Lépine was clear, “Women to one side. You are all feminists, I hate feminists,” he shouted. One of the young survivors, Natalie, tells reporters how she pleaded at the time, “We are only women in engineering who want to live a normal life.” She is unaware she had risen above her station. But her attacker, Lépine, was sure that it was not yet normal for Canadian women to become engineers.
Without feminist analysis, "without collective action shaped by feminist consciousness, without awareness that the women's movement is in fact a force for revolutionary social change (not just a band aid operation), the centres might as well fold their tents and merge with existing social service agencies.
What we are creating is an organizing centre for women. Women will be able to support each other, educate each other with the stories of their lives, and move into action. Our office is already beginning to look like a transition house. On any given day yo will find kids, dogs, telephones ringing, the typewriters flying and women – all kinds of women. But it’s not enough just to hear stories.
To end our oppression, we need to join together and fight back collectively. All women need the women’s movement. Therefore, the movement must be accessible – to all women.
The function of pornography as an influence on consciousness is a major public issue of our time, when a multibillion-dollar industry has the power to disseminate increasingly sadistic, women-degrading visual images But even so-called soft-core pornography and advertising depict women as objects of sexual appetite devoid of emotional context, without individual meaning or personality: essentially as a sexual commodity to be consumed by males
"Consciousness-raising — studying the whole gamut of women’s lives, starting with the full reality of one’s own — would also be a way of keeping the movement radical by preventing it from getting sidetracked into single issue reforms and single issue organizing. It would be a way of carrying theory about women further than it had ever been carried before, as the groundwork for achieving a radical solution for women as yet attained nowhere. It seemed clear that knowing how our own lives related to the general condition of women would make us better fighters on behalf of women as a whole."
"A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political. In our consciousness-raising sessions, for example, we have in many ways gone beyond white women's revelations because we are dealing with the implications of race and class as well as sex."
One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.
