People sometimes say that we will know feminism has done its job when half the CEOs are women. Thatโs not feminism; to quote Catharine MacKinnon, itโs liberalism applied to women. Feminism will have won not when a few women get an equal piece of the oppression pie, served up in our sistersโ sweat, but when all dominating hierarchies - including economic ones - are dismantled.
Lierre KeithUnderstand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.
Lierre KeithDo we want to feel better or do we want to be effective? Are we sentimentalists or are we warriors?
Lierre KeithThese political passions are born of a hunger so deep that it touches on the spiritual. Or they were for me, and they still are. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism. If the martial imagery alienates you, I can rephrase it. I want my lifemy bodyto be the place where the earth is cherished not devoured, where the sadist is granted no quarter, where the violence stops.
Lierre KeithMeanwhile, every eighteen seconds a man beats a woman, every three minutes a man rapes a woman, and every day two men will murder women. And that's just in the United States.
Lierre KeithOne group of people that get a lot of PTSD are soldiers who have been in combat. You know who gets more PTSD, has higher rates of PTSD? Women who have escaped prostitution. That tells me that the war that men wage against women is actually worse than the wars they wage against each other.
Lierre Keith