Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults - is on a psychic level, a battered woman.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the pervasive experiences of oppression that women face, emphasizing their psychological impact.
Mary Daly's quote underscores the deep-rooted and often unrecognized violence and oppression that women experience throughout their lives. By comparing women's experiences to that of a 'battered woman' on a psychic level, she invites us to acknowledge the collective trauma and resilience of women confronting societal injustices, thus prompting a shift in awareness and activism against gender-based violence.
In practice
During a women's rights seminar, to emphasize the necessity of recognizing psychological trauma in advocacy.
I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism-or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism-whic h are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!
Patriarchy has stolen our cosmos and returned it in the form of 'Cosmopolitan' magazine and cosmetics.
Courage to be is the key to revelatory power of the feminist revolution.
Patriarchy appears to be everywhere. Even outer space and the future have been colonized. As a rule, even the more imaginative science-fiction writers (allegedly the most foretelling futurists) cannot/will not create a space and time in which women get far beyond the role of space stewardess.
Within a culture possessed by the myth of feminine evil, the naming, describing, and theorizing about good and evil has constituted a maze/haze of deception. The journey of women becoming is breaking through this maze - springing into free space, which is an a-mazing process.
I had explained that a woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan
When I was a teenager, the biggest heartthrob was Tab Hunter. He was in every movie out of Warner Bros. until he was exposed as gay, and his career faded. That was an object lesson. I knew I must protect my sexual orientation.
Storm clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country... They must not be allowed to bring eternal night.
In the current struggle, there is one positive course of action. There is no alternative, for the alternative would connote a rear march.
They say I need to be seasoned; they say I need to be stewed. They say, 'We need to boil all the hope out of him -- like us -- and then he'll be ready.'
The brave and bold persist even against fortune; the timid and cowardly rush to despair though fear alone.
Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I'll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I'm not backing off.
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