Imagine Mary’s Breasts
Imagine Mary’s breasts, / warm brown as the earth / pale gold as the moon, / the breasts of a young girl / ripe as perfect plums.
How Quaker Women Made Decisions
“Quaker women in history have a reputation for being bolder and more publicly visible than their contemporaries, being involved with preaching and publishing from the very beginning of the movement. Until the end of the 19th century, however, the members of the main Quaker decision-making groups were men. Female Friends were considered spiritually equal, but there was vocal opposition to giving them any earthly authority.”
A Sisterhood of Dissent
“Decisions about nuclear weapons and about military things in general, they’re all taken by men. It seems right that it should be women [protesting].
I began to have visions of women walking down the road with our banners and our placards. We walked from Cardiff, the capital of Wales, to Greenham Common. The press were not interested. We had to do something more dramatic, and we decided to chain ourselves up to the gates of Greenham when we got there. We had to stay a night, and another night, a week two weeks… gradually, the support did come in.
It was the biggest women’s demonstration ever, I think, in this country.”
Call No Man Master, and Emphatically Not in Heaven
“As Friends we seek to do away with violence both in seed and branch, in language and in deed. Should it be our goal then to do away with every vestige of master-submission patterns among ourselves, and consistently oppose them in the world at large? Unfortunately this seems not to be possible. A notable example can be found in adult-child relations [….]”
Open Your Beauty to the Sun
“Credit not the old fashioned absurdity, that woman’s is a secondary lot, ministering to the necessities of her lord and master! It is a higher destiny I would award you [….]
I would charge you to water the undying bud, and give it healthy culture, and open its beauty to the sun—and then you may hope, that when your life is bound up with another, you will go on equally, and in a fellowship that shall pervade every earthly interest.”
The Few Friends Who Were Out in Front on Social Change
“We tend to think historically that Friends have been out in front in all areas of social change, the abolition of slavery, rights for women, prison reform, and all the rest, but Margaret Bacon points out in an article that it was only a few Friends who were out in front. The John Woolmans and the Lucretia Motts were very lonely in their own meetings, in their own days, and the Elizabeth Frys also. They were eldered by their meetings and looked on as a little bit too far out for the general populace.”
Demanding Representation for Women
“It wasn’t easy because I had a young child and we were separated. I couldn’t hold him in my arms. But I think what kept me going was the belief that I was contributing to something that would change for our people: demanding that we get a better education, demanding that we get the right to vote, demanding that we were citizens in our country. And as somebody who had to overcome not only racial discrimination in my country, but also gender discrimination, we demanded that women should be present in large enough numbers in the peace talks, in the structures that were writing our constitution.”
All Men and Women Are Created Equal
“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
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