The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lorde

(Which reminds me, I'd love to do a general 'access to power' theme, which would include access to media outlets, education, language use, independent finances, physical strength, etc). Women can see how large their numbers are, and how similar their thinking, for the first time in history. While I agree this is an initial fear of many women, and therefore the idea of women supporting women has some comfort, I believe that the era of social media and access to education on anthropology/sociology ought to provide a more concrete comfort to women/feminists. Looks like you found a source about fighting the patriarchy without using patriarchal constructs -) Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.ĭifference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. The point of Lorde's essay is that feminists must see their differences and internal conflicts as our source of strength and creative energy:Īs women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. But there is bound to be in-fighting within a group that is so huge and diverse. Often I hear people on the political right say that feminism is doomed because there is too much in-fighting.

Until women have the security of knowing that they will be supported by other women (or the courage to take a leap of faith without that security), women will not be able to achieve true equality. In the speech, Lorde seems to be saying that we have to stop thinking about power in patriarchal terms, and start thinking of power in terms of women supporting each other. I think many women have wanted to avoid that stigma because they are afraid that, without the support of patriarchal institutions, they would be powerless. I think part of the reason is that women think they have something to lose if they get stamped with the 'feminist' branding iron - because there are negative associations with that word: difficult, crazy, man-hating, unpleasant. Lately I've been thinking about why feminism has never been fully mainstream, even though women make up more than half the population.

I came across this short speech that Audre Lorde made in 1984, and it seemed relevant to some of the things we've been talking about in this sub:

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lorde