From Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of my Non Existence
“To be a young woman is to face your annihilation in innumerable ways ….” (p4)
“I was often unaware of what and why I was resisting ….” (p4)
Yes. Let’s not understate the value of having words for what we experience. The words ‘sexism’ and ‘misogyny’ didn’t always exist, so it was hard to identify, let alone talk about, what it was …
“The fight wasn’t just to survive bodily … but to survive as a person possessed of rights, including the right to participation and dignity and a voice.” (p4)
“… back when I was trying not to be that despised thing, a girl, and ….” (p6)
“sometimes at the birth and death of a day, the opal sky is no color we have words for, the gold shading into blue without the intervening green that is halfway between those colors, the fiery warm colors that are not apricot or crimson or god, the light morphing second by second so that the sky is more shades of blue than you can count as it fades from where the sun is to the far side where others color are happening.” (p7)
Best description of a sunset (in San Francisco) I’ve ever read!
“What is rape but an insistence that the spatial rights of a man, and by implication men, extend to the interior of a woman’s body …,” (p77-8)
So well-put.
“Most urban women, you know, live as though in a war zone….” (p98)
Yes. I’ve often said living as a woman in our society is like living in an occupied country. And men have no idea. Most men.
“There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence. … Gender violence is made possible by this lack of audibility, credibility, and consequence.” p229, 231
