our lives! Help! Help! Help!
    Please! We're going to let go!" Poor fellows!
    	Their jobs start once they're driven into the wood! Then, for the
    rest of their lives it's their job to hold on, like soldiers off the
    coast of Zymbodia! At the ready, just in case! But for how long?
    There's no war, but they're there! But who know they're there? There's
    not even a f*cking war on!!!
    	Those little boogers have to hold these big ol' pieces of lumber
    together! And who gets all the credit? "Oh, my! That is a most
    wonderful _wooden_ bookcase you possess! Surely a grand specimen!"
    Christ...
    	And... finally... when they fail to hold the wood together any
    longer... they are shunned... turned away by man... tossed aside... to
    be replaced by young upstarts... no longer a part of society... friend
    today, foe tomorrow...
    	But... alas... We all gotta go sometime... Life must go on... We
    must continue on living in this uncaring world...
    
    
    	Hernandez, Jaime. Love and Rockets. London: Titan Books, 1987. p
    	36.
    
    Yes, and it really is about a bookcase. (I don't think it's
    metaphorical, it's just weird and I love it)
    
    Alice T.
    

    "Western culture has mystified the white male viewpoint, representing
    it as the objective one."
    
    		Carol Ascher (author of a biography of Simone de Bouvoir-
    -I know I spelled her name wrong!)

"You, sir, have a major problem when dealing with me because you are treating
me like you treat your women.  Wouldn't it be a little easier for us if you 
promoted me two levels to congenital idiot so we could communicate AS EQUALS?"

	August, 1991 - 	Sunny Wilde, my one-of-a-kind mother, when driven to
	the edge of madness by a mechanic who repeatedly failed to fix
	her Chevy van's air conditioning...even though she had described,
	in great detail, the source of the problem and the procedure
	needed to fix it.  She said this to the mechanic in front of
	a roomful of customers -- at which time she turned and walked
	out of the place to applause from all other patrons of the
	establishment.  Oh, for a moment like that...

			Sunny's kid,

			     D

    
    
    Had to put this in here today....... After talking with Met pay
    about the recent storm damage and not quite getting my point across
    with an agent that was brought in to help out with claims... my wife
    took over the phone call and tried to get a straight answer from him...
    After she got no where she said she had just one question for him
    to answer........
    This is a direct quote from my wife.......
     
    
    
    Are you practicing to be stupid or does it come naturally?
    
    REK
    
    An I'm still rolling with laughter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111
    
    

    I was given a wonderful book today.  It is called WOMEN'S WISDOM, and
    is full of quotes by women.  I thought I would enter some of them here.




    		Every day is a fresh beginning;
    		 Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
    		And, in spite of old sorrow...
    		 and possible pain,
    		Take heart with the day,and begin again.

    					-- Susan Coolidge

    


    			I believe in the immortality 
    			of the soul because
    			I have within me immortal longings.

    					-- Helen Keller

    			Courage is the price that life
    			extracts for granting peace.
    			The soul that knows it not knows
    			no release from little things.

    					-- Amelia Earhart

    			God, give me sympathy and sense
    			 And help me keep my courage high.
    			God, give me calm and confidence -
    			 And, please - a twinkle in my eye.

    					-- Margaret Bailey

    Women who miscalculate are called "mothers."
    			Abigail Van Buren

    If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
    
    				Florynce Kennedy

    It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another
    woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.
    				
    				Hellen Rowland

    Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.
    
    					Mae West

    I married below me. All women do.
    		
    		Nancy, Lady Astor

    Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself, "Lillian, you
    should have stayed a virgin."
    
    				Lillian Carter, mother of Jimmy and Billy

    Never eat more than you can lift.
    
    				Miss Piggy

    I never know how much of what I say is true.
    
    				Bette Midler

    The biggest sin is setting on your a$$.
    
    			Florynce Kennedy

    Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
    
    				Gloria Steinem

    Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.
    
    				Lily Tomlin

    I was rumaging through my old files, and I came across something I
    wrote when I was 13, to a friend who was trying to figure out how to
    convince her parents to let her come visit me (I lived in MA and she
    lived in NM.)
    
    I thought it was cute and relevent and there isn't a "quoteable
    children" topic, so...
    
    TIPS ON CONNING PARENTS INTO LETTING YOU DO SOMETHING THEY 
    DON'T WANT YOU TO...
    
    #1.  TAKE YOUR TIME - Parents are like tough leather.  You must
         soften it up before you shape it. Don't rush it or it won't
         work.
    
    #2.  SOFTEN THEM OVER a long period of time.  For a week or so,
         don't mention your request at all, just be really nice and
         helpful and mature.  Make them feel good towards you.  Don't
         make waves, but...
    
