Serina

“The vast majority of conservative women are not in fact ignorant about patriarchy or their limited role in it, but have adopted a certain fatalistic attitude. To them, liberation from patriarchy is neither possible nor worth fighting for, as it would be no better than tilting at windmills. Better to accept that a woman is modest, domestic, a home-maker and child-rearer, and to perform according to those standards. In exchange, they receive the stability and security that a man who has claimed them can provide, a certain safety located within having to manage a single man’s desires and needs. This ‘traditional’ life protects them, shelters them from the wider world which remains hostile and misogynistic, and is thus the ‘smart’ choice, one that all women ought to wisely and maturely accept.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“Wittig’s assertion is based on her analysis of heterosexuality as a regime, not merely the ‘default’ sexuality, but a political institution that has structured and continues to structure the organization of society, philosophical modes of thought, and even language itself. She conceptualizes the state of women as an enrollment, at birth, into the heterosexual contract, analogous to Rousseau’s social contract: an arrangement into which they are all entered without consent, whose terms and conditions are never explicated but are enforced all the same, set up to extract all benefits and return precious little (if any) compensation to women-as-a-class. To Wittig, the goal of feminist struggle is not an attempted rehabilitation of ‘womanhood’, a category that was and remains subordinate in its very conceptualization. Rather, the struggle for liberation is a struggle for abolition of this category, a mutual annihilation of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ such that social existence is no longer defined by a relation of extractive parasitism.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“Others felt that feminists would split the unity of the working class or of other oppressed classes, that they forgot the broader issue of revolution by putting the issue of women’s liberation before the issue of class struggle or national liberation struggle.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“The hierarchical division of labour between men and women and its dynamics form an integral part of the dominant production relations, that is, the class relations of a particular epoch and society, and of the broader national and international divisions of labour.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour