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Institutions shape us more than we shape them;

Confront the disturbing implications of our historical reality.

Without preconceptions,

necessarily utopian,

self-consciously and unabashedly subjective,

the object of the critique.

the same anomaly.

Society tames the feminist.

That excuse shall not serve you, Madam.

Situated in the larger struggle against patriarchy,

suffering never ennobles, it only humiliates.

Woman must write her self,

gaining strength through the unconscious.

Duality is transcended,

yet I am invisible;

but I exist, we exist.

Biography is many-sided,

coherent, unified, morally inspiring.

Illusions are fabricated,

mythologizing ourselves or the past.

Against the grain of individualism,

relentless in their insistence,

they necessarily bear the mark of our time:

a mutable, more malleable species…

ambivalence from the clash of voices.

Woman always occurs simultaneously in several places.

I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining…

defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.

Should that state of affairs continue?

Enough ink has been spilled quarrelling.

To fight has always been the man’s habit…

I have begun my own quiet war.

On the face of it, how easy, how simple;

but in the depths, how difficult, how complicated…

Here then is your own letter.

Repression is proliferating at a prodigious pace.

Ebullient, infinite woman,

let no one hold you back.

Write and proclaim this unique empire,

help prune the rose bushes,

reach an audience that transcends the academy,

reach her heart and mind.

I know I said I would write down where I got each line, but I simply have not had time to go back and do so yet. I got all of these lines from Woolf, Kauffman, Schweickart, Cixous, Anzaldua, De Beauvoir, and Cisneros. I tried to incorporate a variety of voices from different time periods and cultures in order to send one message; hopefully I accomplished that goal!