Best 7 quotes of Maria Mies on MyQuotes

Now, after the material resources of the colonies have been looted, their spiritual and cultural resources are being transformed into commodities for the world market.

All those feminists who had hoped that women’s liberation could be brought about by putting pressure on the state and thus getting more social welfare for women, or by demanding equal opportunities for women in the job market, particularly in the higher ranks of this market, or by increasing women’s participation in political and other decision-making bodies, find their expectations shattered. They have to realize today that the fundamental democratic rights, the claim to equality and freedom, are also fair-weather rights, as far as women are concerned, and that these rights, in spite of the rhetoric of their universality, are suspended when the accumulation needs of capital require this.

By focusing on the male violence against women, coming to the surface in rape, and by trying to make this a public issue, feminists have unwittingly touched one of the taboos of civilised society, namely that this is a ‘peaceful society’. … The very fact that rape has now become a public issue had helped to tear the veil from the facade of so-called civilised society and has laid bare its hidden, brutal, violent foundations.

Feminists are those who dare to break the conspiracy of silence about the oppressive, unequal man-woman relationship and who want to change it.

Maleness and femaleness are not biological givens, but rather the results of a long historical process. In each historic epoch maleness and femaleness are differently defined. The definition depends on the principle mode of production in these epochs.

Too often the concept of nature has been used to explain social inequalities or exploitative relations as inborn, and hence, beyond the scope of social change

We can say that the various forms of asymmetric, hierarchical divisions of labour, which have developed throughout history up to this stage where the whole world is now structured into one system of unequal division of labour under the dictates of capital accumulation, are based on the social paradigm of the predatory hunter/warrior who, without himself producing, is able by means of arms to appropriate and subordinate other producers, their productive forces and their products.