A note on this blog's organization

Since I first started this blog, I've read well over 600 books. I decided to organize them by sections, so to navigate to specific blog entries, review the sections below. To look for a specific book, try typing the book title or author's name in the search bar at the top left of this blog.

Book Bingo #4 - Feminist Resistance Book Bingo - 2020 to 2021

Book Bingo #4 - Feminist Resistance Book Bingo (It's so Intersectional, it's Spooky!) (25 books in total, no overlaps from '101 and Beyond')


No categories for this one, just a collection of my own creation. That said, I do think it does a pretty decent job at hitting a variety of voices. As with the other bingos, I'm listing the titles below left to right, top to bottom. 

Note: Blurbs below are either from the authors' websites or from booksellers. When possible, I've linked directly to the author's site to purchase a copy. Alternatively, feel free to use your local library, or buy local! Numbers are assigned for clarity purposes, not an ordering!
    • A 1997 anthology edited by science journalist and author Sonia Shah that explores the emergence of a distinct Asian American feminist movement. The book tackles the polarized stereotypes forced upon Asian American women—ranging from the quiet, subservient "model minority" to the manipulative, overbearing "dragon lady". It addresses the frustrations Asian women felt regarding a mainstream U.S. feminist movement that was largely dominated by white women. The essays also examine how race, gender, immigration, labor, queer identity, and punk culture intersect within the Asian American community. 
    • In 2014, award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren't affected by it on her blog, in a piece titled: "Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race." Her words hit a nerve. The post went viral and comments flooded in from others desperate to speak up about their own experiences. Galvanized by this clear hunger for open discussion, she decided to dig into the source of these feelings. Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism. It is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of color in Britain today.
    • This groundbreaking collection reflects an uncompromised definition of feminism by women of color. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.
    • This powerful account of brutality against women in the Muslim world remains as shocking today as when it was first published, more than a quarter of a century ago. It was the horrific female genital mutilation that she suffered aged only six which first awakened Nawal el Saadawi's sense of the violence and injustice which permeated her society. Her experiences working as a doctor in villages around Egypt, witnessing prostitution, honour killings and sexual abuse, inspired her to write in order to give voice to this suffering. She goes on explore the causes of the situation through a discussion of the historical role of Arab women in religion and literature. Saadawi argues that the veil, polygamy and legal inequality are incompatible with the just and peaceful Islam which she envisages.
    • A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must-read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this book a critical place on every feminist scholar's bookshelf.
    • At the tender age of eighteen, Nazneen’s life is turned upside down. After an arranged marriage to a man twenty years her elder she exchanges her Bangladeshi village for a block of flats in London’s East End. In this new world, where poor people can be fat and even dogs on diets, she struggles to make sense of her existence – and to do her duty to her husband. But Nazneen submits, as she must, to Fate and devotes her life to raising her family and slapping down her demons of discontent. Until she becomes aware of a young radical, Karim...
    • This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the modern era. The book is now reissued as a Veritas paperback, with a new foreword by Kecia Ali situating the text in its scholarly context and explaining its enduring influence.
    • Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of "the problem that has no name" - the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women's confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. 
  • 9 - On Intersectionality - Kimberlé Crenshaw (at the time I'm writing this, I'm having trouble finding a copy in the US from a bookseller. It seems to still be in print, but perhaps try the library for this one!)
    • Drawing on black feminist and critical legal theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality, a term she coined to speak to the multiple social forces, social identities, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized. In this comprehensive and accessible introduction to Crenshaw’s work, readers will find key essays and articles that have defined the concept of intersectionality, collected together for the first time. The book includes a sweeping new introduction by Crenshaw as well as prefaces that contextualize each of the chapters. 
    • One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.
    • Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes, hustlers, escorts, call girls, strippers, and porn stars in the center of America's major civil rights struggles. Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers--not as helpless victims in need of rescue. Even before transgender sex worker Sylvia Rivera threw a brick and sparked the Stonewall Riot in 1969, these trailblazing activists and allies challenged criminal sex laws and "whorephobia," and were active in struggles for gay liberation, women's rights, reproductive justice, union organizing, and prison abolition. Although the multibillion-dollar international sex industry thrives, the United States remains one of the few industrialized nations that continues to criminalize prostitution, and these discriminatory laws put workers at risk. In response, sex workers have organized to improve their working conditions and to challenge police and structural violence. Through individual confrontations and collective campaigns, they have pushed the boundaries of conventional organizing, called for decriminalization, and have reframed sex workers' rights as human rights.
    • What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, bell hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives-to see that feminism is for everybody.
    • In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to “never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . ”
    • Part coming-of-age story, part mind-altering manifesto on gender and sexuality, Gender Outlaw introduces the notion of nonbinary gender, and breaks all the rules you’ve ever been told you had to follow because you’re a man or a woman.
    • On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder. This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou. Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she lived until her death in 2025.
    • Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More is Janet’s coming-of-age story celebrating the perils and pleasures of her unconventional girlhood in Honolulu, Dallas and Oakland. It’s the first memoir from a young trans woman and debuted on the New York Times bestsellers list!
  • 17 - Woman, Native, Other: Writings Postcoloniality & Feminism - Trinh T. Minh-ha
    • Woman, Native, Other is located at the juncture of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in pushing the boundaries of these disciplines further. It is one of the very few theoretical attempts to grapple with the writings of women of color." ―Chandra Talpade Mohanty
    • This book is widely regarded as a foundational text of modern feminism. This groundbreaking work explores the treatment of women throughout history and in contemporary society, challenging the notion of women as the “Other” in relation to men. De Beauvoir's meticulous research and philosophical analysis span two volumes, covering topics ranging from biology and psychoanalysis to literature and myth.The book's controversial nature was evident upon its release, with the Vatican placing it on its List of Prohibited Books. Despite initial criticism and censorship, The Second Sex has since been translated into over 40 languages and continues to influence feminist thought and gender studies. De Beauvoir's famous assertion that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” laid the groundwork for distinguishing between sex and gender, a concept that would be further developed by subsequent feminist theorists.
