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Jewish Contribution to Radical Feminism and Leftism

This list covers (many, not all) women who contributed to radical women’s movements or women who contributed to radical leftist movements. There are a variety of perspectives and there is much to learn from all of their work. 

Betty Friedan (1921-2006)

A leading figure in the women’s movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which aimed to bring women “into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men.”

Notable Writing: Author of The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Selected Quote: “The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.” -The Feminine Mystique

Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005)

Dworkin considered the pornography industry to be based on turning women into objects for abuse by men. Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon developed a legislative approach based on civil rights rather than obscenity to outlaw pornography and allow lawsuits against pornographers for damages, but their efforts were largely unsuccessful. She testified at a federal commission against pornography, leading some stores to withdraw certain magazines from sale, but a court ruled the government’s efforts unconstitutional.Her book Intercourse, which addresses the role of sexual intercourse in society, has been interpreted as opposing all heterosexual intercourse, but Dworkin said it does not and that what she was against was male domination by intercourse. 

Notable Writing: Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Right-Wing Women, Intercourse, Woman Hating, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation, and more.

Selected Quote: “Men come to me or to other feminists and say: “What you’re saying about men isn’t true. It isn’t true of me. I don’t feel that way. I’m opposed to all of this.” And I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues. Tell the novelists who think that rape is wonderful. Tell Larry Flynt. Tell Hugh Hefner. There’s no point in telling me. I’m only a woman. There’s nothing I can do about it. These men presume to speak for you. They are in the public arena saying that they represent you. If they don’t, then you had better let them know.” -from the speech “I Want A Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape” (1983)

Shulamith Firestone (1945-2012)

Firestone was a Canadian-American radical feminist, writer and activist. A central figure in the early development of radical feminism and second-wave feminism, Firestone was a founding member of three radical-feminist groups: New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists. 

She was known for her idea that live birth was oppressive and that as technology developed, parthenogenesis would free women and children.

She also struggled with schizophrenia and wrote a book of short stories based on her experiences in a mental health hospital called Airless Spaces (1980)

Notable Writing: The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist Revolution (1970)

Selected Quotes: 

“The end goal of femi­nist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between ‘human beings would no longer matter culturally.” -The Dialectic of Sex

“Artificial reproduction is not inherently dehumanizing. At very least, development of an option should make possible an honest reexamination of the ancient value of motherhood.” -The Dialectic of Sex

Ellen Willis (1941-2006)

Willis as a member of New York Radical Women and subsequently co-founder in early 1969 with Shulamith Firestone of the radical feminist group Redstockings.  Starting in 1979, Willis wrote a number of essays that were highly critical of anti-pornography feminism, criticizing it for what she saw as its sexual puritanism and moral authoritarianism, as well as its threat to free speech. These essays were among the earliest expressions of feminist opposition to the anti-pornography movement in what became known as the feminist sex wars. A self-described anti-authoritarian democratic socialist, she was very critical of what she viewed as social conservatism and authoritarianism on both the political right and left. She was a strong supporter of women’s abortion rights, and in the mid-1970s was a founding member of the pro-choicestreet theater and protest group No More Nice Girls.

Ellen Willis is featured in the feminist history film She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.

Noteable Writing: Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex? (1981)

Selected Quote: “The goal of the right is not to stop abortion but to demonize it, punish it and make it as difficult and traumatic as possible. All this it has accomplished fairly well, even without overturning Roe v. Wade.” -“Escape from Freedom,” Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol 1, No 2 (2006)

Susan Brownmiller (1935- )

Brownmiller argues in Against Our Will that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. In order to write the book, after having helped to organize the New York Radical Feminists Speak-Out on Rape on January 24, 1971, and the New York Radical Feminists Conference on Rape on April 17, 1971, she spent four years investigating rape. Against Our Will was a highly controversial book. Brownmiller’s basic premise was contested by some sections of the left wing, who considered it untrue that “all men benefit” from the culture of rape, and who believed rather that it was possible to organize both women and men together to oppose sexual violence. The book also received criticism from Angela Davis, who thought Brownmiller disregarded the part that black women played in the anti-lynching movement and that Brownmiller’s discussion of rape and race became an “unthinking partnership which borders on racism”.[13]In 1995, the New York Public Library selected Against Our Will as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century.

