A Quote by Emmeline Pankhurst
Women had always fought for men, and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own human rights. Our militant movement was established.
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Black women fought for the right to vote during the suffrage movement and fought again during the civil rights movement. The rote narrative in the press of the civil rights movement is truncated with the briefest of histories of men like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or John Lewis.
If it is right for men to fight for their freedom, and God knows what the human race would be like today if men had not, since time began, fought for their freedom, then it is right for women to fight for their freedom and the freedom of the children they bear.
For many years now, I have been an outspoken supporter of civil and human rights for gay and lesbian people. Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Ga. and St. Augustine, Fla., and many other campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions.
Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.
Freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. We have to fight for it and protect it and then hand it to them, so that they shall do the same, or we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.
In less than a century we experienced great movement. The youth movement! The labor movement! The civil rights movement! The peace movement! The solidarity movement! The women's movement! The disability movement! The disarmament movement! The gay rights movement! The environmental movement! Movement! Transformation! Is there any reason to believe we are done?
People say, "Oh, we ought to fight for animal rights." We fought for human rights, but even if humans have rights, they can still be horribly abused and are every day. You don't have to go to some far off land, far away place; we have a lot of child abuse in our own society.
The idea of equality is misunderstood. I wouldn't ever argue that everyone is the same, but that differences should not be hierarchical. Attitudes and expectations have been imposed on both men and women. For instance, men had very little to do with the raising of their children before the women's movement. The women's movement has freed men to become more active as fathers. We're living in a period of transition, but change can be much slower than we want, with unintended consequences, and can also be happening without our seeing it.
I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for the USA. I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this country. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone. That's not happening.
I believe and support the feminist movement, but I am not generally interested in considering women's rights in relation to equality with men, or in a competition with men, but rather within their own rights and feminine space.
Women's rights, men's rights-human rights-all are threatened by the everpresent specter of war so destructive now of human material and moral values as to render victory indistinguishable from defeat.
The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women's movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights.
Women had a rights movement where they fought for changes. Men... don't band together in quite that way. It happens not in such a public-cascade way as in a house-to-house way.
It's true that in a lot of western feminist movements, you see women working singularly from men. Suffragettes and the women's rights movement in the 60s here, but when I think of the Islamic feminist movement, I think of a lot of men who are very much standing with the women. It really feels like in equal numbers. Women are catching up in the field because we were not given access to knowledge and encouraged into these studies and so these men are helping us and empowering us. They are men of conscience who are fed up with this assumption that they're entitled.
I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this country. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone.
I certainly embrace all the movement that's going on these days about equality for women and equal rights. In general, I would apply that to all nationalities and all races. I think we do need more awareness, generosity, and compassion than we have right now. But in terms of feminism, I embrace it wholeheartedly. Not in a kind of militant way, but I've always known that it matters.
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