Worker Woman Quotes

Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying `Enough'. He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable -- this is Marcos.

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.

You could tell she was a free spirit, a gypsy, just by looking at her. A smile like that doesn't come from a sad soul.

love. she liberated me to life, she continued to do that. and when she was in her final sickness i went out to san francisco and the doctor said she had 3 weeks to live, i asked her "would you come to north carolina?" she said yes. she had emphysema and lung cancer, i brought her to my home. she lived for a year and a half ..and when she was finally in extemis, she was on oxygen and fighting cancer for her life and i remembered her liberating me, and i said i hoped i would be able to liberate her, she deserved that from me. she deserved a great daughter and she got one. so in her last days, i said "i understand some people need permission to go… as i understand it you may have done what god put you here to do. you were a great worker, you must've been a great lover cause a lot of men and if I'm not wrong maybe a couple of woman risked their lives to love you. you were a piss poor mother of small children but a you were great mother of young adults, and if you need permission to go, i liberate you". and i went back to my house, and something said go back- i was in my pajamas, i jumped in my car and ran and the nurse said "she just gone". you see love liberates. it doesn't bind, love says i love you. i love you if you're in china, i love you if you're across town, i love you if you're in harlem, i love you. i would like to be near you, i would like to have your arms around me i would like to have your voice in my ear but thats not possible now, i love you so go. love liberates it doesn't hold. thats ego. love liberates.

When I first started here, there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don’t have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual.

In other words, you play the part of the fictitious creature called ‘an ordinary person’ that everyone has in them. Just like everyone in the convenience store is playing the part of the fictitious creature called ‘a store worker.

The specific character of [women's] oppression cannot be explained away by equating different situations through superficial and childish simplifications[:] It is true that both the woman and the male worker are condemned to silence by their exploitation. But under the current system, the worker's wife is also condemned to silence by her worker-husband. In other words, in addition to the class exploitation common to both of them, women must confront a particular set of relations that exist between them and men, relations of conflict and violence that use physical differences as their pretext.

Some men lash out and leave marks, the black eyes and broken noses that send women to the emergency rooms and from there to the kindly social worker and the battered women’s shelter. But the real devils are the ones who hide the traces, who practice constant psychological abuse until the woman is all but destroyed.

A woman’s strength and character shouldn’t ever be underestimated, although time and time again women are taken for granted. A woman has a choice; just like anyone else on this earth—she doesn’t have to give her all for her family, friends, or co-workers. Women are human, just like everyone else. However, a woman is treated as though she’s not. It is beyond ridiculous that a woman always has to justify her actions in lengthy detail in every situation and the person she encounters.

You said you survived, Anna, but you didn't. You triumphed. Everything about you is a testament to courage and strength." When she stared at him, obviously stunned, he smiled a little. "You didn't get either from a social worker or a counselor. They just helped you figure out how to use it. I figure you got it from your mother. She must have been a hell of a woman." "She was," Anna murmured, near tears again. "So are you.

My soul is old, speak to me in energy. You'll understand me better.

As to whether Marcos is gay: Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal,… a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.

Build your house on granite. By granite I mean your nature that you are torturing to death, the love in your child's body, your wife's dream of love, your own dream of life when you were sixteen. Exchange your illusions for a bit of truth. Throw out your politicians and diplomats! Take your destiny into your own hands and build your life on rock. Forget about your neighbor and look inside yourself! Your neighbor, too, will be grateful. Tell you're fellow workers all over the world that you're no longer willing to work for death but only for life. Instead of flocking to executions and shouting hurrah, hurrah, make a law for the protection of human life and its blessings. Such a law will be part of the granite foundation your house rests on. Protect your small children's love against the assaults of lascivious, frustrated men and women. Stop the mouth of the malignant old maid; expose her publicly or send her to a reform school instead of young people who are longing for love. Don;t try to outdo your exploiter in exploitation if you have a chance to become a boss. Throw away your swallowtails and top hat, and stop applying for a license to embrace your woman. Join forces with your kind in all countries; they are like you, for better or worse. Let your child grow up as nature (or 'God') intended. Don't try to improve on nature. Learn to understand it and protect it. Go to the library instead of the prize fight, go to foreign countries rather than to Coney Island. And first and foremost, think straight, trust the quiet inner voice inside you that tells you what to do. You hold your life in your hands, don't entrust it to anyone else, least of all to your chosen leaders. BE YOURSELF! Any number of great men have told you that.

Virtually all ideologies are implicitly antifeminist in that women are sacrificed to higher goals: the higher goal of reproduction; the higher goal of pleasure; the higher goal of a freedom antipathetic to the freedom of women; the higher goal of better conditions for workers not women; the higher goal of a new order that keeps the sex exploitation of women essentially intact; the higher goal of an old order that considers the sex exploitation of women a sign of social stability (woman’s in her place, all’s right with the world).

Feminists have accepted that choice is possible when it comes to a different, difficult subject: abortion. The feminist position (and I agree with it) is that women own their bodies and therefore each woman has the right to choose to get an abortion if she gets pregnant. This is called being "pro-choice". Feminists should be consistent on the subject of choice. If a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion, she should also have the right to choose to have sex for money. It's her body; it's her right.

I never understood why a woman’s strength, character and hard work are underestimated. A woman has to prove herself to be worthy in just about everything she does. When it comes to her relationships such as friendship, marriage, being a mother, daughter, sister, and a co-worker, someone will find fault in what she does because nothing is ever good enough.

I can’t quite shake this feeling that we live in a world gone wrong, that there are all these feelings you’re not supposed to have because there’s no reason to anymore. But still they’re there, stuck somewhere, a flaw that evolution hasn’t managed to eliminate yet. I want so badly to feel bad about getting pregnant. But I can’t, don’t dare to. Just like I didn’t dare tell Jack that I was falling in love with him, wanting to be a modern woman who’s supposed to be able to handle the casual nature of these kinds of relationships. I’m never supposed to say, to Jack or anyone else, ‘What makes you think I’m so rich that you can steal my heart and it won’t mean a thing?’ Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression, because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was all right for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left. Deceit and treachery in both romantic and political relationships is nothing new, but at one time, it was bad, callous, and cold to hurt somebody. Now it’s just the way things go, part of the growth process. Really nothing is surprising. After a while, meaning and implication detach themselves from everything. If one can be a father and assume no obligations, it follows that one can be a boyfriend and do nothing at all. Pretty soon you can add friend, acquaintance, co-worker, and just about anyone else to the long list of people who seem to be part of your life, though there is no code of conduct that they must adhere to. Pretty soon, it seems unreasonable to be bothered or outraged by much of anything because, well, what did you expect?

When you are a mature woman, the wolf-whistles from construction workers stop, and that's a scary thing.

She had this way of making you see life differently, a little ray of light in an ordinarily dim world.

She was not a woman to be deterred by hatred: not from her workers, not from her rivals, not from the men she bullied, bribed or blackmailed to get her way. It is when they truly hate you, after all, that you know you have won. So she met the seething dislike with effortless superiority, paraded past with her shoulders back and chin high. If she was to be cast as the villain, so be it. They were always the most interesting characters anyway.

Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts​ from the GNP...Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works,' no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be.

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the as**sembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

As a woman I am so curious about prostitutes because of the idea that they know men better than you. Also, it's such a strange way to live. But at the same time there are prostitutes who just want to be prostitutes, and this is this woman, nobody pushed her to do it. She's a prostitute because she wants to be a prostitute. It's her philosophy of life.