  • 19 - Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg - free PDF download available on author site, or you can purchase a print copy at a local (queer owned, perhaps!) bookstore
    • Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 first novel, is widely considered in and outside the U.S. to be a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Feinberg was the first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation.” Sold by the hundreds of thousands of copies and also passed from hand-to-hand inside prisons, Stone Butch Blues has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Hebrew (with hir earnings from that edition going to ASWAT Palestinian Gay Women). The novel was winner of the 1994 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award and a 1994 Lambda Literary Award.
    • Chicana Feminist Thought brings together the voices of Chicana poets, writers, and activists who reflect upon the Chicana Feminist Movement that began in the late 1960s. With energy and passion, this anthology of writings documents the personal and collective political struggles of Chicana feminists.
    • Fading Scars distills 40 years of activism in disability, queer, parenting communities. Funny and engaging, Corbett pulls the curtains back on the humor and pathos of living as a disabled queer in a world that doesn’t welcome either with open arms.
    • Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself and talks her way into college. But once she’s there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single lesbian mother as she’s beset by custody disputes, homophobia, and America’s ever-present obsession with shaming unconventional women into passive citizenship. But even as the narrator struggles to graduate, a question uncomfortably lingers: If you’re dealing with precarious parenthood, queer identity, and debt, what is the true narrative shape of your experience?
    • Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.
  • 24 - Vox - Christina Dalcher
    • Set in a United States in which half the population has been silenced, Vox is the harrowing, unforgettable story of what one woman will do to protect herself and her daughter. On the day the government decrees that women are no longer allowed more than one hundred words per day, Dr. Jean McClellan is in denial. This can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to her. Soon women are not permitted to hold jobs. Girls are not taught to read or write. Females no longer have a voice. Before, the average person spoke sixteen thousand words each day, but now women have only one hundred to make themselves heard. For herself, her daughter, and every woman silenced, Jean will reclaim her voice.
    • Dedicated to trans women everywhere, this inspirational collection of letters written by successful trans women shares the lessons they learnt on their journeys to womanhood, celebrating their achievements and empowering the next generation to become who they truly are. Written by politicians, scientists, models, athletes, authors, actors, and activists from around the world, these letters capture the diversity of the trans experience and offer advice from make-up and dating through to fighting dysphoria and transphobia. By turns honest and heartfelt, funny and furious or beautiful and brave, these letters send a clear message of hope to their sisters: each of these women have gone through the struggles of transition and emerged the other side as accomplished, confident women; and if we made it sister, so can you!
My Reflections on this Book Bingo

As with the other book bingos, I won't blog separately on each of these books, as it has been a long time since I read many of these, and I wouldn't want to give them short shrift. What I will do instead is share passages I liked and/or general reflections from this bingo board.

I'm definitely missing some of my notes from this era (I guess it has been five years!) but here's what I have! My biggest takeaway was basically that white women are the worrrrrst (she says, as a hwite woman herself ;)) In all seriousness, though, by and large white women have stepped on, displaced, harmed, and generally ignored and excluded women of color in their 'feminist' journeys. It was a great collection of works, and a helpful edification for me and my personal growth.  There are also a few white women who I can get behind looking back in history - see 'Women, Race and Class' for those diamonds in the rough. Lines that stood out are below. I definitely want to continue to expand my understanding of the 'feminist' experience, so much as any such thing exists in monolith.
  • 3 - This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color
    • I'm sick and tired of continually hearing about the destructive aspects of Latin American culture, especially from women who don't know the culture and can only repeat well-known and worn-out myths. Let Latina women tell you what's going on, the good and the bad... Listen to what I have to say about my culture, rather than believe hearsay, myths or racists stereotypes. No one ever talks about 'terminally depressed Scandinavians', or the 'cut-through competition instilled by American culture, or the lack of warmth and physical contact in Anglo culture. These are all destructive aspects of Anglo culture, and they cannot be ignored.
    • The unspoken question always seems to be: "Aren't Latin (or Black, etc.) men more macho and women more oppressed in that culture?" My answers to that are: 1) It is absurd to compare sexist oppression. Oppression is oppression in whatever form or intensity. 2) Sexist and heterosexist oppression is more or less visible depending on how communicative people in a culture are. That Anglo culture is more Puritan and less visibly expressive does not mean it is less sexist. 3) Most of Latin America is a land economically colonized by the U.S., and as such can't be compared with a colonizing culture (the U.S.), Women's condition in Latin America would be much better were they not living in colonized countries. 4) Most importantly, are we as feminists concerned with men or with women? There is always a women's culture within every culture. Why is everyone so willing to accept the very male view of Latin American culture as consisting simply of macho males and Catholic priests? There are scores of strong women living in Latin America today and our history is full of famous and lesser known strong women. Are they to be ignored as women have always been ignored? 