Notable Writing: Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975), Femininity (1984)

Selected Quote: “That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation.” -Against Our Will

Gloria Steinem (1934- )

Steinem was a columnist for New York magazine, and a co-founder of Ms.magazine. In 1969, Steinem published an article, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation”, which brought her to national fame as a feminist leader. Although most frequently considered a liberal feminist, Steinem has repeatedly characterized herself as a radical feminist. More importantly, she has repudiated categorization within feminism as “nonconstructive to specific problems,” saying: “I’ve turned up in every category. So it makes it harder for me to take the divisions with great seriousness.”

Notable Writing: Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983) is a compilation of 20 years of Steinem’s writing. 

Selected Quotes: 

‪"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.“‬

“Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.“‪

“Men should think twice before making widowhood women’s only path to power.“‬‬

Gerda Lerner (1920-2013)

Austrian-born American historian and feminist author. In addition to her numerous scholarly publications, she wrote poetry, fiction, theater pieces, screenplays, and an autobiography.

Notable Writing: Women and History, Vol. I The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), Vol. II The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870 (1993)

Selected Quote: “Women have been kept from contributing to History-making, that is, the ordering and interpretation of the past of humankind. Since this process of meaning-giving is essential to the creation and perpetuation of civilization, we can see at once that women’s marginality in this endeavor places us in a unique and segregate posi­tion. Women are the majority, yet we are structured into social in­stitutions as though we were a minority.” -The Creation of Patriarchy

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

Rich was called “one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century”, and was credited with bringing “the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse. According to her, she prefers to use the term “women’s liberation” rather than feminism. For her, the latter term is more likely to induce resistance from women of the next generation. Also, she fears that the term would amount to nothing more than a label if it is used extensively.

Notable Writing: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1986)

Selected Quote: “The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.” -Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

Joanna Russ (1937-2011)

Russ was an American writer, academic and radical feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism.

Notable Writing: How to Suppress Women’s Writing

Selected Quote:

Men succeed. Women get married.

Men fail. Women get married.

Men enter monasteries. Women get married.

Men start wars. Women get married.

Men stop them. Women get married.

Dull, dull.

Joanna Russ, The Female Man, 1975, p. 126.

Gail Dines (1958- )

Dines specializes in the study of pornography. Described in 2010 as the world’s leading anti-pornography campaigner, she is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture and founder of Culture Reframed, created to address pornography as a public-health crisis.

Notable Writing: Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2010)

Selected Quote: “Women are still being held captive by images that ultimately  tell lies about women. The biggest lie is that conforming to this hypersexualized image will give women real power in the world, since in a porn culture, our power rests, we are told, not in our ability to shape the institutions that determine our life chances but in having a hot body that men desire and  women envy.” -Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality

Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking “rebel woman” by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status in the 1970s by a revival of interest in her life, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest. 

Although hostile to first-wave feminism and its suffragist goals, Emma Goldman advocated passionately for the rights of women and is today heralded as a founder of anarcha-feminism. In 1897, she wrote: “I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood”.In 1906, Goldman wrote a piece entitled “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation" in which she argued that traditional suffragists and first-wave feminists were achieving only a superficial good for women by pursuing the vote and a movement from the home sphere.

Notable Writing: Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), Marriage And Love (1911)

Selected Quote: “If, however, woman is free and big enough to learn the mystery of sex without the sanction of State or Church, she will stand condemned as utterly unfit to become the wife of a ‘good’ man, his goodness consisting of an empty head and plenty of money. Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a ‘good’ man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife? That is precisely what marriage means. How can such an arrangement end except in failure? This is one, though not the least important, factor of marriage, which differentiates it from love.” -Marriage and Love

Susan Griffin (1943- )

Susan Griffin is a radical feminist philosopher, essayist and playwright particularly known for her innovative, hybrid-form ecofeminist works. Griffin has written 21 books, including works of nonfiction, poetry, anthologies, plays, and a screenplay. Her work has been translated into over 12 languages. Griffin describes her work as “draw[ing] connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and trac[ing] the causes of war to denial in both private and public life.“ Griffin articulated her anti-pornography feminism in “Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature”. In this work she makes the case that although the pursuit of “political freedom”, especially freedom of speech, could lead to a position against the censorship of pornography, in the case of pornography the freedom to create pornography leads to a compromise of “human liberation” when this term includes liberation for all of humankind including the emancipation of women. She argues against the collapse of pornography and eros, arguing that they are separate and opposing ideas. Her work Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her is believed to have launched ecofeminism in the United States.