Ruby Bates, one of the young white girls, was a remarkable person. She told me she had been driven into prostitution when she was thirteen. She had been working in a textile mill for a pittance. When she asked for a raise, the boss told her to make it up by going with the workers. She told me there was nothing else she could do...Ruby Bates was a remarkable woman. Underneath it all—the poverty, the degradation—she was decent, pure. Here was an illiterate white girl, all of whose training had been clouded by the myths of white supremacy, who, in the struggle for the lives of these nine innocent boys, had come to see the role she was being forced to play. As a murderer. She turned against her oppressors. . .. I shall never forget her.

In one way, at least, our lives really are like movies. The main cast consists of your family and friends. The supporting cast is made up of neighbors, co-workers, teachers, and daily acquaintances. There are also bit players: the supermarket checkout girl with the pretty smile, the friendly bartender at the local watering hole, the guys you work out with at the gym three days a week. And there are thousands of extras --those people who flow through every life like water through a sieve, seen once and never again. The teenager browsing a graphic novel at Barnes & Noble, the one you had to slip past (murmuring "Excuse me") in order to get to the magazines. The woman in the next lane at a stoplight, taking a moment to freshen her lipstick. The mother wiping ice cream off her toddler's face in a roadside restaurant where you stopped for a quick bite. The vendor who sold you a bag of peanuts at a baseball game. But sometimes a person who fits none of these categories comes into your life. This is the joker who pops out of the deck at odd intervals over the years, often during a moment of crisis. In the movies this sort of character is known as the fifth business, or the chase agent. When he turns up in a film, you know he's there because the screenwriter put him there. But who is screenwriting our lives? Fate or coincidence? I want to believe it's the latter. I want that with all my heart and soul.

Oh, Al, shut up! Stop criticizing me! First I'm criticized for being a prude and sounding like a social worker or something, then I'm criticized for looking like a cheap broad. How am I supposed to live? Under the water or something, coming up only to say 'I beg your pardon if I disturb you by coming up for air. I'll do my best to remain submerged.

On payday near the entrances to the mines, lines of maimed and debilitated workers begged for handouts. Pennsylvania

Is Obama Anything but Black? So lots of folk—mostly non-black—say Obama’s not black, he’s biracial, multiracial, black-and-white, anything but just black. Because his mother was white. But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass had white fathers. Imagine them saying they were not black. Imagine Obama, skin the color of a toasted almond, hair kinky, saying to a census worker—I’m kind of white. Sure you are, she’ll say. Many American Blacks have a white person in their ancestry, because white slave owners liked to go a-raping in the slave quarters at night. But if you come out looking dark, that’s it. (So if you are that blond, blue-eyed woman who says “My grandfather was Native American and I get discrimination too” when black folk are talking about shit, please stop it already.) In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you. Barack Obama, looking as he does, would have had to sit in the back of the bus fifty years ago. If a random black guy commits a crime today, Barack Obama could be stopped and questioned for fitting the profile. And what would that profile be? “Black Man.

And so, because business leadership is still so dominated by men, modern workplaces are riddled with these kind of gaps, from doors that are too heavy for the average woman to open with ease, to glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt, to paving that’s exactly the right size to catch your heels. Small, niggling issues that aren’t the end of the world, granted, but that nevertheless irritate. Then there’s the standard office temperature. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man.1 But a recent study found that ‘the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower’ than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets in the New York summer while their male colleagues wander around in summer clothes.

A home where a woman is abused is a small-scale model of much larger oppressive systems that work in remarkably similar ways. Many of the excuses an abusive man uses for verbally tearing his partner to shreds are the same ones that a power-mad boss uses for humiliating his or her employees. The abusive man’s ability to convince himself that his domination of you is for your own good is paralleled by the dictator who says, “People in this country are too primitive for democracy.” The divide-and-conquer strategies used by abusers are reminiscent of a corporate head who tries to break the labor union by giving certain groups of workers favored treatment. The making of an abuser is thus not necessarily restricted to the specific values his society teaches him about men’s relationships with women; without realizing it he may also apply attitudes and tactics from other forms of oppression that he has been exposed to as a boy or as a young adult and that he has learned to justify or even admire.

The word “autistic” is accurate. But so are other words that we no longer use to describe people: spinster (unmarried woman), hobo (migrant worker), cripple (person with a physical handicap), and so on. The fact that a person is unmarried or has sustained a mobility-reducing injury or birth defect certainly figures into their life experiences, but it does not define their character—unless they or we let it.

Brought down by a woman with black hair and dark eyes.  A sexy wit and a sexier body. A bartender, coupon clipper, temp worker. A college drop out turned party girl, with loose morals, and legs that rarely closed.

In other words, you play the part of the fictitious creature called an 'ordinary person' that everyone has in them. Just like everyone in the convenience store is playing the part of a fictitious creature called a 'store worker'.

Clearly, he was a bit shaky on the concept of sociology. “I’m not a social worker,” I said. “You don’t want to help?” said the man with the rubber band. “Why don’t you want to help?” said the woman in lingerie. All three pairs of eyes focused on me.

Jahan took a breath and composed herself. “When I was a little sort of girl and I would see a gentleman or a lady with good, clean clothes I would run and hide my face. But after I graduated from the Korphe School, I felt a big change in my life. I felt I was clear and clean and could go before anybody and discuss anything. And now that I am already in Skardu, I feel that anything is possible. I don’t want to be just a health worker. I want to be such a woman that I can start a hospital and be an executive, and look over all the health problems of all the women in the Braldu. I want to become a very famous woman of this area,” Jahan said, twirling the hem of her maroon silk headscarf around her finger as she peered out the window, past a soccer player sprinting through the drizzle toward a makeshift goal built of stacked stones, searching for the exact word with which to envision her future. “I want to be a… ‘Superlady’” she said, grinning defiantly, daring anyone, any man, to tell her she couldn’t. p. 313

However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinion polling, real work, in the old-fashioned sense of labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job.

The news about Shiraha spread through the store like wildfire. Every time I saw the manager he started pestering me with: “How’s Shiraha? When are you going to bring him out drinking with us?” I’d always had a lot of respect for manager #8. He was a hard worker and I’d thought of him as the perfect colleague, but now I was sick to death of him only ever talking about Shiraha whenever we met. Until now, we’d always had meaningful worker-manager discussions: “It’s been hot lately, so the sales of chocolate desserts are down,” or “There’s a new block of flats down the road, so we’ve been getting more customers in the evening,” or “They’re really pushing the ad campaign for that new product coming out the week after next, so we should do well with it.” Now, however, it felt like he’d downgraded me from store worker to female of the human species.

