Marilyn Frye Quotes
Marilyn Frye is an American radical feminist philosopher, professor emerita at Michigan State University, and one of the most influential feminist analytic philosophers of the late twentieth century. The Politics of Reality, her 1983 essay collection, gave currency to the concept of the bird-cage of oppression, in which interlocking structural barriers, none of which appears decisive on its own, together constitute the reality of women's lives. The quotes below are attributed to Marilyn Frye, organized by topic.
Marilyn Frye on Freedom
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Attributed to Marilyn Frye:
“The right to be wrong about one's own life is not a small right; it is half of the right to live.”
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“Efficient exploitation requires that those exploited be relatively mobile, self-animating and self-maintaining—the more so as the work in question requires greater intelligence, attention or ingenuity. But it also requires that they not be free enough, strong enough or willful enough to resist, escape or significantly misfit the situation of exploitation.”
p. 59 -
“If we have no intuition of ourselves as independent, unmediated beings in the world, then we cannot conceive ourselves surviving our liberation; for what our liberation will do is dissolve the structures and dismantle the mechanisms by which Woman is mediated by Man. If we cannot imagine ourselves surviving this, we certainly will not make it happen.”
p. 80
Marilyn Frye on Happiness
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“While what was said [in reference to the content Frye personally removed from her Wikipedia entry] could easily be extrapolated from my work, I have never written a word linking C. S. Lewis to male prostitution before. I am not Captain Obvious from Hotels.com!" [ 1 ]”
Wikiquote
Marilyn Frye on Knowledge
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“Men see with arrogant eyes which organize everything seen with reference to themselves and their own interests.”
p. 67 -
“The forces of men’s material and perceptual violence mold Woman to dependence upon Man, in every meaning of 'dependence': contingent upon; conditional upon; necessitated by; defined in terms of; incomplete or unreal without; requiring the support or assistance of; being a subordinate part of; being an appurtenance to.”
p. 77
Marilyn Frye on Politics
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Attributed to Marilyn Frye:
“Oppression is the bird-cage; one bar alone does not make a cage, but together the bars trap.”
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Attributed to Marilyn Frye:
“To see clearly what oppression is, you must look at the macroscopic structure of the wires.”
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Attributed to Marilyn Frye:
“Anger that wakes the world is the work of philosophy as much as of politics.”
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Attributed to Marilyn Frye:
“Whiteness is a kind of looking that does not know it is looking.”