Monologue-ing Chris

"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 (pseudonym of Cecily Isabel Fairfield) (1892-1983), English novelist. "One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian." Shirley Chisholm, (1924-), American, member of the US House of Representatives. "In my heart, I think a woman has two choices: either she's a feminist or a masochist." Gloria Steinhem (1934-), American feminist writer. "A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men." Gloria Steinhem. "Any student of women painters therefore finds that he [sic] is actually studying the female relatives of male artists . . . Women artists before the nineteenth century seldom expressed their own creativity: they adopted modes of self-expression first forged by integrated, self-regulating (male) genius, most often when they were already weakened by eclecticism and imitation . . . Until the nineteenth century liberation from the overwhelming and ubiquitous artist father would also have meant the cessation of all technical training." Germaine Greer (1939-), Australian-American author. The Obstacle Race: the fortunes of women painters and their work (1979). "Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes — love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself — and render them fully human. It may also, although our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and rich as those others — should we call it 'joy'?" Andrea Dworkin (1946-), American feminist critic, "Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia," in a speech, April 16, 1974, at Smith College, Northampton, Mass; published in Our Blood, chapter 1, 1976. "A natural response is to change the word feminist to a word with fewer stigmas attached. But inevitably the same thing will happen to that magical word. Part of the radical connotation of feminism is not due to the word, but to the action. The act of a woman standing up for herself is radical, whether she calls herself a feminist or not." Paula Kamen (1968-), American journalist, feminist author and playwright. "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." Paula Treichler (contemporary), feminist scholar.