Women don't always want the right things in a man. And men don't have even an idea of what they want," she said. "Why, one minute their bodies tell them they want a wild woman that makes their blood rush. The next minute their good sense reminds them that they need a hard worker who is sturdy enough to help plow the field and birth the babies. They want a woman who'll mind their word and not be giving no jawing. But they also want a gal they can complain to when they are scared and unsure and who's smart enough to talk clear about the things goin' on." "So the wife has to be all those things?" "No, the wife is none of them," the old woman answered. "The wife is a wife and no further definition is necessary." Granny leaned forward in her chair to look more closely at Meggie. "Roe Farley married you and you were his wife. Nothing further even need to be said." Her face flushing with embarrassment, she glanced away. "But he doesn't... he didn't love me." "And did you think he would?" Momentarily Meggie was taken aback. "Well, yes." "Lord Almighty, child," Granny said. "Love ain't something that heaven hands out like good teeth or keen eyesight. Love is something two people make together." Shaking her head, the old woman leaned back in her chair once more and tapped on her pipe. "Love, oh, my, it starts out simple and scary with all that heavy breathing and in the bed sharing," she said. "You a-trembling when he runs his hands acrost your skin, him screaming out your name when he gets in the short rows. That's the easy part, Meggie. Every day thereafter it gets harder. The more you know him, the more he knows you, the longer you are a part of each other, the stronger the love is and the tougher it is to have it.

Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.“Why, of course!” she laughed.“Then why do you do it?”“It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think, I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was you who actually did it.” “Hmm,” he said. “Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?” “Yes,” he agreed. The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?” He smiled. “I suppose not.” “You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” She looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun.

A shrew, a wife, a whore. Those seemed to be my choices. I ask any man reading this, how could you decide whether to be a villain, a worker, or a plaything? A man would refuse to choose; a man would have that right. But I had only three words to choose from, and which of them was happiness? All I wanted was love. A simple thing, a timeless thing. When men want love they sing for it, or smile for it, or pay for it. And what do women do? They choose. And their lives are struck like bronze medallions. So tell me, gentlemen, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman?

To oppose one class perpetually to another — young against old, manual labor against brain-worker, rich against poor, woman against man — is to split the foundations of the State; and if the cleavage runs too deep, there remains no remedy but force and dictatorship. If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it — not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick and Harry, and the individual Jack and Jill — in fact, upon you and me.

The male glance has often been described. It is commonly said to rest coldly on a woman, measuring, weighing, evaluating, selecting her--in other words, turning her into an object. What is less commonly known is that a woman is not completely defenseless against that glance. If it turns her into an object, then she looks back at the man with the eyes of an object. It is though a hammer had suddenly grown eyes and stare up at the worker pounding a nail with it. When the worker sees the evil eye of the hammer, he loses his self-assurance and slams it on his thumb. The worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

The more ardently I see humanity as a glorious abstract that must conform to my ideal of how the world should be, the harder it is for me to love the person on the other side of the picket line who is holding up progress. I can love the downtrodden in the abstract, but as I shivered under the bridge that night with Jorge, I realized that it's harder to love the illegal immigrant with the bottle-slashed face and the body unwashed for weeks, the workers gathering to eat day-old bread and chicken and rice out of foam containers, the crowd of thousands clamoring for bread and fish and healing, the unclean woman hoping to touch the hem of the Savior's robe.

The black mother perceives destruction at every door, ruination at each window, and even she herself is not beyond her own suspicion. She questions whether she loves her children enough- or more terribly, does she love them too much? Do her looks cause embarrassment- or even terrifying, is she so attractive her sons begin to desire her and her daughters begin to hate her. If she is unmarried, the challenges are increased. Her singleness indicates she has rejected or has been rejected by her mate. Yet she is raising children who will become mates. Beyond her door, all authority is in the hands of people who do not look or think or act like her children. Teachers, doctors, sales, clerks, policemen, welfare workers who are white and exert control over her family’s moods, conditions and personality, yet within the home, she must display a right to rule which at any moment, by a knock at the door, or a ring in the telephone, can be exposed as false. In the face of this contradictions she must provide a blanket of stability, which warms but does not suffocate, and she must tell her children the truth about the power of white power without suggesting that it cannot be challenged.

Lizzie and I arrived in the polluted heat of a London summer. We stood frozen at street corners as a blur of pedestrians burst out of the subways and spilled like ants down the pavements. The crowed bars, the expensive shops, the fashionable clothes - to me it all seemed a population rushing about to no avail...I stared at a huge poster of a woman in her underwear staring down at her own breasts. HELLO BOYS, she said. At the movies we witnessed sickening violence, except that this time we held tubs of popcorn between our legs and the gunfire and screams were broadcast in digital Dolby. We had escaped a skull on a battlefield, only to arrive in London, where office workers led lines of such tedium and plenty that they had to entertain themselves with all the f****** and killing on the big screen. So here then was the prosperous, democratic and civilized Western world. A place of washing machines, reality TV, Armani, frequent-flier miles, mortgages. And this is what the Africans are supposed to hope for, if they're lucky.

Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality—all simply store workers.

Organizing among agency workers is structurally impossible, and the enforced atomization of the agency worker is rephrased as ‘individual choice’, ‘your freedom’.

you see, my whole life is tied up to unhappiness it's father cooking breakfast and me getting fat as a hog or having no food at all and father proving his incompetence again i wish i knew how it would feel to be free it's having a job they won't let you work or no work at all castrating me (yes it happens to women too) it's a sex object if you're pretty and no love or love and no sex if you're fat get back fat black woman be a mother grandmother strong thing but not woman gameswoman romantic woman love needer man seeker dick eater sweat getter fuck needing love seeking woman it's a hole in your shoe and buying lil sis a dress and her saying you shouldn't when you know all too well that you shouldn't but smiles are only something we give to properly dressed social workers not each other only smiles of i know your game sister which isn't really a smile joy is finding a pregnant roach and squashing it not finding someone to hold let go get off get back don't turn me on you black dog how dare you care about me you ain't go no good sense cause i ain't shit you must be lower than that to care it's a filthy house with yesterday's watermelon and monday's tears cause true ladies don't know how to clean it's intellectual devastation of everybody to avoid emotional commitment "yeah honey i would've married him but he didn't have no degree" it's knock-kneed mini skirted wig wearing died blond mamma's scar born dead my scorn your whore rough heeeled broken nailed powdered face me whose whole life is tied up to unhappiness cause it's the only for real thing i know

Want to guess what comes up when I Google “Woman discovers”? It’s not “new galaxy.” It’s “a body in her trunk” or "the unthinkable in her attic.” According to my computer search, other big discoveries by women include “her co-worker is her birth mom,” “a Renaissance painting in her kitchen,” and “her new home was once a meth lab.” Hey, at least that one contains the word “lab.

… a woman that has a career is looked at as self-sufficient and her own man; she may not need one in her life. She is seen as lacking femininity, household un-savvy, and not a wife material.

For you being human means being human and being a woman and being a worker and being everything, everything. Asking a lot? Each of us is asked only for what he can give. Woe betide us, if he doesn't give it all.

George moved from one group of people he didn’t know to another, trying to get out of the draught. The girls didn’t seem to notice it. They were Sydney girls, with short skirts and long, bare arms. Recently, George had gone to an opening at a gallery in the company of a visiting lecturer from Berlin. The artist was fashionable, and the gallery’s three rooms were packed. Over dinner, the German woman expressed mild astonishment at the number of sex workers who had attended the opening. ‘Is this typical in Australia?’ she asked. George had to explain that she had misunderstood the significance of shouty make-up, tiny, shiny dresses and jewels so large they looked fake.

