CHARLOTTE BUNCH QUOTES

American author & women's rights activist (1944- )

Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women's issues.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH

Tags: feminism

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Women are all vulnerable, and each of us is only as secure as those women that society puts on the "bottom," not as powerful as the token top.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH

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The idea of just adding women to things as they are is not nearly as likely to excite people as the idea that society as a whole could be different. To believe that the degradation of sexism and racism, the violence in our lives that we have today is not inevitable moves people to action.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH

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Women's liberation has touched off a resurgence of the women's struggle by giving public visibility and common analysis to an uneasiness and hostility that many women feel, but that had been confined until now to the personal sphere and thereby dismissed. Women are responding because, as one sister put it, women's liberation is simply organized rage against real oppression.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH

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Heterosexual privilege is the method by which women are given a stake in male supremacy--and ... it is therefore the method by which women are given a stake in their own oppression.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH

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We do not need, and indeed never will have, all the answers before we act.... It is often through taking action that we can discover some of them.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH

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Consciousness-raising is our term for the process by which women begin to discover ourselves as an oppressed people and struggle against the effects of male supremacy on us. It happens when we describe and share our individual problems so that we can understand the universality of our oppression and analyze its social roots. It is learning to take pride and delight in our femaleness, rejecting the need to follow the feminine mystique or to copy men as our models; it is learning to trust and love each other as sisters, not competitors for male approval. It is deciding and redeciding each day, individually and together, that we will take control over our lives, create and support each other in alternative ways of living, and struggle together for the liberation of all women.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH

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It is clear that capitalism in the U.S.A., as in many societies in the past, benefits from and perpetuates sexist ideologies for its own profit. It exploits us as cheap labor through unpaid work at home and as a threat to other workers in order to prevent strikes and keep wages down. Through the sacred concept of the nuclear family, it isolates women, defines us as secondary to our men (Mrs.), yet assigns us major tasks for maintaining life, keeping up their castles and their egos, raising children, and so on, all without pay.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH

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Critical thinking is the antithesis of women's traditional role. Women are supposed to worry about mundane survival problems, to brood about fate, and to fantasize in a personal manner. We are not meant to think analytically about society, to question the way things are, or to consider how things could be different. Such thinking involves an active, not a passive, relationship to the world. It requires confidence that your thoughts are worth pursuing and that you can make a difference. And it demands looking beyond how to make do and into how to make "making do" different--how to change the structures that control our lives.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH

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The initial tenets of feminism have already been established--the idea that power is based on gender differences and that men's illegitimate power over women taints all aspects of society, for instance. But now we face the arduous task of systematically working through these ideas, fleshing them out and discovering new ones.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH

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