    • But I am also a bit concerned when a Black sister generalizes about/dismisses all non-black women, or all women who are not strict "women of color” or strictly "Third World." If you are not WASP in this country, if you or your family have known the immigrant experience or ghetto life, you are likely to be very much acquainted with the  social, economic, political reality of internal colonization. Yes, racism is a BIG MONSTER we all need to contend with - regardless of our skin color and ethnic affiliation. But I think we need to keep in mind that in this country, in this world, racism is used both to create false differences among us and to mask very very significant ones - cultural economic, political. . .And yes, those who have been racially oppressed must create separatist spaces to explore the meaning of their experiences - to heal themselves, to gather their energies, their strength, to develop their own voices, to build their armies. And yes, those of us who have not been victims of racial oppression must come to terms with our own racism, our own complicity with this system that discriminates and oppresses on the basis of skin color and body features. And of course it would be irresponsible liberal folly to propose that social and institutional racism could be eliminated by simply "becoming" personally non-racist, by becoming "integrated" in our private lives . . . How ridiculous for white folk to think that a long history of slavery and every other kind of oppression, that an ongoing and insidious reality of social, economic, political exploitation could be magically transcended through a few individual choices. . .And even if everybody's skin should suddenly turn black, it would be quite impossible to truly know what it means to have grown up - generation after generation -Black and female in America. Of course our skin is not likely to "turn", and so regardless of how "conscious" we claim to be of the "Black experience" in America, we shall always be limited by our own history and the reality of our white skin and the privileges it automatically confers on us. 
    • Ironically, when a Black American sister (or anyone for that matter) puts me, or other ethnic women of this society in the same category with the socially dominant White American Woman on the basis of lighter-than-black skin color, she is in fact denying my history, my culture, my identity, my very being, my pain and my struggle. She too is being personally racist. When she fails to recognize that the "social privileges" of lighter-than-black ethnic-minority lesbians in this society are almost totally dependent on our denial of who we are, on our ethnic death, she also falls prey to the racist mythology that color differences are the end-all indications of social inequality. That those who happen to have the "righf skin color are not only all alike but all hold the same social privileges. Yes, lighter-than-black skin color may confer on some ethnic minority women the option of becoming "assimilated", "integrated" in mainstream American society. But is this really a privilege w'hen it always means having to become invisible, ghost-like, identity-less, community-less, totally alienated? The perils of "passing" as white American are perils indeed. It should be easy enough at least for lesbians to understand the meaning of being and yet not being, of "merging" and yet remaining utterly alone and in the margins of our society. 
    • Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage. - Naomi Littlebear
    • Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Beacuse I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger.
    • The disease of powerlessness thrives in my body, not just out there in society. And just as the use of gloves, masks, and disinfectants fails to kill this disease, government grants, equal rights opportunity programs, welfare, and foodstamps fail to uproot racism, sexism, and homophobia. And tokenism is not the answer. Sharing the pie is not going to work. I had a bite of it once and it almost poisoned me. With mutations of the virus such as these, one cannot isolate the virus and treat it. The whole organism is poisoned. 
    • I stand behind whatever threatens our oppression. I stand behind whatever breaks us out of our bonds, short of killing and maiming. I stand with whatever and whoever breaks us out of our limited views and awakens our atrophied potentials. 
    • The basic problem that we have had was believing somebody else's story about us - what we can and cannot do, who we can and cannot be.
  • 4 - The Hidden Face of Eve
    • Peoples everywhere are breaking not only the bonds of political and economic dependence, but also the cultural chains that imprison the mind. They are proving into their past, rediscovering their origins, their roots, their history; they are searching for a cultural identity, learning anew about their own civilization, moulding a personality genuine enough and strong enough and resolute enough to resist the onslaught of Western interests and to take back what was plundered over the centures: natural resources, labour producing value, goods and profits, and the creations of intellect and culture...
    • To be conscious that you are still a slave living under oppression is the first step on the road to emancipation.
    • We the women in Arab countries realize that we are still slaves, still oppressed, not because we belong to the East, not because we are Arab, or members of Islamic societies, but as a result of the patriarchal class system that has dominated the world for thousands of years.
  • 7 - Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
    • The areas of women's lives and the informal structures that they they inhabit that are still unexplored are vast. And perhaps the posture of studying other cultures in order to identify their worst practices is not after all likely to be the best way to further our understanding of human societies. The noted Indian anthropologist T. N. Madan, reflecting on the ambiguous legacy of anthropology and the contribution the discipline might nevertheless make to a common human enterprise, rather than serving Western interests, suggests that a productive starting point could be looking to other cultues in an attitude of respect and in acknowledgment of their affording opportunities for critiquing and enhancing awareness of the investigator's culture. The study of anthropology "should not merely tell us how others live their lives: it should rather tell us how we may live our lives better," and ideally it should be grounded in the affirmation "that every culture needs others as critics so that the best in it may be highlighted and held out as being cross-culturally desirable".
  • 8 - The Feminine Mystique
    • I guess it wasn't till I stopped trying to be feminine that I began to enjoy being a woman. 
    • I have come to realize that I was educated to be a successful man and must learn by myself to be a successful woman.
    • Freedom is a frightening thing. 
    • Happiness is not the same thing as the aliveness of being fully used.
    • Faced with the slow death of self, the American woman must begin to take her life seriously. 
    • It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
  • 9 - On Intersectionality
    • 1. DeGraffenreid v General Motors. In DeGraffenreid, five Black women brought suit against General Motors, alleging that the employer's seniority system perpetuated the effects of past discrimination against Black women. Evidence adduced at trial revealed that General Motors simply didnot hire Black women prior to 1964 and that all of the Black women hired after 1970 lost their jobs in a seniority-based layoff during a subsequent recession. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendant, rejecting the plaintiffs' attempt to bring a suit not on behalf of Blacks or women, but specifically on behalf of Black women. The court stated:
      • [P]laintiffs have failed' to cite any decisions which have stated that Black women are a special class to be protected from discrimination. The Court's own research has failed to disclose such a decision. The plaintiffs are clearly entitled to a remedy if they have been discriminated against. However, they should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new 'super-remedy' which would give them relief beyond what the drafters of the relevant statutes intended. Thus, this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both.'