The only one of the early investigators who carried the exploration of hysteria to its logical conclusion was Breuer's patient Anna O. After Breuer abandoned her, she apparently remained ill for several years. And then she recovered. The mute hysteric who had invented the "talking cure" found her voice and her sanity, in the women's liberation movement. Under a pseudonym, Paul Berthold, she translated into German the classic treatise by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and authored a play, Women's Rights. Under her own name, Bertha Papenheim became a prominent feminist social worker, intellectual, and organizer. In the course of a long and fruitful career she directed an orphanage for girls, founded a feminist organization for Jewish women and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East to campaign against the sexual exploitation of women and children. Her dedication, energy and commitment were legendary. In the words of a colleague, 'A volcano lived in this woman... Her fight against the abuse of women and children was almost a physically felt pain for her.' At her death, the philosopher Martin Buber commemorated her: 'I not only admired her but loved her, and will love her until the day I die. There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionate spirit. Bertha Pappenheim was a woman with just such a spirit.

Women are taught to sacrifice, to play nice, to live an altruistic life because a good girl is always rewarded in the end. This is not a virtue; it is propaganda. Submission gets you a ticket to future prosperity that will never manifest. By the time you realize the ticket to success and happiness you have been sold isn’t worth the paper it was printed on, it will be too late. Go on, spend a quarter of your life, even half of your life, in the service of others and you will realize you were hustled. You do not manifest your destiny by placing others first! A kingdom built on your back doesn’t become your kingdom, it becomes your folly. History does not remember the slaves of Egypt that built the pyramids, they remember the Pharaohs that wielded the power over those laborers. Yet here you are, content with being a worker bee, motivated by some sales pitch that inspires you to work harder for some master than you work for yourself, with this loose promise that one day you will share in his wealth. Altruism is your sin. Selfishness is your savior. Ruthless aggression and self-preservation are not evil. Why aren’t females taught these things? Instead of putting themselves first, women are told to be considerate and selfless. From birth, they have been beaten in the head with this notion of “Don’t be selfish!” Fuck that. Your mother may have told you to wait your turn like a good girl, but I’m saying cut in front of that other bitch. Club Success is about to hit capacity, and you don’t want to be the odd woman out. Where are the powerful women? Those who refuse to play by those rules and want more out of life than what a man allows her to have? I created a category for such women and labeled them Spartans. Much like the Greek warriors who fought against all odds, these women refuse to surrender and curtsy before the status quo. Being

The bourgeois woman clings to the chains because she clings to her class privileges. It is drilled into her and she believes that women’s liberation would weaken bourgeois society; liberated from the male, she would be condemned to work; while she might regret having her rights to private property subordinated to her husband’s, she would deplore even more having this property abolished; she feels no solidarity with working-class women: she feels closer to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She makes his interests her own.

You. Man at the machine and man in the workshop. If tomorrow they tell you you are to make no more water-pipes and saucepans but are to make steel helmets and machine-guns, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Woman at the counter and woman in the office. If tomorrow they tell you you are to fill shells and assemble telescopic sights for snipers' rifles, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Research worker in the laboratory. If tomorrow they tell you you are to invent a new death for the old life, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Priest in the pulpit. If tomorrow they tell you you are to bless murder and declare war holy, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Pilot in your aeroplane. If tomorrow they tell you you are to carry bombs over the cities, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Man of the village and man of the town. If tomorrow they come and give you your call-up papers, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Mother in Normandy and mother in the Ukraine, mother in Vancouver and in London, you on the Hwangho and on the Mississippi, you in Naples and Hamburg and Cairo and Oslo - mothers in all parts of the earth, mothers of the world, if tomorrow they tell you you are to bear new soldiers for new battles, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! For if you do not say NO - if YOU do not say no - mothers, then: then! In the bustling hazy harbour towns the big ships will fall silent as corpses against the dead deserted quay walls, their once shimmering bodies overgrown with seaweed and barnacles, smelling of graveyards and rotten fish. The trams will lie like senseless glass-eyed cages beside the twisted steel skeleton of wires and track. The sunny juicy vine will rot on decaying hillsides, rice will dry in the withered earth, potatoes will freeze in the unploughed land and cows will stick their death-still legs into the air like overturned chairs. In the fields beside rusted ploughs the corn will be flattened like a beaten army. Then the last human creature, with mangled entrails and infected lungs, will wander around, unanswered and lonely, under the poisonous glowing sun, among the immense mass graves and devastated cities. The last human creature, withered, mad, cursing, accusing - and the terrible accusation: WHY? will die unheard on the plains, drift through the ruins, seep into the rubble of churches, fall into pools of blood, unheard, unanswered, the last animal scream of the last human animal - All this will happen tomorrow, tomorrow, perhaps, perhaps even tonight, perhaps tonight, if - if - You do not say NO.

How do you know which one's the queen?' 'She's bigger than the others,' said Mel. 'That doesn't always help,' Petey said, 'I can't always find her.' 'Because she's not that much bigger," said Mel. 'You don't rely on her size as much as you try to use the way she moves. It's hard to describe. It's as if she walks in a more determined way' She pulled off her hat and smoothed her long, straight hair. 'She's got a big job. Babies to bear. Workers to inspire. A colony to manage. She moves like that. Like she's a woman with a plan. The best way to see her is to let your eyes lose their focus, let things get a bit fuzzy on you. See the bees as a whole rather than individuals. When you do that, you understand the entire pattern. The queen's movements will stick out because they're so different from everyone else's.

At the first ever Girl Scout training event Hesselbein attended, she heard another new troop leader complain that she was getting nothing from the session. Hesselbein mentioned it to a dress-factory worker who was also volunteering, and the woman told her, “You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” She repeats that phrase today, to mean that a mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience. It is a natural philosophy for someone who was sixty when she attempted to turn down an interview for the job that became her calling. She had no long-term plan, only a plan to do what was interesting or needed at the moment. “I never envisioned” is her most popular preamble. Hesselbein’s professional career, which started in her midfifties, was extraordinary. The meandering path, however, was not.

raw.  She stepped forward carefully, her eyes gentling as she tried to reach her brother.  “Royston, it isn’t a game.  It’s me.  Wyndi.” He glared down at the tiny woman who looked startlingly, hauntingly similar to the little sister he’d tried to protect so many years ago.  But it was impossible.  “My sister died of pneumonia,” he growled, furious that anyone would try such a horrible trick.  “The case worker told me my sister died.  You’re going to have to leave.  Now!” he almost shouted.  Wyndi shook her head.  “They lied, Royston.  I didn’t die.”  She hesitated

One night, we workers formed a circle around the tallow candle as it burned, allowing each other to bond by holding hands. It felt strange to connect with fellow people from Mira again. We have all become estranged from each other as we slave away for the woman leader. In our circle, we closed our eyes and prayed. I pictured the streets of Mira, adorned with the rugged rawness of our original footprints. We once stepped together or passed each other by, busy but comfortable with our work in various trades. Now we are anonymous, our identities stripped away from us.

In consequence, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba proclaims before America: the right of peasants to land; the right of the worker to the fruit of his labor; the right of children to receive education; the right of the sick to receive medical and hospital care; the right of the young to work; the right of students to receive free instruction, practical and scientific; the right of Negroes and Indians to 'a full measure of human dignity'; the right of woman to civil, social and political equality; the right of the aged to secure old age; the right of intellectuals, artists and scientists to fight through their work for a better world; the right of States to nationalize imperialist monopolies as a means of recovering national wealth and resources; the right of countries to engage freely in trade with all other countries of the world; the right of nations to full sovereignty; the right of people to convert their fortresses into schools and to arm their workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, Negroes, Indians, women, the young, the old, all the oppressed and exploited; that they may better defend, with their own hands, their rights and their future.

