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" THE HE’S ARE SHE’S In 1847, three novels excite England’s readers. Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell tells a devastating tale of passion and shame. Agnes Grey by Acton Bell strips bare the hypocrisy of the family. Jane Eyre by Currer Bell exalts the courage of an independent woman. No one knows that the authors are female. The brothers Bell are actually the sisters Brontë. These fragile girls, virgins all, Emily, Anne, Charlotte, avenge their solitude by writing poems and novels in a village lost on the Yorkshire moors. Intruders into the male world of literature, they don men’s masks so the critics will forgive them for having dared. But the critics pan their works anyway, as “rude,” “crude,” “nasty,” “savage,” “brutal,” “libertine” . . . "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
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" ALEXANDRA To be natural and clean, like the water we drink, love must be free and mutual. But men demand obedience and deny pleasure. Without a new morality, without a radical shift in daily life, there will be no real emancipation. If the revolution is not to be a lie, it must abolish in law and in custom men’s right of property over women and the rigid social norms that are the enemies of diversity. Give or take a word, this is what Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman in Lenin’s cabinet, demanded. Thanks to her, homosexuality and abortion were no longer crimes, marriage was no longer a life sentence, women had the right to vote and to equal pay, and there were free child care centers, communal dining halls, and collective laundries. Years "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
