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
Whether trauma will be a cruel and punishing Gorgon or a vehicle for soaring to the heights of transformation and mastery depends upon how we approach it.
Black power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it.
If we want there to be peace in the world, we have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid in our hearts, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. Thatβs the true practice of peace.
Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them.
The coward only threatens when he is safe.
The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!
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