That there is a silent genocide of women and girls in the homes, communities and just everywhere is not a new story. That my great grandmother, grandmother, mother, mother-in-law, aunt, sister, cousin, niece, housemaid, co-worker, friend, neighbor and just about every female shares the same pain is not a new story. What is new in this story is how I stood up to say, “Never again.” Never again will a girl or woman get raped, killed, drop out of school, be harmed by our culture or be sexually enslaved. That is as long as I know about it. Never Again--not to any woman or girl again is the new story.

And there was something more, something highly unusual. Strike had never once made her feel physically uncomfortable. Two of them in the office, for a long time the only workers at the agency, and while Robin was a tall woman, he was far bigger, and he'd never made her feel it, as so many men did . . .

There will always be children and there will always be old people. We spend most of our lives somewhere in between. When we produce the children, we get to be royalty for a short while--the world pulls out its chair for the pregnant woman--but soon we are once again worker bees, tending the little ones.

In 1959 Corrie was part of a group that visited Ravensbruck, which was then in East Germany, to honor Betsie and the 96,000 other women who died there. There Corrie learned that her own release had been part of a clerical error; one week later all women her age were taken to the gas chamber. When I heard Corrie speak in Darmstadt in 1968, she was 76, still traveling ceaselessly in obedience to Betsie’s certainty that they must “tell people.” Her work took her to 61 countries, including many “unreachable” ones on the other side of the Iron Curtain. To whomever she spoke—African students on the shores of Lake Victoria, farmers in a Cuban sugar field, prisoners in an English penitentiary, factory workers in Uzbekistan—she brought the truth the sisters learned in Ravensbruck: Jesus can turn loss into glory. John and I made some of those trips with her, the only way to catch this indefatigable woman long enough to

In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, came the first known strike of women factory workers; 202 women joined men in protesting a wage cut and longer hours, but they met separately. Four years later, women in Dover, New Hampshire, struck alone. And in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, when a young woman was fired from her job, other girls left their looms, one of them then climbing the town pump and making, according to a newspaper report, “a flaming Mary Wollstonecraft speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the ‘moneyed aristocracy’ which produced a powerful effect on her auditors and they determined to have their own way, if they died for it.

(Bernie) Sanders came to think all (Hilary) Clinton said was ‘vote for me I’m a woman’. The data shows that she certainly didn’t. A word frequency analysis of her speeches by Vox revealed that Clinton mostly talked about workers jobs, education, and the economy... She mentioned jobs almost 600 times... and women’s right a few dozen times.

But it’s not unprocessed grain and grape that we find on the Communion table, it’s bread and wine. Grain and grape come from God’s good earth, but bread and wine are the result of human industry. Bread and wine come about through a cooperation of the human and the divine. And herein lies a beautiful mystery. If grain and grape made bread and wine can communicate the body and blood of Christ, this has enormous implications for all legitimate human labor and industry. The mystery of the Eucharist does nothing less than make all human labor sacred. For there to be the holy sacrament of Communion there must be grain and grape, wheat fields and vineyards, bakers and winemakers. Human labor becomes a sacrament, a farmer planting wheat, a vintner tending vines, a miller grinding wheat, a winemaker crushing grapes, a woman baking bread, a man making wine, a trucker hauling bread, a grocer selling wine. Who knows what bread or what wine might end up on the Communion table as the body and blood of Christ. This is where we discover the holy mystery that all labor necessary for human flourishing is sacred. A farmer plowing his field, a worker in a bakery, a trucker hauling goods, a grocer selling wares—all are engaged in work that is just as sacred as the priest or pastor serving Communion on Sunday. The Eucharist pulls back the curtain to reveal a sacramental world.

I could hear the *click clack* of my heels on the brick walkway. *click* A boy starts a ballet class and doesn’t worry about what his friends will say. *clack* A college student reads Judith Butler. *click* A transgender person understands that, while they have a difficult life to face, they will not be alone. *clack* A sex worker reclaims her dignity and autonomy from a world that says she’s worthless. *click* A woman finds freedom from her abusive husband. *clack* A friend, struggling with bulimia, realizes that she is beautiful. *click* All people, man and woman, realize that in some small way, they have not been true to themselves, and the bonds of gender stereotypes and heterosexism dissolve into truth.

Time was minutely calculated everywhere in the vast plant so that top managers knew precisely what everyone was supposed to be doing at a given moment. Bell was struck, for instance, by how General Motors “divides the hour into ten six-minute periods…the worker is paid by the numbers of tenths of an hour he works.”27 This minute engineering of work time was connected to very long measures of time in the corporation as well. Seniority pay was finely tuned to the total number of hours a man or woman had worked for General Motors; a laborer could minutely calculate benefits of vacation time and sick leave. The micrometrics of time governed the lower echelons of white-collar offices as well as manual labor on the assembly line, in terms of promotion and benefits.

I say this simply as a woman rattling the cage to be free. And what do I mean by free? Just to walk down the street. Just to buy a newspaper without a single eye deciding my place. A shrew, a wife, or a whore. Those seemed to be my choices. I ask any man reading this, how could you decide whether to be a villain, a worker, or a plaything? A man would refuse to choose; a man would have that right. But I had only three worlds to choose from, and which of them was happiness? All I wanted was love. A simple thing, a timeless thing. When men want love they sing for it, or smile for it, or pay for it. And what do women do? They choose. And their lives are struck like bronze medallions. So tell me, gentlemen, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman?

Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.

In a short-staffed convenience store, a store worker can sometimes be highly appreciated just by existing, by virtue of not rocking the boat. I’m not particularly brilliant compared to Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara, but I’m second to none in terms of never being late or taking days off. I just come in every day without fail, and because of that I’m accepted as a well-functioning part of the store.

Though Black women enjoyed few of the dubious benefits of the ideology of womanhood, it is sometimes assumed that the typical female slave was a houseservant—either a cook, maid, or mammy for the children in the “big house.” Uncle Tom and Sambo have always found faithful companions in Aunt Jemima and the Black Mammy—stereotypes which presume to capture the essence of the Black woman’s role during slavery. As is so often the case, the reality is actually the diametrical opposite of the myth. Like the majority of slave men, slave women, for the most part, were field workers. While a significant proportion of border-state slaves may have been houseservants, slaves in the Deep South—the real home of the slaveocracy—were predominantly agricultural workers. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, seven out of eight slaves, men and women alike, were field workers.

Any general social responsibility for motherhood, or move towards the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities is immediately blocked off – this individual woman has betrayed the economy! All the while, women working full time receive 17% less than male counterparts while part-timers are paid on average 37% less.21 The model female worker, so long as she doesn’t get pregnant or make undue demands, is both desirable and cheap. When

The message: I am a Black woman, so I must be poor and in need of help. ... The message: I am different, exotic. Anyone should have the right to my body in exchange for a compliment. ... The message: I am responsible for the feelings of white people, and my boss will not defend me from these accusations. ... The message: My tone will be interpreted as angry, even if I'm just feeling hurt or misunderstood. My actual feelings are irrelevant and could be used as reason to fire me. ... The message: My body is being scrutinized in ways that others are not subjected to, and the worst is being assumed of me. ... The message: I am here to educate my white co-workers when they are confused about a racial issue in their lives. ... The message: My body, my person is not distinct; I am interchangeable with all other Black women. ... The message: I need white approval and interpretation before my idea will be considered good.

