Margaret

 Dear Valeria,

Peace!

The Right Honourable Margaret Bondfield (Justice of the Peace)

Wilma

 Dear Valeria,

“Europeans brought with them the view that men were the absolute head of households, and women were to be submissive to them. It was then that the role of women in Cherokee society began to decline. One of the new values Europeans brought to the Cherokees was a lack of balance and harmony between men and women. It was what we today call sexism. This was not a Cherokee concept. Sexism was borrowed from Europeans.”

Regards,

Wilma Mankiller

Trevor

 Dear Valeria,

Peace sister,

Trevor Carter (co-founder of the Notting Hill Carnival)

Eunice

Dear Valeria,

By Eunice Newton Foote (1856). "Circumstances affecting the heat of the Sun’s rays": Art. XXXI, The American Journal of Science and Arts, 2:XXII/no. LXVI, November 1856, p. 382-383

Aïcha

Dear Valeria,

ma as-salaama!

Aïcha Chenna

Dick

Dear Valeria,

I am really enjoying the new MLK Jr stamp - just think about all those white bigots, licking the backside of a black man.

Peace and freedom,

Dick Gregory

Harriet

Dear Valeria,

We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.

Very best regards,

Harriet Tubman

Malcolm

Dear Valeria,

I don’t mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I’m nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you’ve made me go insane, and I’m not responsible for what I do. And that’s the way every Negro should get. Any time you know you’re within the law, within your legal rights, within your moral rights, in accord with justice, then die for what you believe in. But don’t die alone. Let your dying be reciprocal. This is what is meant by equality. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Yours,

Malcolm X
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz

Frederick

Dear Valeria,

I have often been asked, how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. And my readers may share the same curiosity. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the ‘quick round of blood,’ I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York, I said: ‘I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.’ Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil.

Best regards,

Frederick Douglass

Tina

Valeria, mia cara

I cannot accept life as it is - it is too chaotic - too unconscious - therefore my resistance to it - my combat with it - I am forever struggling to mould life according to my temperament and needs - in other words, I put too much art in my life.

tua,

Tina Modotti

Dorothy

Dear Valeria,

In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (...) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

yours,

Dorothy L. Sayers

Frances

Dear Valeria,

I dare say you marvel sometimes at my independent way of walking through the world just as if nature had made me of your sex instead of poor Eve's. Trust me, my beloved friend, the mind has no sex but what habit and education give it, and I who was thrown in infancy upon the world like a wreck upon the waters have learned, as well to struggle with the elements as any male child of Adam.

Yours faithfully,

Frances Wright

Sojourner

Dear Valeria,

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Yours sincerely,

Sojourner Truth

Petra

Dear Valeria,

The suffering people of this world must come together to take control of their lives, to wrest political power from their present masters pushing them towards destruction. The Earth has been mistreated and only by restoring a balance, only by living with the Earth, only by emphasising knowledge and expertise towards soft energies and soft technology for people and for life, can we overcome the patriarchal ego.

With love,

Petra Karin Kelly

Émile

Dear Valeria,

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation.

Kind Regards,

Émile Zola

Sylvia

Dear Valeria,

I haven't described our Co-operative home to you. It is built round a square garden and there is another garden round it. There is also a garden on the roof. The dining- room and kitchen are on the top floor. The school nursery, crèche, and children's garden is at the end of the block of buildings. There are a tennis court, croquet lawn, a hall for meetings, concerts, dances, and so on, a sewing room, workshops for all sorts of crafts, a library and gymnasium, and two big summer houses in the garden, one of which is for the older children.

Peace, sister,

Sylvia Pankhurst

Henri

Dear Valeria,

I went out on the street like an exile, I who am an everyday man, who resemble everybody else so much, too much. I went through the streets and crossed the squares with my eyes fixed upon things without seeing them. I was walking, but I seemed to be falling from dream to dream, from desire to desire. A door ajar, an open window gave me a pang. A woman passing by grazed against me, a woman who told me nothing of what she might have told me. I dreamed of her tragedy and of mine. She entered a house, she disappeared, she was dead.

Sincerely,

Henri Barbusse

Sotiria

Dear Valeria,



Με εκτίμηση,

Σωτηρία Μπέλλου

Simone

Dear Valeria,

One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world.

Best wishes,

Simone Weil

Ernestine

Valeria, my dear sister

But it will be said that the husband provides for the wife, or in other words, he feeds, clothes and shelters her! I wish I had the power to make every one before me fully realize the degradation contained in that idea.

All my best wishes,

Ernestine Rose