The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into...

Finding The Man. Keeping The Man. Not scaring The Man, building up The Man, following The Man, soothing The Man, flattering The Man, deferring to The Man, changing your judgement for The Man, changing your...

Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them is what it means to be convicted of rape–I do not mean the man who did it, I...

Well, of course, you can’t expect people to rearrange their minds in five minutes. And I’m not good at this. And I don’t want to do it. It’s a bore, anyway. Unfortunately I know what...

There’s no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers,...

The little blue book was rattling around in my purse. I took it out and turned to the last thing he had said (“You stupid broad et cetera). Underneath was written Girl backs down–cries–manhood vindicated....

The game is a dominance game called I Must Impress This Woman. Failure makes the active player play harder. Wear a hunched back or a withered arm; you will then experience the invisibility of the...

That not all men are piggy, only some; that not all men belittle me, only some; that not all men get mad if you won’t let them play Chivalry, only some; that not all men...

(Ezekial saw the wheel(Way up in the middle of the air –(O Ezekial saw the wheel(Way in the middle of the air!(Now the big wheel runs by faith(And the little wheel runs by the grace...

In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent, obedient, and beautiful. You can always get...

The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That’s the troublewith women, too.” [“Existence” (1975)]

I think,” said my neighbour, her chin very high in the air (and still spiffed, I am glad to say) “that women who’ve never married and never had children have missed out on the central...

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners,...

There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.

Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, “Oh, Esther, I don’t want to be a feminist. I don’t enjoy it. It’s no fun.””I know,” I said. “I don’t either.” People think...

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may...

To die on a dying Earth – I’d live, if only to weep.

The demon got up. The demon said Fool. To think you can eat their food and not talk to them. To think you can take their money and not be afraid of them. To think...

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.

Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.

(Only God can make a tree and She seldom tries, nowadays.)

The idea that any art is achieved ‘intuitively’ is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artist as subhuman. It is those supposed incapable of...

I left her wallpapering her much-loved, much-tended little corner of hell.

What did we talk about?I don’t remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knee. We had too many cups of tea and then didn’t want to leave...

An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.

This is the underside of my world.Of course you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want...

WE WUZ PUSHED.

Courage is willful hope.

There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this...

Privileged groups, like everyone else, want to think well of themselves and to believe that they are acting generously and justly.

Courage is willfulhope.

At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act...

And here, of course, we come to the one occupation of a female protagonist in literature, the one thing she can do, and by God she does it and does it and does it, over...