Sally Kempton

Sally Kempton (January 15, 1943–July 10, 2023), also known as Swami Durgananda, was an American swami, journalist, radical feminist, and meditation teacher.

Quotes

Cutting Loose

• I am no longer submissive, no longer seductive; perhaps it is for that reason that my husband tells me sometimes that I have become hard, and that my hardness is unattractive. I would like it to be otherwise. I think that will take a long time.
• And I wonder always whether it is possible to define myself as a feminist revolutionary and still remain in any sense a wife. There are moments when I still worry that he will leave me, that he will come to need a woman less preoccupied with her rights, and when I worry about that I also fear that no man will ever love me again, that no man could ever love a woman who is angry. And that fear is a great source of trouble to me for it means that in certain fundamental ways I have not changed at all.
• I would like to be cold and clear and selfish, to demand satisfaction for my needs, to compel respect rather than affection. And yet there are moments, and perhaps there always will be, when I fall back upon the old cop-outs. Why should I trouble to win a chess game or a political argument when it is so much easier to lose charmingly? Why should I work when my husband can support me, why should I be a human being when I can get away with being a child?
• Women's Liberation is finally only personal. It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
  • "Cutting Loose", Esquire (July 1970) (also published in About Women anthology, 1973)

• “I knew the writing came from the place that’s the closest you can get to truth. But the downside was, I became a character in a public story that resembled mine but was a huge oversimplification of a complex life.”
  • Writing about Cutting Loose, quoted in Sara Davidson article

Other

• We can care about things without clinging to them.
  • The Edge-Walker interview, 2022

• When you give up partnership relationships you also give up a certain kind of intimacy. But you gain a lot of freedom, and you also experience a wider, less exclusive form of love.
  • Quoted in "Whatever Happened to Sally Kempton.

Attributed

• I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist.
  • As quoted in Witty Words from Wise Women: Quips, Quotes, and Comebacks (2001) by B. J. Gallagher, Andrews McMeel Publishing

• When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women. Most men can’t really imagine “equality.” All they can imagine is having the existing power structure inverted.
  • As quoted in Notes for Participants, National Forensic League's Lincoln-Douglas Debate on Feminism and Gender Equality (November 11, 1995) by Twiss Butler, National Organization for Women