One of the things you can do as a confident woman is apply the blood of Jesus Christ by faith to your household. I do this regularly. I apply it to my own life, my mind, emotions, will, body, conscience, spirit, finances, relationships, my walk with God, my husband, children and their families, co-workers and all the partners of Joyce Meyer Ministries. I do this by praying and releasing my faith that there is indeed power in the blood of Jesus to cleanse and protect.

Two hundred years ago, the mothers of the books we take for granted were lumped together in the same lowly category as factory workers, governesses, and prostitutes. A respectable woman didn't write, she took care of her household: if she were rich, she oversaw a staff of servants and entertained for a living; if she were poor, she carried out endless labors punctuated by births and deaths. Jane Austen had to publish her books anonymously at a time when women were lucky to be taught to read.

Only the working class is capable of maintaining morale in the modern world with its distorted social relations. With firm and measured step it advances steadily towards its aim. It draws the working women to its ranks. The proletarian woman bravely starts out on the thorny path of labour. Her legs sag; her body is torn. There are dangerous precipices along the way, and cruel beasts of prey are close at hand. But only by taking this path is the woman able to achieve that distant but alluring aim – her true liberation in a new world of labour. During this difficult march to the bright future the proletarian woman, until recently a humiliated, downtrodden slave with no rights, learns to discard the slave mentality that has clung to her, step by step she transforms herself into an independent worker, an independent personality, free in love. It is she, fighting in the ranks of the proletariat, who wins for women the right to work; it is she, the “younger sister”, who prepares the ground for the “free” and “equal” woman of the future.

In a town in Liberia, a young woman named Fatu Kekula, who was a nursing student, ended up caring for four of her family members at home when there was no room for them in a hospital—her parents, her sister, and a cousin. She didn’t have any protective gear, so she created a bio-hazmat suit out of plastic garbage bags. She tied garbage bags over her feet and legs, put on rubber boots over the bags, and then put more bags over her boots. She put on a raincoat, a surgical mask, and multiple rubber gloves, and she covered her head with pantyhose and a garbage bag. Dressed this way, Fatu Kekula set up IV lines for her family members, giving them saline solution to keep them from becoming dehydrated. Her parents and sister survived; her cousin died. And she herself remained uninfected. Local medical workers called Fatu Kekula’s measures the Trash Bag Method. All you needed were garbage bags, a raincoat, and no small amount of love and courage. Medical workers taught the Trash Bag Method, or variants of it, to people who couldn’t get to hospitals

Language as communication has three aspects or elements. There first what Karl Marx once called the language of real life, the element basic to the whole notion of language, its origins and development: that is, the relations people enter into with one another in the labour process, the links they necessarily establish among themselves in the act of a people, a community of human beings, producing wealth or means of life like food, clothing, houses. A human community really starts its historical being as a community of co-operation in production through the division of labour; the simplest is between man, woman and child within a household; the more complex divisions are between branches of production such as those who are sole hunters, sole gatherers of fruits or sole workers in metal. Then there are the most complex divisions such as those in modern factories where a single product, say a shirt or a shoe, is the result of many hands and minds. Production is co-operation, is communication, is language, is expression of a relation between human beings and it is specifically human.

Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for living? You kind grin and look down your nose at him. You think he’s nuts, know what I mean, or he doesn’t have any ambition. And then you take a good look at yourself, and you stop wondering about the other guy… You’ve got all your hands and feet. Your health is okay, and you make a nice appearance, and ambition-man! You’ve got it. You’re young, I guess: you’d call thirty young, and you’re strong. You don’t have much education, but you’ve got more than plenty of other people who go to the top. And yet with all that, with all you’ve had to do with this is as far you’ve got And something tellys you, you’re not going much farther if any. And there is nothing to be done about it now, of course, but you can’t stop hoping. You can’t stop wondering… …Maybe you had too much ambition. Maybe that was the trouble. You couldn’t see yourself spending forty years moving from office boy to president. So you signed on with a circulation crew; you worked the magazines from one coast to another. And then you ran across a little brush deal-it sounded nice, anyway. And you worked that until you found something better, something that looked better. And you moved from that something to another something. Coffee-and-tea premiums, dinnerware, penny-a-day insurance, photo coupons, cemetery lots, hosiery, extract, and God knows what all. You begged for the charities, You bought the old gold. You went back to the magazines and the brushes and the coffee and tea. You made good money, a couple of hundred a week sometimes. But when you averaged it up, the good weeks with the bad, it wasn’t so good. Fifty or sixty a week, maybe seventy. More than you could make, probably, behind agas pump or a soda fountain. But you had to knock yourself out to do it, and you were standing stil. You were still there at the starting place. And you weren’t a kid any more. So you come to this town, and you see this ad. Man for outside sales and collections. Good deal for hard worker. And you think maybe this is it. This sounds like a right town. So you take the job, and you settle down in the town. And, of course, neither one of ‘em is right, they’re just like all the others. The job stinks. The town stinks. You stink. And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it. All you can do is go on like this other guys go on. The guy giving haircuts to dogs, and the guy sweeping up horse manute Hating it. Hating yourself. And hoping.

February 4 The Overmastering Majesty of Personal Power For the love of Christ constraineth us. 2 Corinthians 5:14 Paul says he is overruled, overmastered, held as in a vice, by the love of Christ. Very few of us know what it means to be held in a grip by the love of God; we are held by the constraint of our experience only. The one thing that held Paul, until there was nothing else on his horizon, was the love of God. “The love of Christ constraineth us”—when you hear that note in a man or woman, you can never mistake it. You know that the Spirit of God is getting unhindered way in that life. When we are born again of the Spirit of God, the note of testimony is on what God has done for us, and rightly so. But the baptism of the Holy Ghost obliterates that for ever, and we begin to realise what Jesus meant when He said—“Ye shall be witnesses unto Me.” Not witnesses to what Jesus can do—that is an elementary witness—but “witnesses unto Me.” We will take everything that happens as happening to Him, whether it be praise or blame, persecution or commendation. No one can stand like that for Jesus Christ who is not constrained by the majesty of His personal power. It is the only thing that matters, and the strange thing is that it is the last thing realised by the Christian worker. Paul says he is gripped by the love of Christ; that is why he acts as he does. Men may call him mad or sober, but he does not care; there is only one thing he is living for, and that is to persuade men of the judgement seat of God, and of the love of Christ. This abandon to the love of Christ is the one thing that bears fruit in the life, and it will always leave the impression of the holiness and of the power of God, never of our personal holiness.

A modern woman sees a piece of linen, but the mediaeval woman saw through it to the flax fields, she smelt the reek of the retting ponds, she felt the hard rasp of the hackling, and she saw the soft sheen of the glossy flax. Man did not see 'just leather', he saw the beast - perhaps one of his own - and knew the effort of slaughtering, liming and curing. Communities were smaller and whether our man lived on the outskirts of some feudal system, had escaped from it, or was entirely isolated, he would work alone, or daily with the same fellow-workers - conversation would soon languish. But THINK he must.