    #3.  BE SUBTLE - as soon as they realize what you're doing, you;re
         doomed.
    
    #4.  BE SERIOUS when you ask.  Don't make a joke of it.
    
    #5.  BE TACTFUL - wait till they are in a good mood, and relaxed,
         and you are in their favor.  Don't do it in the presence of a
         little sibling.  If they don't seem to be responding
         correctly, WAIT - it's not the right time.
    
    #7.  Last but not least, BE FRIENDLY.  Don't get angry and 
         resentful.  Accept their response so that next time they will
         appreciate you more.
    
    And, oh yes, I forgot.  be Optomistic.  Don't phrase your question
    "You wouldn't let me...would you?"
    
    It's obvious what these tips are meant for [the trip to visit me] but
    they apply to all major long-term requests.  Keep them in mind.
    

    
    "And then, right over her heart, pinching and squeezing, she felt the
    emptiness, as if someone had just taken a childhood trinket she had
    lost track of all those years and held it up in front of her eyes for a
    single mocking instant.  Just long enough to let her remember how
    precious it had once been.  Before toosing it away, forever, into the
    ocean."
    
    Kim Chernin - The Flame Bearers

    
    "The, some high tension, which seemed to have been there most of her
    life, suddenly resolved itself.  Something seemed to be falling,
    dropping soundlessly upon a place of great sensitivity, deep within
    her."
    
    Kim Chernin - the Flame Bearers
    

    
    "It was as if the lights had gone out in the single room where she was
    standing, while all around her everything else seemed to go on blazing
    for some perpetual celebration that had just excluded her."
    
    Kim Chernin - the Flame Bearers
    

    
    "She had the sense of being cut loose from her moorings, and on some
    trackless wandering.... she could already feel the loneliness of the
    habitual wanderer who day after day finds herself homeless at
    nightfall."
    
    Kim Chernin - the Flame Bearers

    
    "I have to see myself as large enough to acomplish the impossible....
    you are only as large as you are small - no one is ever worthy to do
    what she is called to do.  No one is ever significant enough.  The
    mission is always larger than the one who goes out on the mission....
    She is made out of the same clay that makes up any woman."
    
    Kim Chernin - The Flame Bearers
    

    Re .156:
    
    Well, did it work?  Was she able to go visit you?
    
    -Tracy
    

        Well, did it work?  Was she able to go visit you?
    
    Yes, and yes.  We had a terrific three weeks... :-)
    
    D!

    "Oh, you're the one who gives hugs."
    
    			-- Ivy Wales (at May Ling's tonight)

on the light side:

	"men are like Dove bars.  One is wonderful, but two make you
	throw-up"

	unknown write for "Murphy Brown" - when Murphy has two men vying
	for her undivided attention

DISCLAIMER:

	This is not intended to insult any male of the species (or any
	species for that matter), but to illuminate how silly we get when
	our personal lives get messy....put down your weapons, men, this
	was not a loaded volley....8^}

 I heard that last night and almost changed my p_n to "Men are like 
dove bars..."

 :-)

    
    
    "I *know* I'm a survivor!
    
    			Do I have to keep *proving* it to myself?!"
    
    				-Auddy in "Sibs"
    
    

    E,
    I'm right with you on that one!  I identified also.
    
    :-)
    Karen

    
    "It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property,
    etcetera, if I may not keep my body, and it's uses, in my absolute
    right".
    
    Lucy Stone, suffragist, 1855
    
    "It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality"
    
    Virginia Woolf
    
    "I notice that it is the fashion....to disclaim any notion of male
    conspiracy in the oppression of women....
    For my part, I must say with William Lloyd Garrison, "I am not prepared
    to respect that philosophy. I believe in sin, therefore in a sinner;
    in theft, therefore in a thief; in slavery , therefore in a
    slaveholder; in wrong, therfore in a wrong-doer."
    
    Ann Jones
    
    All quotes taken from "The Beauty Myth" - Naomi  Wolf
     
    'gail

    From Julie Burchill (who's got a size 42 chest), about not wearing a
    bra:
    
    "I'm very self-supporting."
    
    (read in yesterday's Guardian)
    
    Alice T.

    "The function of poetry is to waste excess energy."
    	-- Rosemarie Waldrop
    

    Weeelllll,
    
    In my opinion, you can waste the excess energy, and then
    
    write the poetry about the wonderful things you just did! 8-)
    
    Alice T.

    
    .171
    
    "Gee, thanks, I needed that."
    
    		-- D.B.

re: .171
    
    "The function of poetry is to focus excess energy."
    
    --Jody Bobbitt

    Do you mean the writer's energy, or the reader's?
    
