Quotes from Ruth Barrett

The crimes men commit against women aren't done to women as random individuals; they're done because women belong to a subordinate class and they're done to keep women a subordinate class. The

Female erasure is and has been the essential tool used throughout history to ensure the success and continuation of patriarchal values.

If feminism was reduced to one word, it would be this: No. "No" is a boundary, spoken only by a self who claims one. Objects have neither; subjects begin at "No". Feminists said "No" and we meant it.

If you were born female, you were born on a battlefield. You will be punished for even saying that out loud, but the grim truth is you are going to be punished no matter what for the sin of being female.

The spaces we refer to as public are assumed to be male, and for centuries men have excluded women from the public where all the key decisions relating to power are deliberated and implemented.

Patriarchy has effectively used exclusion as a central tenet of its ideological claims to hegemony in all our societies, where one is looking at notions of identity, of rights and privilege, of access and inclusion into institutions and sites of power.

When women occupy public spaces as persons who understand that for millennia they have been denied their inalienable rights as human beings, they begin to demand the restitution of those rights through the creation of structures within which they situate financial, technical and intellectual resources.

What is "male privilege," and why is it important to name the elephant in the living room? My friend Patricia Monaghan (of blessed memory) describes it this way: "For those who have male privilege, it's like a person wearing strong perfume. Rarely can the wearer smell it, but those around begin to leave the room.

Growing up under patriarchy is a grooming process that leaves girls and women extremely vulnerable to male manipulation.

Patriarchy denies reality, that Woman is primary for she creates man.