    • The court's refusal in De Graffenreid to acknowledge acknowledge that Black women encounter combined race and sex discrimination implies that the boundaries of sex and race discrimination doctrine are defined respectively by white women's and Black men's experiences. Under this view, Black women are protected only to the extent that their experiences coincide with those of either of the two groups.'" Where their experiences are distinct, Black women can expect little protection as long as approaches, such as that in DeGraffenreid, which completely obscure problems of intersectionality prevail.
  • 10 - Gender Trouble
    • Certainly, there have been plenty of debates: is there some commonality among 'women' that preexists their oppression, or do 'women' have a bond by virtue of their oppression alone? 
    • If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders.
    • Within a language pervasively masculinist, a phallogocentric language, women constitute the unrepresentable. In other words, women represent the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absense and opacity. Within a language that rests on univocal signification, the female sex constitutes the unconstrainable and undesignatable.
  • 12 - Feminism is for Everybody
    • Feminists are made, not born. One does not become an advocate of feminist politics simply by having the privilege of having been born female. 
    • When women acquired greater class status and power without conducting themselves differently from males feminist politics were undermined. Lots of women felt betrayed. Middle- and lower-middle-class women who were suddenly compelled by the ethos of feminism to enter the workforce did not feel liberated once they faced the hard truth that working outside the home did not mean work in the home would be equally shared with male partners. No-fault divorce proved to be more economically beneficial to men than women. As many black women/women of color saw white women from privileged classes benefiting economically more than other groups from reformist feminist gains, from gender being tacked on to racial affirmative action, it simply reaffirmed their fear that feminism was really about increasing white power.
    • We put in place a vision of sisterhood where all our realities could be spoken.
    • Patriarchal masculinity teaches men that their sense of self and identity, their reason for being, resides in their capacity to dominate others. To change this males must critique and challenge male domination of the planet, of less powerful men, of women and children. But they must also have a clear vision of what feminist masculinity looks like. How can you become what you cannot imagine? 
    • The gender I'm perfectly happy with keeping around is the gender I live with that shifts on its own accord as I move forward in time and space...I believe that if we simply trust ourselves to shift, sure enough, our genders will shift as we need them to.
  • 13 - Sister Outsider
    • Lorde uses the word 'heterocetera', which I found delightful. 
    • After a trip to the USSR - I came away with revolutionary women in my head. But I feel very much now still that we, Black Americans, exist alone in the mouth of the dragon. As I've always suspected, outside of rehtoric and proclamations of solidarity, there is no help, except ourselves.
    • For women, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.
    • The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
    • We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply.
    • There are no new ideas. There are only ne wways of making them felt.
    • In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences.
    • What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?
    • For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others - for their use and to our detriment.
    • Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface.
    • Raising Black children - female and male - in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.
    • We find oureslves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen. 
    • As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become 'other', the outsider whose experience and tradition is too 'alien' to comprehend.
    • Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacaphony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart.
    • The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner of saying.
    • What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face?
    • I am not free whlie any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
    • One of the most basic Black survival skills is the ability to change, to metabolize experience, good or ill, into something that is useful, lasting, effective. Four hundred years of survival as an endangered species has taught most of us that if we intend to live, we had better become fast learners.
    • You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same.
    • What other creature in the world besides the Black woman has had to build the knowledge of so much hatred into her survival and keep going?
    • Sometimes it feels as if I were to experience all the collective hatred that I have had directed at me as a Black woman, admit its implications into my consciousness, I might die of the bleak and horrible weight. Is that why a sister once said to me, 'white people feel, Black people do?'
    • I refuse to settle for anything less than a rigorous pursuit of the possible in myself.
    • I can afford to look at myself directly, risk the pain of experiencing who I am not, and learn to savor the sweetness of who I am.
  • 14 - Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us
    • When we play with our identities, we play with desire.
    • I love being without an identity - it gives me a lot of room to play around - but it makes me dizzy, having nowhere to hang my hat. When I get too tired of not having an identity, I take one on: it doesn't really matter what identity I take on, as long as it's recognizable. I can be a writer, a lover, a confidante, a femme, a top, or a woman. I retreat into definition as a way of demarcating my space, a way of saying, "Step back, I'm getting crowded here." 
    • Where once we met only in drag bars or someone else's pride marches, we're now meeting in our own protest marches and Facebook groups. 
      • Would you like to meet other people who feel the same way you do about gender? 
      • Would you like to hear you're not the only one? 
      • Would you like to know you've got a history in this world? 
      • Do you think that might make you smile? 
    • It's easy to spot someone who's learning a new gender: they move just a bit slower than most people; he or she is unlearning old ways of moving, and picking up new ways of moving. So one of the first things you try to do is move at a normal pace, because you don't want to be laughed at. You don't want the high school kids pointing and yelling. You don't want to see the looks of disgust on people's faces. So you learn how to blend in. It's called "passing".
    • I think it's time for trans people - whether binary or nonbinary identified - to come together under own own banner: a banner that would include anyone who cares to own their own gender ambiguities, a banner that includes trans of all sexualities, races and ethnicities, religions, ages, classes, and states of body, a banner of the Third. I think it's time for us to use our status as Third to bring some harmony into the world. Like other border outlaws, trans people are here to open some doorway that's been closed off for a long, long time. We're gatekeepers, nothing more.
    • Given any binary, it's fun to look for some hidden third, and the reason why the third was hidden says a lot about a culture. The choice between two of anything is not a choice at all but rather the opportunity to subscribe to the value system that holds the two presented choices as mutually exclusive alternatives. Once we choose one or the other, we've given up our imagination in favor of buying into the system that perpetuates that binary. When, for example, I lived my life saying I was a man or a woman, I was tacitly supporting all the rules of the gender system that defines those two identities. I supported those rules in order to belong, or rather to not be an outsider, a non-belonger.
