#Women’s Liberation

[erebusvincent]

[munegirl]

I hope in 2024 lots of women leave their shitty husbands

[liberate-women-now]

I work in tech (a male dominated field) and have no fucking clue as to why it is paid so well when compared to some other fields… you know, other than the reason being it’s a male dominated field lol.

Teachers are underpaid and overworked, especially primary school teachers, and it’s outrageous they make about the same as I do with my entry level position.

[thediaryofarevolutionist]

Sometimes I just wish I was ignorant and didn't know anything. I wouldn't care about politics and would no longer break down when I find out about injustice against women. I just can't do it. I'm not strong enough and this misogyny is getting to me. It’s tearing me apart. I feel paralyzed and don't understand why women must go trough this. All i want is women to be safe and liberated but i dont see any hope.

[haggishlyhagging]

This introduction can serve as a working sheet for a beginning consciousness raising group.

The typical consciousness-raising group is composed of six to twelve women who meet on an average of once a week. Groups larger than ten or twelve are less conducive to lengthy personal discussion and analysis. The consciousness-raising process is one in which personal experiences, when shared, are recognized as a result not of an individual's idiosyncratic history and behavior, but of the system of sex-role stereotyping. That is, they are political, not personal, questions.

Generally consciousness-raising groups spend from three to six months talking about personal experiences and then analyzing those experiences in feminist terms. Thereafter they often begin working on specific projects including such activities as reading, analyzing and writing literature; abortion law repeal projects; setting up child care centers; organizing speak-outs (rape, motherhood, abortion, etc.) ; challenging sex discrimination in employment, education, etc.

The following is a list of topic areas generally discussed. Although listed by week, they are not in any particular order, nor is it necessary to rigidly adhere to a one-week/one-topic schedule. The questions are examples of the kinds of areas that can be explored.

Week 1 GENERAL: What are some of the things that got you interested in the women's movement?

Week 2 FAMILY: Discuss your parents and their relationship to you as a girl (daughter). Were you treated differently from brothers or friends who were boys?

Week 3 FAMILY: Discuss your relationships with women in your family.

Week 4 CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE: Problems of growing up as a girl. Did you have heroines or heros? Who were they? What were your favorite games? How did you feel about your body changing at puberty?

Week 5 MEN: Discuss your relationships with men-friends, lovers, bosses—as they evolved. Are there any recurring patterns?

Week 6 MARITAL STATUS: How do (or did) you feel about being single? Married? Divorced? What have been the pressures—family, social— on you?

Week 7 MOTHERHOOD: Did you consider having children a matter of choice? Discuss the social and personal pressures you may have felt to become a mother. What have been your experiences and thoughts regarding such issues as child care, contraception and abortion?

Week 8 SEX: Have you ever felt that men have pressured you into having sexual relationships? Have you ever lied about orgasm?

Week 9 SEX: Sex objects-When do you feel like one? Do you want to be beautiful? Do you ever feel invisible?

Week 10 WOMEN: Discuss your relationships with other women. For example, have you ever felt competitive with other women for men? Have you ever felt attracted to another woman?

Week 11 BEHAVIOR: What is a "nice girl"? Discuss the times you have been called selfish. Have you ever felt that you were expected to smile even when you didn't feel like it?

Week 12 AGE: How do you feel about getting old? Your mother getting old? What aspects of aging do you look forward to? Fear? Do you think it is a different problem for men and women?

Week 13 AMBITIONS: What would you most like to do in life? How does being a woman affect that?

Week 14 MOVEMENT ACTIVITY: What are some of the things you would like to see the women's movement accomplish?

-‘Consciousness Raising’ in Radical Feminism, Koedt et al (eds.)

[feministbirdcreature]

So is Ovarit just fully a conservative right-wing website now or what? Why the fuck are these women on a feminist website posting about voting for Trump getting 12 upvotes? You’re not a feminist if you vote for a party with an agenda that threatens to take away no-fault divorce, contraception and abortion because these are all policies that make it easier for men to entrap and abuse women. Republicans are NOT on the side of radical feminists just because they oppose trans ideology. They oppose trans ideology because they think eww men in dresses icky :( not because they care about the safety of women and girls.

