Amy Mclaughlin

“Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“Things get better everyday you stay alive
then I'm amazed
every day
that the sun decides to rise
every minute, every hour, is another
chance to change
life is beautiful & terrible & strange.”
― Johnette Napolitano

“But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution