The Black Woman Quotes

“We're so turned around about Western models, we don't even know how to raise the correct questions. But raise them we must if we are to fashion a natural sense of self, if we are to develop harmonious relationships with each other. What are we talking about when we speak of revolution if not a free society made up of whole individuals?”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology

“Classifications and categorizations of groups of people by other groups have always been for the benefit of the group who is doing the classifying and to the detriment of the classified group.”
― Kay Lindsey, The Black Woman: An Anthology

“We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the exploitive and dehumanizing system of racism, from the manipulative control of a corporate society; liberation from the constrictive norms of 'mainstream' culture, from the synthetic myths that encourage us to fashion ourselves rashly from the without (reaction), instead of the within (creation).”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology

“You got to have an eye, ear, and nose for pork if you're going to stay clean”
― Nikki Giovanni, The Black Woman: An Anthology

“So if one take a creative, imaginative, loving, serious attitude toward life everything one does will reflect one attitude hence when one cooks this attitude will be served at the table. and it will be good.”
― Verta Mae Smart-Grosvenor, The Black Woman: An Anthology

“It is a noble thing, the rearing of warriors for the revolution. I can find no fault with the idea. I do, however, find fault with the notion that dumping pills is the way to do it. You don't prepare yourself for the raising of super-people by making yourself vulnerable - chance fertilization, chance support, chance tomorrow - nor by being celibate until you stumble across the right stock to breed with. You prepare yourself by being healthy and confident, by having options that give you confidence, by getting yourself together, by being together enough to attract a together cat whose notions of fatherhood rise above the Disney caliber of man-in-the-world-and-woman-in-the-home, by being committed to the new consciousness, by being intellectually and spiritually and financially self-sufficient to do the thing right. You prepare yourself by being in control of yourself. The pill gives the woman, as well as the man, some control. Simple as that.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology

“Women have become the largest oppressed group in a dominant, aggressive, male capitalistic culture. The next largest oppressed group is the product of their wombs, the children, who are ever pressed into service and labor for the maintenance of a male-dominated class society.”
― Pat Robinson, The Black Woman: An Anthology

“From the pyramids to the cities, we are stuck with these monuments and great surpluses built on man's fearful need to be God.”
― Pat Robinson, The Black Woman: An Anthology

“The female births both male and female. The Adam and Eve myth turns that reality on its head. The female now issues from the male. Hence we know how terrified the male had become of animal reality to establish such a perversion of the truth.”
― Pat Robinson, The Black Woman: An Anthology