Susan Griffin is featured in the feminist history film She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.

Notable Writing: Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (1981), Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978), Rape: The Politics of Consciousness (1986), A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (1992)

Selected Quote: “He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger. He sets himself apart from woman and nature. And so it is Goldilocks who goes to the home of the three bears, Little Red Riding Hood who converses with the wolf, Dorothy who befriends a lion, Snow White who talks to the birds, Cinderella with mice as her allies, the Mermaid who is half fish, Thumbelina courted by a mole. (And when we hear in the Navaho chant of the mountain that a grown man sits and smokes with bears and follows directions given to him by squirrels, we are surprised. We had thought only little girls spoke with animals.) We are the bird’s eggs. Bird’s eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep; we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and sprigs of wallflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear.” 

- Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her

Further Reading:

Wikipedia List of Jewish feminists

A New Book Looks at 50 Years of Jewish Radical Feminism

The Radical Jewish Feminists, and Why They Never Spoke of Their Jewish Identities

Our True Legacy: Radical Jewish Women in America

The Forgotten Jewish Element of the Women’s Liberation Movement

Anarchists, American Jewish women

Communism in the United States

Rosa Luxemburg’s Legacy for Feminism

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was looking up 50s fashion for writing reasons and i CANNOT get over the outfits these girls are rocking

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honestly even if pregnancy is all the female reproductive system did, it’s presence is not indicating you must reproduce or view being female as saying that either. And wow it does so much more.

Learning that my uterus + ovaries aren't there just to give me periods or babies, but that they also aid in orgasm and regulating circulation made me appreciate this part of my anatomy in a new and different way. I'm sure there are other awesome things that only a female reproductive system can do, and that's honestly exciting.

#female reproductive system #uterus #ovaries #cervix

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Radical feminism isn’t just a checklist of “if you’re anti porn, anti prostitution, anti exploitation, anti gender identity…” yes these beliefs are a part of radical feminism but they all derive from the driving philosophy that male supremacy is a massive structural, ubiquitous system that needs radical destruction and that every source and expression of male supremacy needs to be challenged. Without this context, radical feminist beliefs can look like arbitrary checklists where you add up enough points to decide you must be a radfem, which is how you get self proclaimed “Christian pro-life radfems” or people who see these beliefs as restrictive rules that need to be subverted (and will usually accuse you of ideological purity/dogma if you ask them to have consistent beliefs).

I understand why our community as a whole tends to focus on individual issues and beliefs, it’s a great way to engage a wider scope of women. But I also believe radical feminism is greater than the sum of its parts because you can’t separate any one misogynistic issue from the bigger picture of patriarchy without weakening how effectively you can attack that issue. So while I do agree that any direct action or real life connections that can be made is more useful than just talking online about theory, I believe the ideology that connects issues is important.

#radical feminism #radblr #radfems interact #radfems #radical feminst #radfem #male supremacy #patriarchy #sexism

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my boss isn’t working tomorrow 🕺

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hello party people!!!! if you are a woman in the houston area or know a woman in the houston area that needs any kind of assistance, please fill out this form from the Female Freedom Fund, a new mutual aid fund for female Houstonians! if you are interesting in providing help, you can also fill out the form.

if you have a particular situation or have any other detailed concerns or desires to help, please email the fund at [email protected] or DM the fund on instagram or facebook (@femalefreedomfund on both). if you have a fundraiser you’d like shared, you can also request that with an email or DM!

please share if you can!

#female freedom fund #mutual aid #houston #radical feminism #feminism #radfem #radfems #radfems do touch #radfems interact #radical feminists #woman centered #seperatism #separatism #terfs do interact #terfs do touch #I don’t believe terf is a real thing #but thems the tags

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From ‘All About Love: new visions” by bell hooks, chapter 11 ‘loss: loving into life and death”

ID under cut

2 photos of pages of the book mentioned above. the pages are marked - bracketed, underlined. They read:

“Sustained grief is particularly disturbing in a culture that offers a quick fix for any pain. Sometimes it amazes me to know intuitively that the grieving are all around us yet we do not see any overt signs of their anguished spirits. We are taught to feel shame about grief that lingers. Like a stain on our clothes, it marks us as flawed, imperfect. To cling to grief, to desire its expression, is to be out of sync with modern life, where the hip do not get bogged down in mourning.