    • I'm called "gender dysphoric". That means I have a sickness: a limited understanding of gender. I don't think it's that. I like to look at it that I was gender dysphoric for my whole life before, and for some time after my gender change - bullied into blindly buying into the gender system.
    • I think gender can take a lesson from S & M: gender needs to be safe, sane, and consensual. Gender is not safe. If I change my gender, I'm at risk of homicide, suicide, or a life devoid of half my possibilities. If I'm born with a body that gives mixed signals, I'm at risk of being butchered - fixed, mutilated. Gender is not safe.
  • 15 - Assata
    • It is racist America that provides the context for the making of the Black revolutionary.
    • I have seen the death parade. 
    • The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives. 
    • Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves.
    • We are pregnant with freedom. We are a conspiracy. 
    • Always decide who your enemies are for yourself, and never let your enemies choose your enemies for you. 
    • More bulletins. I'm tired of bulletins. I want bullets.
    • Revolution is about change, and the firs tplace the change begins is in yourself.
    • Getting up early should be an easy thing for a revolutionary. 
    • I despise violence, but I despise it even more when it's one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people.
  • 16 - Redefining Realness
    • The responsibility that comes with being visible is a duty. 
    • Being exceptional isn't revolutionary, it's lonely. 
    • Telling our stories, first to ourselves, and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. 
    • It would take something special, outside of myself, to unwrap me. 
    • I'm afriad you won't love me once you know me. 
    • He was the manifestation of a secret I wasn't equipped to keep. 
    • I am on purpose. 
    • Kindness and compassion are sisters but not twins.
  • 17 - Woman, Native, Other
    • Accumulated unpublished writings do stink. They heap up before your eyes like despicable confessions that no one cares to hear; they sap your self-confidence by incessantly reminding you of your failure to incorporate. 
    • In a sense, committed writers are the ones who write both to awaken to the consciousness of their guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience. 
    • Quoting Alice Walker - "It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about... We do it because we care. We care because we know this. The life we save is our own.
    • Charged with intentionality, writing is therefore disclosing (a secret), and reading is believing.
    • Silence as a refusal to partake in the story does sometimes provide us with a means to gain a hearing.
    • In Africa it is said that every griotte who dies is a whole library that burns down (a "library in which the archives are not classified but are completely inventoried." [A. Hampate Ba]).
    • In this chain and continuum, I am but one link. The story is me, neither me nor mine. It does not really belong to me, and while I feel greatly responsible for it, I also enjoy the irresponsibility of the pleasure obtained through the process of transferring. Pleasure in the copy, pleasure in the reproduction. No repetition can every be identical, but my story carries with it their stories, their history, and our story repeats itself endlessly depsite our persistence in denying it.
    • Quoting from a story from Leslie Marmon Silko - "What I have is a story... Laugh if you want to / But as I tell the story / It will begin to happen"
    • A story is not just a story. once the forces have been aroused and set into motion, they can't simply be stopped at someone's request."
  • 18 - The Second Sex
    • From the foreword - Many readers have also been alienated by Beauvoir's visceral horror of fertility.
    • So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as feminity. Is feminity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? 
    • Women's actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.
    • Crises of puberty and of the menopause, monthly "curse", long and often troubled pregnancy, illnesses, and accidents are characteristic of the human female; her destiny appears even more fraught the more she rebels against it by affirming herself as an individual. The male, by comparison, is infinitely more privileged; it unfolds seamlessly, without crises and generally without accident. Women live, on average, as long as men, but are often sick and indisposed.
    • It is always difficult to describe a myth; it cannot be grasped or encompassed; it haunts the human consciousness without ever appearing before it in fixed form. The myth is so various, so contradictory, that at first its unity is not discerned: Delilah and Judith, Aspasia and Lucretia, Pandora and Athena — woman is at once Eve and the Virgin Mary. She is an idol, a servant, the source of life, a power of darkness; she is the elemental silence of truth, she is artifice, gossip and falsehood; she is healing presence and sorceress; she is man's prey, his downfall, she is everything that he is not and that he longs for, his negation and his raison d'être.
  • 19 - Stone Butch Blues
    • That's when I began passing as a man. Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home.
    • Do you ever think of me in the cool night?
    • I never could have survived this long if I'd never known your love.
    • I didn't want to be different. I longed to be everything grownups wanted, so they would love me. 
    • I laughed and rolled over on my back. The sky was crayon blue. I pretended I was lying on the white cotton clouds. The earth was damp against my back. The sun was hot, the breeze was cool. I felt happy. Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.
    • When I  was really small I thought I'd do anything to change whatever was wrong with me. Now I didn't want to change, I just wanted people to stop being mad at me all the time.
    • Sometimes when I stood in front of my own mirror at home, I saw a powerful me. I couldn't hold onto the image, though. It slipped like a globule of mercury from under my index finger.
    • Every day the men around me came to exercise their bodies; I came to exorcise my demons.
    • I stared far back into my past and remembered the child who couldn't be catalogued by Sears. I saw her standing in front of her own mirror, in her father's suit, asking me if I was the person she would grow up and become. Yes, I answered her. And I thought how brave she was to have begun this journey, to have withstood the towering judgements.
    • If you and I aren't going to fight for the right to live, then the kids coming up will have to do it.
    • I don't know what it would take to really change the world. But couldn't we get toegher and try to figure it out? Couldn't the we be bigger? Isn't there a way we could help fight each other's battles so that we're not always alone?
    • I'm not saying we'll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure... Try imagining a world worth living in, and then ask yourself if that isn't worth fighting for.
    • This is the worst of times; this is the best of times - it will be what we make of it.
