Janice G. Raymond
Janice G. Raymond was born on January 24, 1943, a citizen of the United States whose working life would take shape within American academic and feminist culture. Her formation unfolded during a period when questions about gender and women's experience were pressing themselves with increasing force onto institutional and intellectual life, and she would come to occupy a position that engaged those questions directly and persistently.
Raymond was educated at Boston College, and from that foundation she built a career that brought together several distinct but related vocations. She worked as a university teacher, a sociologist, a feminist, and an essayist — roles that together gave her practice a particular texture, combining the obligations of the classroom with the analytical demands of sociological work and the more publicly directed form of the essay. Her writing was conducted in English, and her occupational commitments placed her within a tradition of feminist scholarship that took seriously both the academic and the political dimensions of its subject matter.
The facts available do not record a date or place of death, and the biographical record confirms her as a United States citizen whose working identity was shaped by those four interlocking roles: teacher, sociologist, feminist, and essayist. Her education at Boston College marks the institutional beginning of a career that would encompass all of them.
Quotes by Janice G. Raymond
The world is what women make of it. This point is crucial – we must make something of it. This presupposes some kind of location in the ordinary world of human affairs, much of which is male-created. Friendship provides a point of crystallization for living in the ordinary world, not the pretense for exiting from it. Friendship does not automatically convey the means of living in the world or of making women into world-builders, but it does provide a location in that world.
That two women could mean a great deal to each other while they awaited men to lead them to marriage and the real business of life is negligible; that they could believe that the real business of life is in meaning a great deal to each other and that men are only incidental to their lives – is of course frightening.82.
An unmentored daughter is an unnurtured daughter, unnurtured in the strength she needs to Survive as an original woman in this world. Daughters, as compared to sons in a hetero-relational family, are more undernurtured in all ways by mothers and pressured prematurely to become nurturers of others – mostly of men. What also happens in this context, as Denice Yanni has pointed out, is “a silencing of woman’s own needs for nurturing by making her the primary nurturer.
Like “the tyranny of structurelessness,” the tyranny of tolerance has promoted an ethic of value freedom that has been allowed to stand as an unexamined principle among certain groups of women. From an unexamined principle, it is a short distance to an unexamined life.