Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults - is on a psychic level, a battered woman.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the pervasive experiences of oppression that women face, emphasizing their psychological impact.
Mary Daly's quote underscores the deep-rooted and often unrecognized violence and oppression that women experience throughout their lives. By comparing women's experiences to that of a 'battered woman' on a psychic level, she invites us to acknowledge the collective trauma and resilience of women confronting societal injustices, thus prompting a shift in awareness and activism against gender-based violence.
In practice
During a women's rights seminar, to emphasize the necessity of recognizing psychological trauma in advocacy.
I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism-or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism-whic h are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!
Patriarchy has stolen our cosmos and returned it in the form of 'Cosmopolitan' magazine and cosmetics.
Courage to be is the key to revelatory power of the feminist revolution.
Patriarchy appears to be everywhere. Even outer space and the future have been colonized. As a rule, even the more imaginative science-fiction writers (allegedly the most foretelling futurists) cannot/will not create a space and time in which women get far beyond the role of space stewardess.
Within a culture possessed by the myth of feminine evil, the naming, describing, and theorizing about good and evil has constituted a maze/haze of deception. The journey of women becoming is breaking through this maze - springing into free space, which is an a-mazing process.
I had explained that a woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan
I have never felt as violated in myself as I had since the DoD team started to torture me to get me admit to things I haven't done.
I didn't wake up and decide to become an activist. But you couldn't help notice the inequities, the injustices. It was all around you.
I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.
I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.
I landed in New Jersey, where I could barely speak English, and I had to figure out what a short brown kid was going to do in this big white world.
For sure, there are times when one may have no choice but to go to war, but it is never something to rush to or accept without exploring every other available option.
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