  • 21 - Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History
    • Unfortunately, I don't seem to have my notes from this one, but I found it fascinating and it was a wonderful read! It made me think about disability in entirely new ways, and I loved hearing about the collaboration between the disabled community in protest and the Black Panthers.
  • 22 - We Were Witches
    • It didn't matter if I could make stories. I had to make a living.
    • I would become a woman who knew his magic. 
    • As the voices get louder, I begin to recognize them. Oh hey, I laugh nervous, oddly relieved by the familiarity. 
    • Maybe what shame requires to stay alive is the consent of the shamed.
    • If there are only two options, create a third option as soon as possible.
    • I want to be a writer. But nobody wants to publish my stories. So it's kind of unrequited, my want. 
    • I'm actually bi-sycheal. More than bisexual.
    • The greatest risk factor for being accused, tried, convicted, and execuited for witchcraft in 15th-17th century Europe was to have a female body.
    • I wondered how the witnessing changed them. 
    • Look at what we conjured.
  • 23 - Women, Race, & Class
    • Proportionately, more Black women have always worked outside their homes than have their white sisters. The enormous space that work occupies in Black women’s lives today follows a pattern established during the very earliest days of slavery. As slaves, compulsory labor overshadowed every other aspect of women’s existence. It would seem, therefore, that the starting point for any exploration of Black women’s lives under slavery would be an appraisal of their role as workers. The slave system defined Black people as chattel. Since women, no less than men, were viewed as profitable labor-units, they might as well have been genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned. In the words of one scholar, “the slave woman was first a full-time worker for her owner, and only incidentally a wife, mother and homemaker.” Judged by the evolving nineteenth-century ideology of femininity, which emphasized women’s roles as nurturing mothers and gentle companions and housekeepers for their husbands. Black women were practically anomalies. 
Six White Women I Can Get Behind (These are excerpts from Women, Race, & Class)

Prudence Crandall
    • During the 1830s white women — both housewives and workers — were actively drawn into the abolitionist movement. While mill women contributed money from their meager wages and organized bazaars to raise further funds, the middle-class women became agitators and organizers in the anti-slavery campaign. By 1833, when the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society was born in the wake of the founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society, enough white women were manifesting their sympathetic attitudes toward the Black people’s cause to have established the basis for a bond between the two oppressed groups. In a widely publicized event that year, a young white woman emerged as a dramatic model of female courage and anti-racist militancy. Prudence Crandall was a teacher who defied her white townspeople in Canterbury, Connecticut, by accepting a Black girl into her school. ' Her principled and unyielding stand throughout the entire controversy symbolized the possibility of forging a powerful alliance between the established struggle for Black Liberation and the embryonic battle for women’s rights. The parents of the white girls attending Prudence Crandall’s school expressed their unanimous opposition to the Black pupil’s presence by organizing a widely publicized boycott. But the Connecticut teacher refused to capitulate to their racist demands. Following the advice of Mrs. Charles Harris — a Black woman she employed — Crandall decided to recruit more Black girls, and if necessary, to operate an all-Black school. A seasoned abolitionist, Mrs. Harris introduced Crandall to William Lloyd Garrison, who published announcements about the school in the Liberator, his anti-slavery journal. The Canterbury townspeople countered by passing a resolution in opposition to her plans which proclaimed that “the government of the United States, the nation with all its institutions of right belong to the white men who now possess them.” No doubt they did mean white men quite literally, for Prudence Crandall had not only violated their code of racial segregation, she had also defied the traditional attitudes concerning the conduct of a white lady. Despite all threats, Prudence Crandall opened the school ... The Negro students stood bravely by her side. And then followed one of the most heroic — and most shameful — episodes in American history. The storekeepers refused to sell supplies to Miss Crandall.... The village doctor would not attend ailing students. The druggist refused to give medicine. On top of such fierce inhumanity, rowdies smashed the school windows, threw manure in the well and started several fires in the building. Where did this young Quaker woman find her extraordinary strength and her astonishing ability to persevere in a dangerous situation of daily siege? Probably through her bonds with the Black people whose cause she so ardently defended. Her school continued to function until Connecticut authorities ordered her arrest. By the time she was arrested. Prudence Crandall had made such a mark on the epoch that even in apparent defeat, she emerged as a symbol of victory. 
Sarah & Angelina Grimke
    • Of all the pioneering women abolitionists, it was the Grimke sisters from South Carolina — Sarah and Angelina — who most consistently linked the issue of slavery to the oppression of women. From the beginning of their tumultuous lecturing career, they were compelled to defend their rights as women to be public advocates of abolition — and by implication to defend the rights of all women to register publicly their opposition to slavery. Born into a South Carolina slaveholding family, the Grimke sisters developed a passionate abhorrence of the “peculiar institution” and decided, as adults, to move North. Joining the abolitionist effort in 1836, they began to lecture in New England about their own lives and their daily encounters with the untold evils of slavery. Although the gatherings were sponsored by the female anti-slavery societies, increasing numbers of men began to attend. “Gentlemen, hearing of their eloquence and power, soon began timidly to slip into the back seats.” These assemblies were unprecedented, for no other women had ever addressed mixed audiences on such a regular basis without facing derogatory cries and disruptive jeers hurled by men who felt that public speaking should be an exclusively male activity. 
