Grace Lee Boggs Quotes
I first understood the changes that were necessary in this world, because the waiters in the restaurant, when I cried, used to say, "Leave her on the hillside to die. She's only a girl baby." I think they said it somewhat as a joke, maybe not, but it made me understand that being born female in this world was very different from being born male.
Boggs, Grace Lee. Interview by Bill Moyers. Bill Moyers Journal, PBS, 15 June 2007.
In some cultures of the world women are considered to be under the control of or even the property of men. As such they are allowed to “discipline” the women. However there are a few religious fundamentalists in America who believe that God has ordained the man as head of the household and they oppose prohibiting husbands from “chastising” their wives. In some nations, especially in Islamic cultures, families are allowed to even murder a woman relative if she “brings dishonor upon the family. In many cultures, including some in the US, rape is not seen as a felonious assault, but as a natural thing for males to do.
Grace Lee Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s she and James Boggs, her husband of some forty years, took their own political direction. By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press. She is regarded as a key figure in the Asian American Movement.