I discovered that I wasn’t good looking when I went out into the world to look for a job. No, don’t mistake me. I was never delusional. I knew I was no Helen of Troy[32]. But whenever I looked in the mirror, I liked what I saw. I liked my face. Plus I had a great figure. Anyway, turns out that when you are a woman looking for a job in a glamourous industry, you need to be fair and lovely. See, that’s successful branding for you – when you so unconsciously use the phrase ‘fair and lovely.’ Of course, back then in the early 1980s, the skin whitening cream, Fair & Lovely, was not marketed as the route to bagging the job of your dreams. That

stay in a convenience store, you have to become a store worker. That’s simple enough, you just wear a uniform and do as the manual says. And before you say anything, it was the same in Stone Age society, too. As long as you wear the skin of what’s considered an ordinary person and follow the manual, you won’t be driven out of the village or treated as a burden.” “I haven’t a clue what you’re blathering on about.” “In other words, you play the part of the fictitious creature called ‘an ordinary person’ that everyone has in them. Just like everyone in the convenience store is playing the part of the fictitious creature called ‘a store worker.’” “But that’s painful. That’s why I’m so bothered by it.

Doubtless there are people who continue to consider love above dollars and cents. Particularly is this true or that class whom economic necessity has forced to become self-supporting. The tremendous change in woman's position, wrought by that might factor, is indeed phenomenal when we reflect that it is but a short time since she has entered the industrial arena. Six million women wage workers; six million women, who have equal rights with men to be exploited, to be robbed, to go on strike; aye, to starve even. Anything more, my lord? Yes, six million wage workers in every walk of life, from the highest brain work to the mines and railroad tracks; yes, even detectives and policemen. Surely the emancipation is complete.

A free Republic! How a myth will maintain itself, how it will continue to deceive, to dupe, and blind even the comparatively intelligent to its monstrous absurdities. A free Republic! And yet within a little over thirty years a small band of parasites have successfully robbed the American people, and trampled upon the fundamental principles, laid down by the fathers of this country, guaranteeing to every man, woman, and child “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For thirty years they have been increasing their wealth and power at the expense of the vast mass of workers, thereby enlarging the army of the unemployed, the hungry, homeless, and friendless portion of humanity, who are tramping the country from east to west, from north to south, in a vain search for work. For many years the home has been left to the care of the little ones, while the parents are exhausting their life and strength for a mere pittance. For thirty years the sturdy sons of America have been sacrificed on the battlefield of industrial war, and the daughters outraged in corrupt factory surroundings. For long and weary years this process of undermining the nation’s health, vigor, and pride, without much protest from the disinherited and oppressed, has been going on. Maddened by success and victory, the money powers of this “free land of ours” became more and more audacious in their heartless, cruel efforts to compete with the rotten and decayed European tyrannies for supremacy of power.

When police arrested a New York bus driver for running down a schoolgirl in a crosswalk… the New York Daily News decried what it saw as mistreatment of one of the city’s bus drivers. The head of the transit union protested this enforcement of the city’s new Right of Way Law as “outrageous, illogical and anti-worker” while branding the head of a city street safety advocacy group “a progressive intellectual jackass.” The same union previously launched a work slowdown when another bus driver faced sanctions for killing a seventy-eight-year-old woman in a crosswalk in December 2014. All this occurred because police sought to enforce _misdemeanor_ charges in cases of pedestrians who were run over in crosswalks where they had the clear right of way.

Many of the white women at Mills who called themselves feminists didn't understand my experiences as a black woman. In women's studies classes, for example, the individual histories and struggles of black women were often ignored...I declared myself a womanist when I realized that white women's feminism really didn't speak to my needs as the daughter of a black, single, domestic worker. I felt that, historically, white women were working hard to liberate themselves from housework and childcare, while women of color got stuck cleaning their kitchens and raising their babies. When I realized that feminism largely liberated white women at the economic and social expense of women of color, I knew I was fundamentally unable to call myself a feminist.

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

Prostitution is heavy with meaning and brings up deeply felt emotions. This is especially the case for people who have not sold sex, and who think of it in symbolic tenns. The idea of prostitution serves as a lightning rod for questions about work, masculinity, class, bodies; about archetypal villainy and punishment; about who 'deserves' what; about what it means to live in a community; and about what it means to push some people outside that community's boundaries. Attitudes towards prostitution have always been strongly tied to questions of race, borders, migration, and national identity in ways which are sometimes overt but often hidden. Sex work is the vault in which society stores some of its keenest fears and anxieties. Perhaps the most difficult questions raised by prostitution involve what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society.

For the next two years, Gary assisted unions in getting some justice for the worker from the business owner. Gary would also help educate voters, who didn’t have too much in the way of an education, to vote how Gary, and the other community organizers, wanted. They told those voters that the Republicans and conservatives wanted to enslave them, that they, the Republicans, were against the working man and woman, and the Republicans only cared about rich, white, old men, who were making millions of dollars off of the poor peoples’ backs. Gary helped hold protests all over the state for these poorer people, with other communist and socialist organizers. Any time a politician had to hold a town hall meeting, or a city council meeting, when the subject was jobs and housing, they were there. Gary knew this was all smoke and mirrors, because nothing would ever actually change, it was all to keep the supposedly downtrodden on the same side as Gary and the others.

Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your co-workers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is in fact far more conservative than sticking with the status quo. Richard Branson doesn’t work more hours than you do. Neither does Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina. Robyn Waters, the woman who revolutionized what Target sells—and helped the company trounce Kmart—probably worked fewer hours than you do in an average week. None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work. As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We’re going to work for the Man, letting him do all the hard work while we put in the long hours. We’re going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone. Some people (a precious few, so far) are

But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures. He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's. He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He wants to live like these people. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He has to. He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what?

There appeared among our letters in 1988 a remarkably vivid account from a woman in Australia, who had been doing housework in the middle of the day when some very strange creatures had abruptly appeared in her sitting room. She observed a willowy being with dark, slanted eyes and a group of short, stocky ones in “brown shrouds,” who seemed to her to be workers, while the tall one was more of a supervisor. It proceeded to overpower her with its mind while the workers moved about in the background, doing what she could not imagine. After a ferocious mental struggle, during which she literally tried to crawl out of the house as she could no longer walk, all went dark. When she woke up, it was hours later. She never found out what had happened to her during that missing time. Presumably, though, the creatures who put her through this ordeal know—and perhaps, also, that is something close to the secret of the ages. In any case, one wonders, looking at Lorie Barnes’s story and the story of the Australian woman, if we are not seeing the outline of a very remarkable and unsuspected structure: we are the kobolds. They are us working, somehow, in the fields of the soul. And one day, many of the living will join them down this very strange path, as we enter this other level of humanity, where what is hidden to us in this state, is the grammar of their ordinary truth.

It would be grotesque to compare what has happened to workers in the West to what has happened to the Native peoples of the Americas, who have survived a genocide and more than a century of persecution. But while I researched this book, I spent some time in the Rust Belt. A few weeks before the U.S. presidential election in 2016, I went to Cleveland to try to get the vote out to stop Donald Trump from being elected. One afternoon I walked down a street in the southwest of the city where a third of the houses had been demolished by the authorities, a third were abandoned, and third still had people living in them, cowering, with steel guards on their windows. I knocked on a door, and a woman answered who, from looking at her, I would have guessed was fifty-five. She began to rage—how terrified she was of her neighbors, how the kids in the area “have got to go,” how she was desperate for anyone who would make things better, how there wasn’t even a grocery store anywhere nearby any more and she had to take three buses just to get food. She mentioned in passing that she was thirty-seven years old, which took me aback. And then she said something that stayed with me long after the election. She described what the area was like when her grandparents lived there, and you could work in a factory and have a middle-class life—and she made a verbal slip. She meant to say “when I was young.” What she actually said was “when I was alive.