    • The Grimke sisters continually insisted that white women in the North and South acknowledge the special bond linking them with Black women who suffered the pain of slavery. Again: They are our country women — they are our sisters; and to us, as women, they have a right to look for sympathy with their sorrows, and effort and prayer for their rescue. “The question of equality for women,” as Eleanor Flexner put it, was not “a matter of abstract justice” for the Grimkes, “but of enabling women to join in an urgent task.” Since the abolition of slavery was the most pressing political necessity of the times, they urged women to join in that struggle with the understanding that their own oppression was nurtured and perpetuated by the continued existence of the slave system. Because the Grimke sisters had such a profound consciousness of the inseparability of the fight for Black Liberation and the fight for Women’s Liberation, they were never caught in the ideological snare of insisting that one struggle was absolutely more important than the other. They recognized the dialectical character of the relationship between the two causes. More than any other women in the campaign against slavery, the Grimkes urged the constant inclusion of the issue of women’s rights. At the same time they argued that women could never achieve their freedom independently of Black people. “I want to be identified with the Negro,” said Angelina to a convention of patriotic women supporting the Civil War effort in 1863. “Until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.” Prudence Crandall had risked her life in defense of Black children’s right to education. If her stand contained a promise of a fruitful and powerful alliance, bringing Black people and women together in order to realize their common dream of liberation, then the analysis presented by Sarah and Angelina Grimke was the most profound and most moving theoretical expression of that promise of unity. 
Myrtilla Miner
    • The most outstanding examples of white women’s sisterly solidarity with Black women are associated with Black people’s historical struggle for education. Like Prudence Crandall and Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner literally risked her life as she sought to impart knowledge to young Black women. In 1851, when she initiated her project to establish a Black teachers’ college in Washington, D.C., she had already instructed Black children in Mississippi, a state where education for Blacks was a criminal offense. After Myrtilla Miner’s death, Frederick Douglass described his own incredulousness when she first announced her plans to him. During their first meeting he wondered about her seriousness in the beginning, but then he realized that "... the fire of enthusiasm lighted in her eye and that the true martyr spirit flamed in her soul. My feelings were those of mingled joy and sadness. Here I thought is another enterprise — wild, dangerous, desperate and impracticable, and destined only to bring failure and suffering. Yet I was deeply moved with admiration by the heroic purpose of the delicate and fragile person who stood or rather moved to and fro before me." It was not long before Douglass recognized that none of the warnings he issued to her — and not even the stories of the attacks on Prudence Crandall and Margaret Douglass — could shake her determination to found a college for Black women teachers. To me the proposition was reckless almost to the point of madness. In my fancy I saw this fragile little woman harassed by the law, insulted in the street, a victim of slaveholding malice and possibly beaten down by the mob. In Frederick Douglass’ opinion, relatively few white people outside the anti-slavery activists would sympathize with Myrtilla Miner’s cause and support her against the mob. This was a period, he argued, of diminishing solidarity with Black people. Moreover, . . . the District of Columbia (was) the very citadel of slavery, the place most watched and guarded by the slave power and where humane tendencies were more speedily detected and sternly opposed. In retrospect, however, Douglass confessed that he did not really understand the depth of this white woman’s individual courage. Despite the grave risks, Myrtilla Miner opened her school in the fall of 1851, and within a few months her initial six students had grown to forty. She taught her Black students passionately over the next eight years, simultaneously raising money and urging congressmen to support her efforts. She even acted as a mother to the orphan girls whom she brought into her home so that they might attend the school. As Myrtilla Miner struggled to teach and as her pupils struggled to learn, they all fought evictions, arson attempts and the other misdeeds of racist stone-throwing mobs. They were supported by the young women’s families and abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who donated a portion of the royalties she received from the sale of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Myrtilla Miner may have been “frail,” as Frederick Douglass observed, but she was definitely formidable, and was always able, at lesson time, to discover the eye of that racist storm. Early one morning, however, she was abruptly awakened by the odor of smoke and raging flames, which soon consumed her schoolhouse. Although her school was destroyed, the inspiration she provided lived on, and eventually Miner’s Teachers College became a part of the District of Columbia public educational system. “I never pass the Miner Normal School for colored girls,” so Frederick Douglass confessed in 1883, ... without a feeling of self reproach that I could have said ought to quench the zeal, shake the faith, and quail the courage of the Noble woman by whom it was founded and whose name it bears. Sisterhood between Black and white women was indeed possible, and as long as it stood on a firm foundation — as with this remarkable woman and her friends and students — it could give birth to earthshaking accomplishments. Myrtilla Miner kept the candle burning that others before her, like the Grimke sisters and Prudence Crandall, had left as a powerful legacy. It could not have been a mere historical coincidence that so many of the white women who defended their Black sisters in the most dangerous of situations were involved in the struggle for education. They must have understood how urgently Black women needed to acquire knowledge — a lamp unto their people’s feet and a light unto the path toward freedom. 

Ella Reeve Bloor
    • Born in 1862, the remarkable labor organizer and agitator for women’s rights, Black equality, peace and socialism, who was popularly known as “Mother” Bloor, became a member of the Socialist party soon after it was founded. She went on to become a Socialist leader and a living legend for the working class across the country. Hitchhiking from one end of the United States to the other, she became the heart and soul of untold numbers of strikes. Streetcar operators in Philadelphia heard her first strike speeches. In other parts of the country, miners, textile workers and sharecroppers were among the workers who benefited from her astounding oratorical talents and her powerful skills as an organizer. At the age of sixty-two Mother Bloor was still thumbing rides from one state to another. When she was seventy-eight Mother Bloor published the story of her life as a labor organizer, from her pre-Socialist days through the period of her Communist party membership. As a Socialist, her working-class consciousness did not include an explicit awareness of Black people’s special oppression. As a Communist however, Mother Bloor fought numerous manifestations of racism and urged others to follow her example. In 1929, for example, when the International Labor Defense held its convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, "(w)e had engaged rooms for all the delegates in the Monogahala Hotel. When we arrived late at night with twenty-five Negro delegates, the manager of the hotel said that while they could stay there that night, they must all get out immediately the next morning. Next morning, we voted that the whole convention should adjourn to the hotel in an orderly fashion. We marched to the hotel carrying banners emphasizing “nodiscrimination.” We filed into the lobby, which by that time was filled with newspapermen, policemen, and curious crowds ..." During the early 1930s Mother Bloor addressed a meeting in Loup City, Nebraska, in  support of women who had struck against their poultry-farm employers. The strike assembly was violently assaulted by a racist mob opposed to the presence of Black people at the meeting. When the police arrived. Mother Bloor was arrested, together with a Black woman and her husband. The Black woman, Mrs. Floyd Booth, was a leading member of the local Anti-War Committee and her husband was an activist in the town’s Unemployed Council. When the local farmers raised sufficient bail money to obtain Mother Bloor’s release, she refused their aid, insisting that she would not leave until the Booths could accompany her. "I felt I could not accept the bail and leave the two Negro comrades in jail, in an atmosphere so dangerously charged with bitter hate of Negroes." 
