Feminists In Their Own Words

  1. Marxism under the mask of Feminism:

    1. "Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, ... not just the elimination of the male privilege, but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally." [Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam Books, 1972) pp.10-11.]

    2. "The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male." [Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York, International Publishers,1942) p.58]

    3. "The first condition of the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society." [Engels, p.67]

    4. "In the subjection of female to male, Engels (and Marx as well), saw the historical and conceptual prototype of all subsequent power systems, all invidious economic relations, and the fact of oppression itself." [Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, (New York, Avon,1971) p. 169]

  2. Destroy Heterosexuality and you end all Oppression:

    1. "Heterosexual hegemony ... is being simultaneously eroded and reconstructed. ...The forms of sexuality considered natural have been socially created and can therefore be socially transformed." (219) "New social policies would focus on transforming social relations and would be based on empowering of lesbians, gay men, sex-trade workers, women and people of colour." (emphasis added, 229) "The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada" by Gary Kinsman, Black Rose Books, 1987

    2. "Heterosexuality like motherhood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution. . .the model for every other form of exploitation." Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5 No.4 (1980) 637

    3. "Heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. Women are kept, maintained and contained through terror, violence, and the spray of semen...[Lesbianism is] an ideological, political and philosophical means of liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny... " Cheryl Clarke, "Lesbianism, An Act of Resistance," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga (Women of Color Press,1983), pp.128-137.

    4. "The opposite of heterosexual desire is the eroticising of sameness, a sameness of power, equality and mutuality. It is homosexual desire." Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (London: Women's Press,1990) p.300

    5. "Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual women's erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices... Those definitions... are about the oppression and exploitation of women [by men]." Marilyn Frye, Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism, 1976-1992 ( Freedom: Crossing Press,1992) p.132

  3. Eradicating Patriarchy

    1. "We live in a culture that condones and celebrates rape. Within a phallocentric, patriarchal state the rape of women by men is a ritual that daily perpetuates and maintains sexist oppression and exploitation. We cannot hope to transform "rape culture" without committing ourselves fully to resisting and eradicating patriarchy." Bell Hooks, "Seduced by Violence No More," in Stan, Adele ed. Debating Sexual Correctness (New York, 1995) p.231.

    2. "Patriarchy was accompanied by ...the ownership of persons, beginning with women and progressing to other forms of slavery, the institutions of class,caste,rank, ruling and propertied classes, the steady development of an unequally distributed wealth, and finally the state." Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, p.156

  4. Eradicating the family

    1. Alison Jagger writes that the nuclear family is "a cornerstone of woman’s oppression: it enforces women’s dependence on men, it enforces heterosexuality and it imposes the prevailing masculine and feminine character structures on the next generation." Feminist Politics and Human Nature

    2. "The care of children ..is infinitely better left to the best trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation...[This] would further undermine family structure while contributing to the freedom of women." Kate Millet, Sexual Politics 178-179

    3. “No women should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children…Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." Simone de Beauvoir, Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.

  5. Gay rights "secret": equality will neuter heterosexuals

    1. "In one sense the right is right...to accuse the gay and lesbian rights movement of threatening homogenization....if gay and lesbian liberationists ever achieve full equality, they will do away with the social need for the hetero/homo division. The secret of the most moderate, mainstream gay and lesbian civil rights movement is its radically transformative promise (or threat, depending on your values)." Gay historian, Jonathan Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, 1995, p.188. [emphasis added]

  6. Feminist "research" is a branch of "political agenda"

    1. "The implications of linking our research agenda with our political agenda and with intentionality are profound for feminist research. Perhaps the most awkward rite of passage for all researchers is the ethics approval requirement of each discipline and/or institution. In order to carry out a research agenda linked with a political agenda we must examine the institutional barriers to our enterprise." Sandra Kirby "What do Feminist Methods Have to do with Ethics?" in Women Changing Academe, (Winnipeg, 1991) p.168. Kirby is now Chair of Sociology at UW.