Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the struggle for women to reclaim their voice and identity in a patriarchal society.
Mary Daly's quote signifies the historical oppression of women, particularly in the realm of language and identity. By stating that women have had the power of naming stolen from them, Daly emphasizes the need for women to reclaim their narratives and assert their own identities in a world that has often silenced them. This reflects a broader issue of empowerment and the importance of women finding their voices in society.
In practice
In a speech advocating for women's rights.
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.
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.
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.
Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.
If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.
If you want change, you have to make it. If we want progress we have to drive it.
Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.
Each one of us can make a difference. Together we make change.
I can remember when I first went into the Himalayan area way back in 1951. Money, for instance, was not important at all to the local people. But now, finance has become just as important to them as it is to us, and this is a change maybe not for the better.
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