    Alice T.

>    Do you mean the writer's energy, or the reader's?
    
    She means both, and focusing is in there -- poetry is a _focused_ waste
    of energy, as opposed to, um, falling down the stairs or whatnot. 
    
    In context, she's working off Bataille's idea that life itself is
    defined as a wasteful economy, starting with the excessive energy given
    the Earth by the Sun: "It is in the principle of life that the sum of
    engergy produced is always greater than that needed for its
    production... If the system can grow no more or if the excess cannot
    entirely be absorbed into the growth process then it has to be lost
    without profit, spent voluntarily or not, gloriously or else
    catastrophically." She goes on to say that the most general and
    thorough way to waste energy is death (war in the social sphere);
    poetry is one of the "glorious" ways.
    
    But I like Waldrop's pithy version too. (A later "thesis" in her talk
    is "There are more crazy people around than you would think," which
    leads to some interesting discussion...) She's an excellent poet and
    translator, by the way.
    
    In the same book, I also liked Nicole Brossard's definition of her body
    as that which transforms language and the outside world into poetry,
    but I'm not as sure that it's a generally applicable idea. (: >,)
    
    Ray

    There are those of us for whom falling down the stairs *was* a focused
    waste of energy!

    E Grace

    When a woman behaves like a man, why can't she behave like a nice man?
    
    			- Dame Judith Evans

    The late Beatrice Lillie (comedian extraordinaire and also a peer of
    the realm) was having her hair done when Mrs Armour (the meat mogul's
    wife) entered.  Mrs Armour was quite put out when told that she would
    have to wait until Bea Lillie was done, and she said, loudly, "I'm an
    important person, my time is valuable.  Why should I have to wait for a
    mere *actress*?"
    
    Ms Lillie overheard and put her in her place: "Tell the butcher's wife
    that Lady Peel was here first."

>    There are those of us for whom falling down the stairs *was* a focused
>    waste of energy!
    
    I have this great mental image of E Grace holding on to a stairway
    arras and swooping over a crowded room of bad guys...
    
    Ray

    re .178
    
    Don't you mean _Edith_ Evans?
    
    Alice T.

    Re: .181
    
    Yes.  Hasty typing...

	"Live and learn. Die and forget it all."

			Claudia Schmidt

On NPR this morning, there was an interview with Molly Ivens (?spelling),
a Texas columnist, journalist and commentator on the political scene. She
described the Speaker of the Texas House with the glowing phrase:
	"He's not a crook; he's just ethically challenged"

She's just published a collection of articles called "Molly Ivens Can't Say
That, Can She?"; judging by this morning's feature, I'd heartily recommend 
buying it!

						Nigel

- .1

Thanks for entering that - I heard an interview with her the other day and 
I too thought she sounded great, very witty. She said that in order to win 
various story-telling contests she'd entered, all she had to do was recount 
the adventures of some of the members of the Texas State Legislature...One I
remember involved a candidate for re-election who was worried because he
hadn't done a thing in his first term. So he hired someone to shoot him in
the arm, I suppose to get the sympathy vote. Then he learned that it's
against the law in Texas to hire somebody to shoot you, and he had to go into
hiding...he was eventually found hiding at his mother's house in a stereo
cabinet. Quipped Ms. Ivens: "I'm here to tell you, that man always did want
to be a speaker." 

D.                           

    Re .184
    
    
    <He's not a crook, he's just ethically challenged.>
    
    
    Heeheeheeheeheeee-oooooooo
    

	"Patriarchal lying has manipulated women both through falsehood and 
	through silence. Facts we needed have been withheld from us. False 
	witness has been borne against us." 

		-- Adrienne Rich 

		I'm an experinced woman;
		I've been around......
		Well, all right, I might not've been around
		but I've been.........nearby.

		Mary Richards (The Mary Tyler Moore Show)

		Often people attempt to live their lives backwards;
		they try to have more things, or more money, in
		order to do more of what they want, so they will be
		happier.

		The way it actually works is the reverse. You must
		first be who you really are then do what you need
		to do in order to have what you want.

		Margaret Young

		The power of the visible is the invisible.

		Marianne Moore
		     1941

		The only reason I would take up jogging
		is so that I could hear heavy breathing
		again.

		Erma Bombeck

		Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
		Security does not exist in nature,
		nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
		Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

		Helen Keller

		From birth to age 18 a girl needs good parents,
		from 18 to 35 she needs good looks,
		from 35 to 55 she needs a good personality,
		and from 55 on she needs cash.

		Sophie Tucker

  " Obviously, we've aiming too high with the Take Back the Night marches.
    It's time for a Take Back the Day demonstration. "