Love knows no shame. To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love. Since loving lets us let go of so much fear, it also guides our grief. When we lose someone we love, we can grieve without shame. Given that commitment is an important aspect of love, we who love know we must sustain ties in life and death. Our mourning, our letting ourself grieve over the loss of loved ones is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion. Knowing this and possessing the courage to claim our grief as an expression of love’s passion does not make the process simple in a culture that would deny us the emotional alchemy of grief. Much of our cultural suspicion of intense grief is rooted in the fear that the unleashing of such passion will overtake us and keep us from life. However, this fear is usually misguided. In its deepest sense, grief is a burning of the heart, an intense heat that gives us solace and release. When we deny the full expression of our grief, it lays a weight on our hearts, causing emotional pain and physical ailments. Grief is most often unrelenting when individuals are not reconciled to the reality of loss.

Love invites us to grieve for the dead as ritual of morning and as celebration. As we speak our hearts in mourning we share our intimate knowledge of the dead, who they were and how they lived. We honor their presence by naming the legacies they leave us. We need not contain grief when we use it as a means to intensify our love for the dead and dying, for those who remain alive.”

#bell hooks #on grief #all about love #grieving #all about love new visions

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This is the real “biology isn’t destiny” anti-bioessentialism. We can have evolved under pressure we now consciously reject. You don’t need to be an “evolutionary success”. You and every last one of your relatives could choose to not reproduce and you would all still be feeling, thinking, loving beings with one life each. Enjoy your life. Live lesbianiciously 💜😉

if our evolutionary purpose is to reproduce, how can i ever get past the grief of not being able to do it normally?

im a lesbian and i have so much pain about the fact that i cant ever have a biological child with someone i love. it hurts so much to know that even if i carried and raised a child it would never be my partner's biological child. i feel like my sexuality has no place in the nature because i cant naturally reproduce. while i have full respect for women who just dont want kids, i feel like a failure myself for not being able to have my partner's baby.

its alright if you dont have an answer to this or cant relate to this at all! your anti-natalism posts are life saving to me and honestly id go on more about how important your anti-natalism is to me if i wasnt tearing up rn!

evolutionary purpose doesn't matter, anon, it doesn't exist 💕 remember, it's residue religious thinking, nature doesn't have a brain, doesn't plan or require you to do something, there's no God, just a chain of event. causes and results. "evolutionary purpose being to reproduce" means the genes that reproduces successfully via their carriers survived. reproduction is the tool of natural selection, and means of evolution, your genes are "oriented" to reproduce solely because the genes that survived all these generations inside you all successfully reproduced! they come from a long, long chain of successful reproduction, that's why they're so well fit for it, that's why your body has all these means to reproduce, but it doesn't mean you must use the body your genes gave you that way. because they don't have a brain, dear anon, it's just DNA, it won't be sad if it ends its journey on you. there's probably enough copies of it inside other people's bodies anyway. you can be the final effect of these decades and centuies and epoques of evolution. I recommend you read this post: https://aristocat98.tumblr.com/post/666680874867277824/not-to-be-a-blackpiller-but-doesnt-that-imply-that?is_related_post=1#notes

where I question the notion of "natural order" based on Dawkins, and talk about probability in evolution. seems to be healing for many women. have a good day :)

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The other thing is good minds with the same good goal can and will disagree. Sometimes people react to neutral language I think is appropriate, and other times they use neutral language I find to be confusing or obscuring of what is really going on, which as @aristocat98 said is the main issue we have with it.

If you see someone arguing against about neutral language you think was actually harmless or good, make your case. Whoever it is might agree with you.

For an example, many radfems frequently use the hypothetical person they/them. It is quick and is a part of language. Others get irritated by it. I think it is a matter of context. Many agree with that from what I have seen.

When I want to emphasize a focus on women I use she/her alone. Woman as default standing in for all people just as man was default for centuries. I often want to center women as default.

When I want to refer to both sexes but also emphasize women are present I say she or he, he or she.

When women are not explicitly mentioned in a misogynistic patriarchal society we will be forgotten. Whey you speak of hypothetical a leader as they/them most people picture a man and never a woman.

When men are not explicitly mentioned in the context of their bad behavior and contribution to women’s suffering, they will also be forgotten and excused. Myths blaming women for our own condition in society will proliferate and everyone will rest easy, having faith we are only getting what we deserve.

