The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House

“academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory in this time and in this place without examining our many difference” ⤴️
“To read this progam is to assume that lesbian and black women have nothing to say of existentialism, the erotic, women’s culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power.” ⤴️
“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy’/ It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” ⤴️
“in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowl- edge as a black lesbian. In this paper there was no examination ot mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interde- pendence as exists between lesbians and women-identified women.” ⤴️
“it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women “who attempt to emancipate themselves pay perhaps too high a price for the results,"" ⤴️
“the need and desire to nurture each other is not patho- logical but redemptive,” ⤴️
“it is only under a patriarchal structure that maternity is the only social power open to women.” ⤴️
“Interdependency between women is the only way to the freedom which allows the T to “be”, not in order to be used, but in order to be cre- ative. This is a difference between the passive “be” and the active “being."" ⤴️
“For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdepend- ency become unthreatening.” ⤴️
“interdependency of dif- ferent strengths, acknowleged and equal,” ⤴️
“Within the interdependence of mutual (non-dominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowl- edge and return with true visions of our future, along with the con- comitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being.” ⤴️
“Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.” ⤴️
“Without community, there is no liberation,” ⤴️
“community must not mean a shedding of our dif- ferences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” ⤴️
“survival is fiot an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the struc- tures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.” ⤴️
“learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.” ⤴️
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those Women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” ⤴️
“Poor and third world women know there is a difference between the daily manifestations and dehumanizations of marital slavery and prostitution, because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street.” ⤴️
“In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of the academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. Divide and conquer, in our world must become define and empower.” ⤴️
“what about inter- racial co-operation between feminists who don’t love each other?” ⤴️
“Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance, and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of black and third world women to educate white women, in the face of tremendous resistance, as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.” ⤴️
“the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.” ⤴️