I wish these women would go back to the daily mail comments section. Ovarit used to be good. I would pop over there and lurk every few months but over the last year I have noticed it becoming more and more conservative. The only posts that gain any traction are about trans nonsense and most of the posts about other women’s issues like male violence get maybe 4 or 5 comments. I get that gender ideology is a threat but it’s ridiculous how they never talk about violence against women by straight men considering it’s the most prevalent form of oppression. I even see women on Ovarit sometimes defending traditional gender roles. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw one last month saying she believed “men should lead in relationships” and she couldn’t even give a reason why when questioned

It’s so obvious at this point that Ovarit is where right wing women go to dunk on trans people. I don’t get it because they can go to the Daily Mail comments section for that.

[drizne]

Excerpt from the speech "Remembering the Witches", from Andrea Dworkin's "Our Blood"

"Men tell us that they too are "oppressed". They tell us that they are often in their individual lives victimized by women -- by mothers, wives and "girlfriends". They tell us that women provoke acts of violence through our carnality, or malice, or avarice, or vanity, or stupidity. They tell us that their violence originates in us and that we are responsible for it. They tell us that their lives are full of pain, and that we are its source. They tell us that as mothers we injure them irreparably, as wives we castrate them, as lovers we steal from them semen, youth and manhood -- and never, never, as mothers, wives, or lovers do we ever give them enough.

And what are we to think? Because if we being to piece together all of the instances of violence -- the rapes, the assaults, the cripplings, the killings, the mass slaughters; if we read their novels, poems, political and philosophical tracts and see that they think of us today what the Inquisitors thought of us yesterday; if we realize that historically gynocide is not some mistake, some accidental excess, some dreadful fluke, but is instead the logical consequence of what they believe to be our god-given or biological natures; then we must finally understand that under patriarchy gynocide is the ongoing reality of life lived by women. And then we must look to each other -- for the courage to bear it and for the courage to change it.

The struggle of women, the feminist struggle, is not a struggle for more money per hour, or for equal rights under male law, or for more women legislators who will operate within the confines of male law. These are all emergency measures, designed to safe women's lives, as many as possible, now, today. But these reforms will not stem the tide of gynocide; these reforms will not end the relentless violence perpetrated by the gender class men against the gender class women. These reforms will not stop the increasing rape epidemic in this country, or the wife-beating epidemic in England. They will not stop the sterilizations of black and poor white women who are the victims of male doctors who hate female carnality. These reforms will not empty mental institutions of women put into them by male relatives who hate them for rebelling against the limits of the female role, or against the conditions of female servitude. They will not empty prisons filled with women who, in order to survive, whored; or who, after being raped, killed the rapist; or who, while being beaten, killed the man who was killing them. These reforms will not stop men from living off exploited female domestic labor, nor will these reforms stop men from reinforcing male identity by psychologically victimizing women in so-called "love" relationships.

And no personal accommodation within the system of patriarchy will stop this relentless gynocide. Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

Before we can live and love, we will have to hone ourselves into a revolutionary sisterhood. That means that we must stop supporting the men who oppress us; that we must refuse to feed and clothe and clean up after them; that we must refuse to let them take their sustenance from our lives. That means that we will have to divest ourselves of the identity we have been trained to as females -- that we will have to divest ourselves of all traces of the masochism we have been told is synonymous with being female. That means that we will have to attack and destroy every institution, law, philosophy, religion, custom, and habit of this patriarchy that feeds on our "dirty" blood, that is build on our "trivial" labor."

[living-and-dyking]

“repair” by molly costello

[feminism-of-course]

”If sex education, preventive health care, and easy access to contraceptives are offered to every female, fewer of us will have unwanted pregnancies. As a consequence the need for abortions would diminish.”

bell hooks, Feminism is for everybody, 2015 ed., p.29

[womenaremypriority]

Limiting women’s reproductive rights has always went both ways. Some women are forced to stay pregnant/denied abortions, told that their god-given duty was to give birth, or denied alternatives to staying bare feet and pregnant their whole life, while other women were forcibly sterilized, had their children taken from them, or were forced to have abortions. True reproductive freedom (a major aspect of women’s liberation) will only work if it goes both ways and focused on all aspects.

