Shirley Chisholm Quotes

We must reject the thought of Saint Paul who said, “let the woman marry in silence."

The law cannot do it for us. We must do it for ourselves. We must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles, and stereotypes.

Few, if any Americans, are free of the psychological wounds imposed by racism and antifeminism.

for those who thought I was the best candidate but chose to work for someone else because they viewed my campaign as hopeless, they will need to reexamine their thinking for truly, no woman will ever achieve the presidency as long as their potential supporters hold this view.

I did this [ran for president as a Democrat instead of third party] because I feel that the time for tokenism and symbolic gestures is past. Women need to plunge into the world of politics and battle it out toe to toe on the same ground as male counterparts.

The movement has, for the most part, been led by educated white middle-class women. There is nothing unusual about this. Reform as movements are usually led by the better educated and better off. But, if the women's movement is to be successful you must recognize the broad variety of women there are and the depth and range of their interests and concerns. To black and Chicano women, picketing a restricted club or insisting on the title Ms are not burning issues. They are more concerned about bread-and-butter items such as the extension of minimum wage, welfare reform and day care. Further, they are not only women but women of color and thus are subject to additional and sometimes different pressures.

different women view different segments of the women's movement agenda as priority items.

It was an amazing and apparently spontaneous transformation in the attitudes and behavior of youth; the generation of the 1950s had been so famous for its "apathy" that some college newspapers banned the overused word from their editorials. Now it was enlisting en masse in a high-minded and high-spirited campaign to integrate the society by living and fighting together, going to jail together, and sometimes (this must never be forgotten) dying together. But the civil rights movement did not achieve its lofty ideals. Hotels and buses were desegregated, but blacks perceived slowly that they were not much better off than before. What good is it to be allowed to sit in the front of the bus when you haven't got the fare? Inevitably, the movement fell apart along racial lines. The blacks began to see that they were still, subtly, being treated as inferiors by the white students. They were in the same position that Frederick Douglass found himself in a century earlier with the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The well-meaning Garrison was using Douglass as an "exhibition piece," Douglass perceived, and when the great black leader demanded a more important role in the abolition movement, Garrison said he thought that the most black people were able to do at the moment was to serve as exhibits of the fact that they could be taught to read, write and speak about their experiences as slaves. Douglass understood then that he was still in a master-slave relationship with the white man and resolved to break his intellectual chains as well as his physical ones. Young blacks in the 1960s played out the same story. Where they had been integrationist and nonviolent, they became separatist and militant. It was the era of Black Power. Discovering that they were not going to win any important gains by carrying picket signs and coaching people for literacy tests, they declared their independence from white society in every way. In diet, dress, religion, clothing and behavior, they set out to become black, black and beautiful, black and proud. This struck a deep chord in the soul of black Americans, whose great need is to believe in their worth and dignity, their selfhood, after generations of having been beaten, sold, murdered, exploited and demeaned. They have been told in the most direct, brutal ways that they are worthless, and there are deep psychic wounds in the minds of all black Americans. A few hard-won gains in status have not healed them, and healing them is the most important priority for blacks. Independence movements, from community-united black fronts to the Black Panthers and the Republic of New Africa-each has an essential role to play in the cure. Of course, one may criticize some of their tactics. I have, myself; but it should not be missed that the people who hate and fear the militant black movements the most, and who would mobilize all the resources of the law against them, do not come with clean hands; they are people who have profited through the years from black subjugation. Many of them have supported in the past, by inaction or action, a group that was far worse than the most militant black ones, the Ku Klux Klan.

Who knows? It took a little black woman, Harriet Tubman, to lead three hundred of her people out of slavery; it required another little black woman, Rosa Parks, to say she was tired of going to the back of the bus for a seat, and this act of very real courage precipitated the Montgomery bus boycott, which was a turning point in the civil rights struggle. It may take another little black woman to bring us together' in these troubled times of war and worry.

The income for domestics in this country. Domestic workers. Every year we had the increase in income domestic workers never, never fit into the scale of things.

Well, it's being done very subtly in many instances, but our country has definitely moved to the right, there's no question about it, and so you find a kind of what should I say? There's a cutback on the kind of funding that is so necessary to help lower-class and middle class people to at least gain some opportunities. So in some instances it's worse than it used to be.

It's the same old priority that we have today...Housing. Employment. Health. The same priorities follow black people in these United States time after time after time...the same issues. It's strange that they don't change.

My grandmother had a fantastic influence in my life. She would always check homework, and she would, each night she would "Repeat it to me." And if I didn't stand up straight, she said, "Child"-this is the way she'd talk-"Child, you got to stand up straight, let the world see you coming." And I would have to stand up straight...And she would say, "And don't slur your words." She, oh, she was pushy. My grandmother-I would say that my granny had the greatest influence in my life.

Little Shirley grew up with a strong sense of her own destiny. Her early heroes were Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony. Miss Anthony, the homeliest of the suffragettes, was one of the movement's best speakers. In her Brooklyn campaign, Mrs. Chisholm would reel off a long quotation from Miss Anthony ("The hour is come when the women will no longer be the passive recipients...") when she was bothered by male hecklers on street corners. "It always stopped them cold," she reports. (April 1969)

The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.'