8 Quotes by Selma James

Caring for others is accomplished by a dazzling array of skills in an endless variety of circumstances. As well as cooking, shopping, cleaning, laundering, planting, tending, harvesting for others, women comfort and guide, nurse and teach, arrange and advise, discipline and encourage, fight for and pacify. Taxing and exhausting under any circumstances, this service work, this emotional housework, is done both outside and inside the home.

It is not women's fault if we are so tender. It is in the nature of the lives we live. And further, it would be a terrible catastrophe if men had to live men's lives and women's also. Which is precisely what has happened today -- to women.

Having the children you want, not having the children you don't want but in order to do that you have to have the right to abortion and the right to pay equity, those two give you choice. One or the other does not.

Revolutions are notorious for allowing even non-participants -- even women! -- new scope for telling the truth since they are themselves such massive moments of truth, moments of such massive participation.

We have needed to define ourselves by reclaiming the words that define us. They have used language as weapons. When we open ourselves to what they say and how they say it, our narrow prejudices evaporate and we are nourished and armed.

The United States is in many ways the biggest ghetto in the world.

It is not women’s fault if we are so tender. It is in the nature of the lives we live. And further, it would be a terrible catastrophe if men had to live men’s lives and women’s also. Which is precisely what has happened today – to women.

Revolutions are notorious for allowing even non-participants – even women! – new scope for telling the truth since they are themselves such massive moments of truth, moments of such massive participation.