Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

People deal with hideous events in different ways, and one way is to forget them.

One wants to believe that poverty can be cured by wealth, cruelty by kindness; but neither is true. The orphan is always an orphan.

Memory became political on the global scale when Holocaust survivors had to remember in order to testify against Nazi war criminals. It had always been political to articulate a crime that had happened to one and name the criminal, but that had been on a small scale

Incest was a privately protected right hidden under the imperial robe of the patriarch.

the political responsibility of feminists to figure out the role of female-to-female betrayal in upholding male supremacy

The media antifeminists are not unlike the woman-using prostitutes and the strung-out mothers - their venom goes in the direction of other women because it is easier than taking on men.

the pornography class, the trafficked-woman class, the woman who is invisible almost because one can see so much of her. Each inch of nakedness is an inch of worthlessness and lack of social protection.

These are miracles, political miracles, and there will be so many more.

Middle-class women rarely understand how complicit they are unless they’ve experienced torture, usually in the home; prostituting women know that every breath is bought by turning oneself inside out so that the blood covers the skin; the skin is ripped; one watches the world like a hunted animal on all fours in the darkest part of every night.

My ideology is simple and left: I believe in redistributing the wealth; everyone should have food and health care, shelter and safety; it’s not right to hurt and deprive people so that they become prostitutes and thieves.