[erebusvincent]

[troythecatfish]

[floatingbook]

You need to afford every other woman who crosses your path the same respect you’d like to be treated with. Walk away if you find her intolerable, but at the very least don’t drag the both of you down. It’s a no-win scenario.

[haggishlyhagging]

When I started looking at feminist efforts at the end of the nineteenth century, I knew that women had been involved in work against prostitution because there has been some feminist historical work on the Contagious Diseases Acts. What astonished me about these feminists was that the language they were using was so fiercely feminist. They described men's use of women in prostitution as an abuse of women, as dividing what they called the class of women, and putting aside one half of that class simply for men to use for their own purposes. I was surprised by the strength of the language that was used and the way in which these writers were very directly pointing out men's abuse of women in prostitution, and targeting men directly in everything they said.

I went on to discover something I had no knowledge of and about which there was virtually no information in secondary sources: there was a fifty-year campaign by those women against the sexual abuse of children. This started out of the struggle against prostitution, and it centered at first on raising the age of consent for girls so that young girls could not be used in prostitution. There wasn't a law against men using women in prostitution, but age of consent laws would have removed young girls from men's reach. That campaign culminated in the raising of the age of consent for sexual intercourse in Britain to 16 in 1885, and for indecent assault to 16 in 1922. It took fifty years.

Feminists were not simply trying to raise the age of consent. They were fighting incest, pointing out that incest was a crime of the patriarchal family, of men against women, and that sexual abuse of children was a crime carried out by men of all classes. They were fighting for women jurors, magistrates, women police to look after victims, fighting for all kinds of reforms that I thought had been invented by this wave of feminism. They were involved in setting up shelters for women escaping prostitution, something that is happening again in this wave of feminism.

I was enormously impressed by these feminists. In fact, I sat in the Fawcett Library in London getting terribly excited and wanting to tell everybody what I was finding out. Feminist theorists like Elisabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and Frances Swiney were writing at this time about sexuality. We haven't had access to their work because it hasn't been taken seriously. Where they are written about at all in history books, they are simply called prudes and puritans and their ideas are seen as retrogressive. What these women were arguing was that the sexual subordination of women—men's appropriation of women's bodies for their use—lay at the foundation of the oppression of women.

Interestingly, these two women, Swiney and Elmy, made clear their opposition to the practice of sexual intercourse. This practice has become so sacred that it is almost impossible to imagine any serious challenge being made to it. What we have seen in the last hundred years is the total and compulsory enforcement of that sexual practice upon women so that women are allowed absolutely no outlet or escape from it.

But at the end of the nineteenth century there were feminists who were prepared to challenge intercourse. They were prepared to say, for instance, that it was dangerous for women's health; that it led to unwanted pregnancies or forced women to use forms of technology, contraception, that reduced them simply to objects for men's use; that it humiliated women and made them into things. Feminists pointed out that sexual diseases transmitted through sexual intercourse were dangerous to women's lives. They felt sexual intercourse to be a humiliating practice because it showed men's dominance more obviously than anything else. They believed that this practice should take place only for the purposes of reproduction, maybe every three or four years. I know these are ideas which if you voiced them today would make people think that you had taken leave of your senses. But these were ideas that were absolutely mainstream; they were being put forward by respectably married women, one married to a general.

These women were campaigning fundamentally for a woman's right to control her own body and to control access to her own body. The integrity of a woman's own body was the basic plank of their campaign.

-Sheila Jeffreys, “Sexology and Antifeminism” in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism

[feministbirdcreature]

I LOVEEEEE how Tumblr has just randomly started recommending pro-ana ED content to me even though I have never sought out such content or interacted with it in any way. Absolutely love that :) I love how it keeps popping up even though I say I’m not interested :))))

/s

Being on the internet as a woman is hell with the constant barrage of anorexia, body dysmorphia, plastic surgery and appearance related content. I wonder if men get recommended shit like this.