Why do radfems claim to want a genderless society so bad, but as soon as someone uses a single gender neutral term they throw a hissy fit. Some of them are a little weird, especially the medical ones, but surely such a large group of gender abolishers could come up with something better.

because we want a genderless society but we don't have it as it stands and using gender neutral language in politics about a society that isn't genderless yet is erasing information the gender that still exists there - and gender is a hierarchy of power. for one, when you say "people rape other people regularly" you're not wrong but you don't convey the information that in 90%+ cases it's men raping women. gender still exists and matters unforch but the information gets lost. that's why abolition of gender first, eventual neutral language second.

#radfem #radical feminism #gender critical #sexism #patriarchy #feminist language reform #feminism #gender neutral language

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What I have seen, and what I bet OP @terfsarehomophobic and friends are misinterpreting, are a few radfems or gender critical people joking about how whenever TRAs trans the dead they pick laudable people.

Too often I see them hunt for evidence of gnc or cross dressing in interesting people and call it trans but ignore the likes of J Edgar Hoover, when we all know if he were a wonderful person he would have “hmm do you think? They was genderqueer or trans?”

This is showing some intellectual dishonestly. I can understand but only to a point. I don’t choose to hide that some lesbians or feminist women weren’t good people. I talk about both their lesbianism or feminism and issues I have with them. I especially am careful to equally consider the evidence a woman was gay whether she is cool and good or not.

Because unlike even feminism being a lesbian or being trans or genderqueer shouldn’t have anything to do with morals. If anything it makes trans identity seem all the more fake that you never name bad historical figures who were “provably trans”.

So the pointed joke is to speculate about random or bad figures being trans, especially if some behavior of theirs would have gotten them gender identity speculation if only they were cool and loved. I have barely seen this, but when I have it was always satire.

Notice when ever there's bad person in history terfs always try to make it put that they trans, like apparently hliter is trans to them, sometimes terfs make my brain feel loke it's melting.

Yeah I’ve seen multiple of them suggest really shitty men from the past are trans men. Which is beyond disgusting but also ironic because TERFs will then claim in the same breath they support trans men bc “adult human female!!!!”

It shows how little they know about history if they genuinely think H*tler was trans too. The N*zis fucking destroyed all records of trans folk in Germany and set trans people back probably decades in that country.

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Honestly the best piece of advice I can give to younger girls trying to figure life out is to completely ignore men. I’m not being quirky or cute when I say that, I mean it seriously. Ignore men’s judgments of you, ignore their insincere compliments, ignore their half-assed romance. Focus on developing yourself. Practice your art, play sports, do theater, volunteer, spend time with your friends, but do not put substantial effort into pleasing men. They’ll be there for you to pursue when the time comes and if you want to. But nothing will waste your youth more than fighting for male acceptance.

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#bell hooks

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it still feels like a microaggression when that one student in my diversity seminar was talking about tracy chapman and was like “she IS a woman. you may not have noticed. i didn’t realize that at first. she doesn’t really look or sound like a woman. i thought she was a man, i had to look it up! but she is a woman”

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“Foraging is more than just a hobby. It’s more than just “free food.” Foraging is more than just “what if” in an apocalyptic scenario. Foraging IS all about getting in touch with the land. It is about acknowledging and understanding the ways that our Mother Earth takes care of us. Foraging is all about connection. Foraging is an amazing way to revitalize our cultures. It’s a way to recognize those who came before us … and to stop the erasure of their legacies.”

— Linda Black Elk

#foraging #Linda black elk

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bell hooks: Pema, one of the ideas in your work that really challenges me is abandoning the hope of fruition. That’s really hard for me.

Pema Chödrön: The way I understand it is that we rob ourselves of being in the present by always thinking that the payoff will happen in the future. The only place ever to work is right now. We work with the present situation rather than a hypothetical possibility of what could be. I like any teaching that encourages us to be with ourselves and our situation as it is without looking for alternatives. The source of all wakefulness, the source of all kindness and compassion, the source of all wisdom, is in each second of time. Anything that has us looking ahead is missing the point.

Source: from lionsroar.com (Pema Chödrön & bell hooks on cultivating openness when life falls apart)

#pema chodron #bell hooks #present moment

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“At night when everyone is silent and everything is still, I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unmoving blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal I write—I belong in this place of words. This is my home. This dark, bone black inner cave where I am making a world for myself.”

— bell hooks (via aprill-showers)

#bell hooks #bone black #memories of girlhood

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Bell Hooks

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love.

#bell hooks #the will to change #masculine #masculinity #the will to change men masculinity and love