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
    • When Elizabeth Gurley Flynn died in 1964 at the age of seven ty-four, she had been active in Socialist and Communist causes for almost sixty years. Raised by parents who were members of the Socialist party, she discovered, at an early age, her own affinity with the Socialists’ challenge to the capitalist class. The young Elizabeth was not yet sixteen when she delivered her first public lecture in defense of socialism. Based on her readings of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women and August Bebel’s Women and Socialism, she delivered a speech in 1906, at the Harlem Socialist Club, entitled “What Socialism Will Do for Women.” By the time Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was sixteen, her career as an agitator for the rights of the working class had been launched. After two years as a Socialist party member, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn became a leading IWW organizer. She resigned from the Socialist party, “convinced that it was sterile and sectarian compared with this grass-roots movement that was sweeping the country. When Elizabeth Gurley Flynn spoke, the excitement of the crowd became a visible thing. She stood there, young, with her Irish blue eyes, her face magnolia white and her cloud of black hair, the picture of a youthful revolutionary girl leader. She stirred them, lifted them up in her appeal for solidarity.... It was as though a spurt of flame had gone through this audience, something stirring and powerful, a feeling which had made the liberation of people possible. As a traveling strike agitator for the IWW, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn sometimes worked alongside the well-known Native American Indian leader, Frank Little. In 1916, for example, they both represented the Wobblies during the Mesabi iron range strike in Minnesota. It was barely a year later when Elizabeth learned that Frank Little had been lynched in Butte, Montana. He had been attacked by a mob after making agitational speeches to the miners on strike in the area. Judging from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s autobiographical reflections, she was aware, from the very beginning of her political career, of the special oppression suffered by Black people. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn became active in the Communist party in 1937 and emerged soon afterward as one of the organization’s major leaders. Working on an intimate basis with such Black Communists as Benjamin Davis and Claudia Jones, she developed a new understanding of the central role of Black Liberation within the overall battle for the emancipation of the working class. Criticizing the inequality between women war veterans and men war veterans, she reminded her readers that Black women veterans suffered to an even greater degree than their white sisters. Indeed, Black women were generally caught in a threefold bond of oppression. Every inequality and disability inflicted on American white women is aggravated a thousandfold among Negro women, who are triply exploited — as Negroes, as workers, and as women. This same “triple jeopardy” analysis, incidentally, was later proposed by Black women who sought to influence the early stages of the contemporary Women’s Liberation movement. During the McCarthy Era assault on the Communist party, Flynn was arrested in New York, along with three other women, and charged with “teaching and advocating the violent overthrow of the government.” The other women were Marian Bachrach, Betty Gannet and Claudia Jones, a Black woman from  Trinidad who had immigrated to the United States as a young girl. In June, 1951, the four  Communist women were taken by the police to the New York Women’s House of Detention. After the three women’s Smith Act trial (Marian Bachrach’s health problems led to the severance of her case), they were convicted and sentenced to serve time in the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, Virginia. Shortly before they arrived, the prison had been placed under court order to desegregate its facilities. Another Smith Act victim — Dorothy Rose Blumenberg from Baltimore — had already served a portion of her three-year sentence as one of the first white prisoners to be housed with Black women. “We felt both amused and flattered that Communists were called upon to help integrate prison houses.” As a leader of the Communist party, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had developed a deep commitment to the Black Liberation struggle and had come to realize that Black people’s resistance is not always consciously political. She observed that among the prisoners in Alderson, (t)here was greater solidarity among Negro women, undoubtedly a result of life outside, especially in the South. It seemed to me that they were of better character, by and large, stronger and more dependable, with less inclination to tattle or be a stool pigeon, than the white inmates. She made friends more easily among the Black women in prison than she did among the white inmates. “Frankly, I trusted the Negro women more than I did the whites. They were more controlled, less hysterical, less spoiled, more mature.” And the Black women, in turn, were more receptive to Elizabeth. Perhaps they sensed in this white woman Communist an instinctive kinship in struggle. 
  • 24 - Vox
    • You can't protest what you don't see coming.
    • I was living in a bubble. I inflated it myself, one breath at a time.
    • Everything lately seems to be a choice between degrees of hate.
  • 25 - To My Trans Sisters
    • Scientist Kate Stone studied for her PhD in physics and micro-electronics at the University of Cambridge, which led to the creation of her groundbreaking company Novalia. She was invited to give a TED Talk at TED's main annual event in the USA alongside some of the world's greatest minds, about her work, which has been watched almost 700,000 times online. Kate was the first trans person to ever present on the TED stage. In 2014, after being exploited by the British press, she used her bad experience as a catalyst for creating change in the way the media talks about trans people, and now sits on the Editor's Code of Practice Committee.
    • What I discovered was that the goal was not to try to be like everyone else; it was to be like me...What we look like and where we are from is irrelevant when compared to who we are. We need to let our inner souls shine so brightly that no one can see what we look like.

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