We end up at an outdoor paintball course in Jersey. A woodsy, rural kind of place that’s probably brimming with mosquitos and Lyme disease. When I find out Logan has never played paintball before, I sign us both up. There’s really no other option. And our timing is perfect—they’re just about to start a new battle. The worker gathers all the players in a field and divides us into two teams, handing out thin blue and yellow vests to distinguish friend from foe. Since Logan and I are the oldest players, we both become the team captains. The wide-eyed little faces of Logan’s squad follow him as he marches back and forth in front of them, lecturing like a hot, modern-day Winston Churchill. “We’ll fight them from the hills, we’ll fight them in the trees. We’ll hunker down in the river and take them out, sniper-style. Save your ammo—fire only when you see the whites of their eyes. Use your heads.” I turn to my own ragtag crew. “Use your hearts. We’ll give them everything we’ve got—leave it all on the field. You know what wins battles? Desire! Guts! Today, we’ll all be frigging Rudy!” A blond boy whispers to his friend, “Who’s Rudy?” The kid shrugs. And another raises his hand. “Can we start now? It’s my birthday and I really want to have cake.” “It’s my birthday too.” I give him a high-five. “Twinning!” I raise my gun. “And yes, birthday cake will be our spoils of war! Here’s how it’s gonna go.” I point to the giant on the other side of the field. “You see him, the big guy? We converge on him first. Work together to take him down. Cut off the head,” I slice my finger across my neck like I’m beheading myself, “and the old dog dies.” A skinny kid in glasses makes a grossed-out face. “Why would you kill a dog? Why would you cut its head off?” And a little girl in braids squeaks, “Mommy! Mommy, I don’t want to play anymore.” “No,” I try, “that’s not what I—” But she’s already running into her mom’s arms. The woman picks her up—glaring at me like I’m a demon—and carries her away. “Darn.” Then a soft voice whispers right against my ear. “They’re already going AWOL on you, lass? You’re fucked.” I turn to face the bold, tough Wessconian . . . and he’s so close, I can feel the heat from his hard body, see the small sprigs of stubble on that perfect, gorgeous jaw. My brain stutters, but I find the resolve to tease him. “Dear God, Logan, are you smiling? Careful—you might pull a muscle in your face.” And then Logan does something that melts my insides and turns my knees to quivery goo. He laughs. And it’s beautiful. It’s a crime he doesn’t do it more often. Or maybe a blessing. Because Logan St. James is a sexy, stunning man on any given day. But when he laughs? He’s heart-stopping. He swaggers confidently back to his side and I sneer at his retreating form. The uniformed paintball worker blows a whistle and explains the rules. We get seven minutes to hide first. I cock my paintball shotgun with one hand—like Charlize Theron in Fury fucking Road—and lead my team into the wilderness. “Come on, children. Let’s go be heroes.” It was a massacre. We never stood a chance. In the end, we tried to rush them—overpower them—but we just ended up running into a hail of balls, getting our hearts and guts splattered with blue paint. But we tried—I think Rudy and Charlize would be proud

But nothing has ever expressed the general, gut-felt moral revulsion against city-bombing better than a virtually unknown article, from firsthand experience, by America’s most famous writer at the time, Ernest Hemingway, in July 1938. It’s still little known because he wrote it, by request, for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, which published it in Russian; his manuscript in English didn’t surface143 for forty-four years. It conveys in words the same surreal images that Picasso had rendered on canvas the year before. His lead sentence: “During the last fifteen months I saw murder done in Spain by the Fascist invaders. Murder is different from war.” Hemingway was describing what he had seen of fascist bombing of workers’ housing in Barcelona and shelling of civilian cinemagoers in Madrid. You see the murdered children with their twisted legs, their arms that bend in wrong directions, and their plaster powdered faces. You see the women, sometimes unmarked when they die from concussion, their faces grey, green matter running out of their mouths from bursted gall bladders. You see them sometimes looking like bloodied bundles of rags. You see them sometimes blown capriciously into fragments as an insane butcher might sever a carcass. And you hate the Italian and German murderers who do this as you hate no other people. … When they shell the cinema crowds, concentrating on the squares where the people will be coming out at six o’clock, it is murder. … You see a shell hit a queue of women standing in line to buy soap. There are only four women killed but a part of one woman’s torso is driven against a stone wall so that blood is driven into the stone with such force that sandblasting later fails to clean it. The other dead lie like scattered black bundles and the wounded are moaning or screaming.

As she explained to her students, patients often awoke from very bad illnesses or cardiac arrests, talking about how they had been floating over their bodies. “Mm-hmmm,” Norma would reply, sometimes thinking, Yeah, yeah, I know, you were on the ceiling. Such stories were recounted so frequently that they hardly jolted medical personnel. Norma at the time had mostly chalked it up to some kind of drug reaction or brain malfunction, something like that. “No, really,” said a woman who’d recently come out of a coma. “I can prove it.” The woman had been in a car accident and been pronounced dead on arrival when she was brought into the emergency room. Medical students and interns had begun working on her and managed to get her heartbeat going, but then she had coded again. They’d kept on trying, jump-starting her heart again, this time stabilizing it. She’d remained in a coma for months, unresponsive. Then one day she awoke, talking about the brilliant light and how she remembered floating over her body. Norma thought she could have been dreaming about all kinds of things in those months when she was unconscious. But the woman told them she had obsessive-compulsive disorder and had a habit of memorizing numbers. While she was floating above her body, she had read the serial number on top of the respirator machine. And she remembered it. Norma looked at the machine. It was big and clunky, and this one stood about seven feet high. There was no way to see on top of the machine without a stepladder. “Okay, what’s the number?” Another nurse took out a piece of paper to jot it down. The woman rattled off twelve digits. A few days later, the nurses called maintenance to take the ventilator machine out of the room. The woman had recovered so well, she no longer needed it. When the worker arrived, the nurses asked if he wouldn’t mind climbing to the top to see if there was a serial number up there. He gave them a puzzled look and grabbed his ladder. When he made it up there, he told them that indeed there was a serial number. The nurses looked at each other. Could he read it to them? Norma watched him brush off a layer of dust to get a better look. He read the number. It was twelve digits long: the exact number that the woman had recited. The professor would later come to find out that her patient’s story was not unique. One of Norma’s colleagues at the University of Virginia Medical Center at the time, Dr. Raymond Moody, had published a book in 1975 called Life After Life, for which he had conducted the first large-scale study of people who had been declared clinically dead and been revived, interviewing 150 people from across the country. Some had been gone for as long as twenty minutes with no brain waves or pulse. In her lectures, Norma sometimes shared pieces of his research with her own students. Since Moody had begun looking into the near-death experiences, researchers from around the world had collected data on thousands and thousands of people who had gone through them—children, the blind, and people of all belief systems and cultures—publishing the findings in medical and research journals and books. Still, no one has been able to definitively account for the common experience all of Moody’s interviewees described. The inevitable question always followed: Is there life after death? Everyone had to answer that question based on his or her own beliefs, the professor said. For some of her students, that absence of scientific evidence of an afterlife did little to change their feelings about their faith. For others,