In their own hateful, demented words. You can't make these things up.
We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage. - Sisterhood Is Powerful, Robin Morgan (ed), 1970, p. 537.
How will the family unit be destroyed? ...[T]he demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare. - Roxanne Dunbar in Female Liberation.
Only with the occasional celebrity crime do we allow ourselves to think the nearly unthinkable: that the family may not be the ideal and perfect living arrangement after all that it can be a nest of pathology and a cradle of gruesome violence... Even in the ostensibly "functional," nonviolent family, where no one is killed or maimed, feelings are routinely bruised and often twisted out of shape. There is the slap or the putdown that violates a child’s shaky sense of self, the cold, distracted stare that drives a spouse to tears, the little digs and rivalries... - Barbara Ehrenreich in Time.
The nuclear family is a hotbed of violence and depravity. - Gordon Fitch.
Is Marriage the Answer? Feminists have long criticized marriage as a place of oppression, danger, and drudgery for women. Barbara Findlen, Ms Magazine, May-June, 1995
Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership. - Andrea Dworkin.
"Only when manhood is dead–and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it." - Andrea Dworkin.
"The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations–for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right–these institutions are real and they must be destroyed." - Andrea Dworkin.
In her polemical report on a trip to Israel, Dworkin condemns what she sees as a theocratic, racist state based on dispossession and theft of Arab land, a place where Orthodox rabbis make most of the legal decisions that affect women’s lives. (promo from "Publisher’s Weekly") about Andrea Dworkin’s book "Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women"
"In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them."– Gloria Steinem
"I was struck by what a beneficial alternative to the nuclear family this arrangement [communal housing and child raising] was for these women and children." - Lenore Walker, after visiting one of the early shelters for battered women, as cited in The Battered Woman, p.195.
"The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together.... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the breakup of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.... No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her children...
Families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people’s needs for love and security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all." - - Linda Gordon, "Functions of the Family," WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969:
"I submit that any sexual intercourse between a free man and a human being he owns or controls is rape." - Alice Walker in "Embracing the Dark and the Light," Essence, July 1982, as cited in Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women.
"In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent" -– Catherine MacKinnon, "Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales From The Strange World of Women’s Studies"
"All men are rapists, and that’s all they are ..." - –Feminist Marilyn French, People Magazine (Percent of reported rape or near-rape incidents = .07% [The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report lists for the year 1996])
"God is going to change. We women... will change the world so much that He won’t fit anymore." – Naomi Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (quoted at beginning of From Father God to Mother Earth)
"We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men..." - – Elizabeth Stanton, One Woman, One Vote, Wheeler, p. 58
"The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist" (‘National NOW Times, Jan.1988).
"Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women’s movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage" - radical feminist leader Sheila Cronan
“Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn’t be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that" - Vivian Gornick, feminist author, University of Illinois, "The Daily Illini," April 25, 1981.
“The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it" - Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, in "Women and the New Rage," p.67.
"In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them" - Dr. Mary Jo Bane, feminist and assistant professor of education at Wellesley College and associate director of the school’s Center for Research on Woman
"Marriage has existed for the benefit of men; and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women... We must work to destroy it. The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore, it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men... All of history must be re-written in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft" - from "The Declaration of Feminism," November 1971
Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole... patriarch! - Gloria Steinem, radical feminist leader, editor of ‘MS’ magazine
In response to a question concerning China’s policy of compulsory abortion after the first child, Molly Yard responded, "I consider the Chinese government’s policy among the most intelligent in the world" - Gary Bauer, "Abetting Coercion in China," The Washington Times, October 10, 1989
"Let’s forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace and inspiration from real women... Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist ‘salvation’ of this world" - Annie Laurie Gaylor, "Feminist Salvation," "The Humanist", July/August 1988, p.37.
"By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God" - Gloria Steinem, editor of ‘MS’ magazine
