Quotes from Dale Spender

This monopoly over language is one of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy, and consequently have ensured the invisibility or 'other' nature of females.

Openly questioning the way the world works and challenging the power of the powerful is not an activity customarily rewarded.

There is a real split today between those who push the button and those who do the dying.

When women are supposed to be quiet, a talkative woman is a woman who talks at all.

Men who teach only men are called scholars. Women who teach only women are called political agitators.

... for centuries there has been a long and honorable tradition of women who have resisted and protested against men and their power.

Paradoxically, the most constructive thing women can do is to write, for in the act of writing we deny our muteness and begin to eliminate some of the difficulties that have been put upon us.

For centuries women have been saying many of the things we are saying today and which we have often thought of as new.

But for women, the conflict between sex role and artistic commitment goes much deeper: The successful woman is-almost by definition-the one who sacrifices her self, her creativity and intellectuality, who puts them into personal (read male) and not professional (read competition) commitments.

The assumption that women's resources are available to men and that women's creativity is but the raw material waiting to be wrought into artistic shape by gifted men is one which is prevalent in literary circles—and one which demands serious and systematic attention.

It is my contention that the population in general and male literary critics in particular entertain a negative image of women and their words, to the extent that it is widely believed that you don't have to read women's writing to know it's no good!

So central, however, is reading to feminist reality that it is not unusual to find women acknowledging that a particular book changed my life; and so central is writing to feminist experience that it is not unusual to find a feminist defined as a woman who writes.

Look what happened to John Stuart Mill when he openly and fully acknowledged the intellectual contribution made by Harriet Taylor to his work! At first he was not taken seriously, but when he continued to insist that Harriet Taylor's intellectual stature was comparable to his own, he was perceived as besotted, as swayed by the wiles of an unscrupulous woman, and his declaration was dismissed.

Women who want to get rid of the belief that women writers are deficient might be better advised to challenge those who are doing the disqualifying, rather than to insist that they are not women, but human.

In a society where men dominate, where women are just another one of all the planet's resources which are available to them, it is predictable that women should be required to hand over their intellectual valuables and that these should go to replenish and enrich the reputations of men. How else could male supremacy be maintained?

Sexual harassment is becoming the modus operandi of the new world (on-line)... It is the means by which some males are conquering and claiming the new territory as their own.

Womens humor is part of the revolution.