“I taught them how to make plates out of leaves and how to grow vegetables. …I taught them you’ve got to work hard to feed yourselves! That is what empowering women is all about, not about making men and women fight.”
Video: Gulabi Gang (Current on Youtube)
“Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.
I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics since 2001 was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI woman who issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was certainly shaped by a Bush administration to which you couldn’t tell anything, including that Iraq had no links to al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to be a “cakewalk.” (Even male experts couldn’t penetrate the fortress of their smugness.)” (From the article.)
Blog: Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way (Solnit on TruthOut.org)
Wayfaring Feminist 