Irene Peslikis

Irene Peslikis (October 7, 1943 – November 28, 2002) was a Greek American feminist artist, activist, and educator. She was one of the early founders and organizers in the women's art movement, especially on the east coast.

Quotes

• Thinking that only institutions oppress women as opposed to other people. This implies that you have not identified your enemy, for institutions are only a tool of the oppressor. When the oppressor is stopped he can no longer maintain his tools and they are rendered useless. Present institutions and our feelings about them should be analyzed in order to understand what it is we want or don't want to use in the new society.
  • "Resistences to consciousness" (1969)

• Education does not bring on revolutions; but consciousness of our own oppression and struggle might. Unfortunately formal education and political consciousness do not usually coincide. Even formal education in Marxism-Leninism tends to make people think that they know more than they really know. When we think of what it is that politicizes people it is not so much books or ideas but experience.
  • "Resistences to consciousness" (1969)

Quotes about Irene Peslikis

• The cultural-political perspectives of Jewish feminists interacted with the ideas of many other pioneering women's liberationists in the city, Jewish and non-Jewish, including Kathie Sarachild, Carol Hanisch, Irene Peslikis, Peggy Dobbins, Anne Koedt, Pat Mainardi, Robin Morgan, Ann Snitow, and Vivian Gornick. Acting within a communal context, innovative theory and practice emerged from group interaction.
  • Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (2020)

• Redstockings staged a public hearing at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, where a dozen women told a crowd of several hundred about their own abortions. The effect was electric, sending shock waves through the community and the nation and helping to lead a groundswell of action against illegal abortion, one that culminated a few years later in Roe v. Wade. This first speak-out, organized by Shulamith Firestone, Irene Peslikis, and others, inspired similar events elsewhere, including in France, where a number of prominent women, including Simone de Beauvoir (Ellen Willis's heroine as well as Firestone's), risked imprisonment by publicly declaring, "I have had an abortion."
  • Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (2020)