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For generations, women in and around the left had to deal with the need for their women’s safety—including abortions and the constant haze of men’s violence—completely informally on their own. Their lives and all women’s lives weren’t judged as needing “political” struggle. Whether communist or socialist or anarchist, the left’s priorities didn’t include that at all. Yes, we all know of brave left women earlier in history who spoke out as exceptions. But Butch [Lee]’s point which she later blew her stack about a lot was, why couldn’t the anti-capitalist left have made that kind of illegal underground work for women the first priority, the main thrust of reorganizing the culture. Not in the 1960s, which was too late, but starting decades before like in the 1930s say.

Her point was that whether it was a “Jane” or a communal subversive day care and school replacing bourgeois “education,” or women’s dead-secret armed patrols outside the law, women must sooner or later organize themselves to make or provide and control the heart of what they need in society. “Jane” wasn’t just part of a hallway towards a Roe v. Wade, but something alternative and much better, much richer in her eyes. If revs don’t understand that lesson, which people’s struggle itself repeats for us in various ways and forms over and over, we are trying to climb a stairway but tripping on the first stair. To find the future the oppressed need to liberate us all, we need to move towards the danger. Not easy to do, for sure.

— The Shape of Things to Come by J. Sakai

I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English. So I did nothing.

— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

And because that part had been easy, and because nothing could be easy all the way through, she knew to expect this next part to be hard.

— Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey