Paula J. Giddings Quotes & Sayings

Wells-Barnett's experience with the ways that lynching victims were criminalized, and her progressive belief in the ability of persons to change for the better, gave her another perspective. — Paula J. Giddings

Sojourner Truth, who squelched the heckler with an oft-quoted speech. In the first place, she said, Jesus came from "God and a woman - man had nothing to do with it."66 Secondly, Truth asserted that women were not inherently weak and helpless. Raising herself to her full height of six feet, flexing a muscled arm, and bellowing with a voice one observer likened to the apocalyptic thunders, Truth informed the audience that she could outwork, outeat, and outlast any man. Then she challenged: "Ain't I a woman?"67 — Paula J. Giddings

Ida was clearly exasperated by the fact that despite the motives that accompanied the lynching statistics published year after year - which Ida included in nearly every article - "law-abiding and fair-minded people should so persistently shut their eyes to the facts." Ida continued, "This record, easily within the reach of every one who wants it," made it "inexcusable" for anyone not to debunk the presumption from the beginning. — Paula J. Giddings

One of the lesser-known contributions of the great Harriet Tubman was the devotion of her life after the war to a similar project. The woman who personally led three hundred slaves to freedom, who was a spy and "general" for the Union, spent her final years trying to establish the John Brown Home for the Aged. When the government refused to give her a full veteran's pension, the former general sold fruit and had a biography published to raise money for the institution. — Paula J. Giddings

In the same year, the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique added fuel to the fire of a growing feminist discontent. The author spoke to middle-class White women, bored in suburbia (an escape hatch from increasingly Black cities) and seeking sanction to work at a "meaningful" job outside the home. Not only were the problems of the White suburban housewife (who may have had Black domestic help) irrelevant to Black women, they were also alien to them. Friedan's observation that "I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children" seemed to come from another planet. — Paula J. Giddings