Meridel Le Sueur Quotes

I'd always identified myself with the people's struggles. I think I began writing more about it and having an audience for writing it. But we wrote as partisans, we call it. You're on the side and like I was marching. I don't say anything about the troubles of the manufacturers association, or any sympathy for them. I just identified with the strikers.

The great energies, languages and nourishment of women are seized, hidden and violated by indifference and outright conspiracy in order to maintain the silence of women. It is a loss when the voices of women are muffled, lost or deliberately silenced.

For the first time, Meridel says "I am writing what I want to write. I don't know if anyone is going to read it," she adds with the pragmatism of someone whose work was virtually banned for years. "I don't even think about it. I just love it. It's a wonderful gift to have a passion like that."

The independent strong woman was a bad woman, even in the radical press. Irene and I had a vision of the free new woman growing in her own pattern-a new crop, new protein, new communication, new connections, new conceptions-birthing out of terrible hunger and anger.

Some of the best poetry is being written by three American Indian women

It's really hard to describe how you can fill a city with terror. When you look at it chronologically, it's terrifying to see how close you are to fascism.

The whole temper of the world is in a much higher consciousness than I've even seen it-there's a global consciousness. I think we're on the verge of a new humanity if we don't blow it up!

Her advice to the women's movement is to avoid male prototypes: "It has to be a collective vision. The time is over entirely for private vision, or private greed. We're entering a new era of the same fate for all."

Meridel has enjoyed being "rediscovered" by the feminist press, particularly because of her chance to work with women editors. Her male editors typically had "such a superior attitude-even in punctuation." Whereas, she contrasts, "The Feminist Press wouldn't even change a comma without asking." The format of Ripening, with its biography, commentary and scrapbook photos, "would never have been conceived in male printing," she notes. Trashing the women writers has resulted in the neglect of twenty midwest women writers-"some as good as Sandburg or Lewis"-now out of print, Meridel says unhappily. She cites as an example her friend and Wisconsin author Zona Gale, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 ("for a feminist story"), yet is virtually forgotten and unread today. Meridel "repudiates categories of male literature." She politely answered all questions about times and dates, but mildly remarked, "Linear thinking is patriarchal."

Emma Goldman lived at the Anarchist's House too. Describe Emma Goldman? Her interest to Meridel was as "the first sexually 'free' woman" she met. "The women and feminists of that period never dealt with sex. They were Puritans."

The women's movement is great in the Twin Cities, I think.