Mary Excerpts

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- Self-depreciation on an organizational level is evident when women are deeply involved in liberal and even radical causes of all sorts except our own cause, even openly repudiating "independent" women's liberation.

The self-depreciation which inclines women individually and collectively to find every cause more important than our own is deeply connected with the myth of feminine evil. Women have been conditioned to see any act that affirms the worth of the female ego as blameworthy. Female ambition can "pass" only when it is diluted into the vicarious ambition through the male or on behalf of patriarchal values.

The beginning of liberation comes when women refuse to be "good" and/or "healthy" by prevailing standards. To be female is to be deviant by definition in the prevailing culture. To be female and defiant is to be intolerably deviant. This means going beyond the imposed definitions of "bad woman" and "good woman," beyond the categories of prostitute and wife. This is equivalent to assuming the role of witch and madwoman. Though this might be suicidal if attempted in isolation (not less self-destructive, however, than attempting to live within the accepted categories,) when done in sisterhood it amounts to collective repudiation of the scapegoat syndrome. It is then tantamount to a declaration of identity beyond the good and evil of patriarchy's world, and beyond sanity and insanity.

- For women attempting to express new consciousness do live in conflict with the mechanisms of social control, which include ridicule, insults, instant psychoanalyses, expressed in such comments as "penis-eveny," "man hater," or "unfeminine."