Quotes from Rosalind Miles

But fall? No. What is it, love? If not a fall, is it a hunger? The appetite casting around for strange meat not yet encountered, hungry for what it does not know yet, but will recognize at the first scent in the air? I know one thing: No one tumbles straight into their greatest love, the great love of their life. For there are many kinds of love- maiden love, flesh love, flesh hunger, then the deepest love hunger- and all these must be tried, tasted and relished before the one great love.

Christian priests were forced to live celibate for their God, but druids lived to celebrate the joys the goddess gives.

Each in its own way, the five major belief systems of Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam by their nature insisted on the inferiority of women and demanded their subjection to values and imperatives devised to promote the supremacy of men.

Now what is Love, I pray thee tell? It is that fountain and that well Where pleasure and repentance dwell. It is perhaps that saucy bell That tolls all into heaven or hell- And this is Love, as I hear tell.

Patriarchy changed all that. With a genuine belief in the one God came the inescapable duty to enforce it upon others; with the claim to the patent on truth came for the first-time ideas of orthodoxy, habits of bigotry and the practice of persecution.

Under patriarchal monotheism, womanhood was a life sentence of second-order existence.

If God was male and woman was not male, then whatever God was, woman was not.

Virginity came in with a vengeance as every budding patriarch suddenly realized his divine right to a vacuum-sealed, factory-fresh vagina with built-in hymenal gift-wrapping and purity guarantee.

All so-called laws of God express in reality the will of man.

The attack on women's bodies that was one of the most marked consequences of the imposition of patriarchal monotheism has no convenient onset or conclusion - but it was a principle determining factor of every woman's history over an extended period of time. It signaled, precipitated even, the decline of women into their long night of feudal oppression and grotesque persecution.

All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women.

Since women are not inferior, they had to be bombarded with a massive literature of religious, social, biological and, more recently, psychological ideology to explain, insist, that women are secondary to men. And to make women believe that they are inferior what better subject for this literature of religious teaching, cautionary folk tales, jokes and customs, than the female body?

Walking in the garden that had been Eden, Mother Nature met Father God and he doom.

For woman was an intractable animal and she displayed her brute unreason nowhere more clearly than in her refusable to acquiesce in her own subjection.

Within the face, woman concealed one of her most potent and treacherous weapons, her tongue.

Now knowledge became the high road to control, and for women the pen had one major advantage over the sword; it fitted neatly into a female fist of any size, age, creed or country in the word.

While there was work to be done, women did it, and behind the vivid foreground activities of popes and kings, wars and discoveries, tyranny and defeat, working women wove the real fabric of the kind of history that has yet to receive its due.

The rights that women had won through the long century and more of struggle were essentially rights of men. Women had had no option but to batter their way into the age-old fortress of male privilege, and storm the citadel where masculine supremacy still held out.

This pelvic preoccupation with women's rampant innards had more of a comic effect, however. Since women were seen as reproductive beings, any and every disorder they experienced was treated by treatment of the reproductive organs.

As this shows, under the topsy-tervy conditions of revolution, women found themselves once again serving as soldiers in the front line. The last known female regular soldier had been abolished in Ireland in the seventh century A.D., but the tradition, stretching all the way back to the old matriarchies, had never entirely disappeared.

Women have had to learn, often painfully and always with reluctance, that their freedom will not simply come of its own accord.

For women, the life choices (which by in large are made for them by their societies) come down to one of two evils - either the overloaded worker / wife / mother with her double burden, or the underoccupied housewife / drone with her half-life of deprivation and despair.

Women have always fought not just for survival, but for the meaning of the struggle - now, they are organizing, grouping and pushing forward, not merely for new definitions, but for the right to define.

That he loved her was his life's greatest grace—that she loved him was a burden and mystery beyond compare.