Time & Perspective Quote by Barbara Deming

Deming’s sentence is built like a quiet provocation: you don’t find your “own voice” by going inward alone; you find it by tuning your ear outward. The first clause flatters the individualist myth (authenticity, selfhood, the hard-won voice), then immediately revises it. “If we are listening at the same time” is the hinge: self-knowledge is made relational, not solitary. In a culture that loves the lone genius narrative, Deming insists that attention is a collective technology.

The subtext is feminist and strategic. Deming isn’t talking about generic empathy; she’s describing consciousness-raising as method. Listening to “other women” becomes a way to identify patterns that have been privatized as personal failure: the same small humiliations, the same institutional ceilings, the same bargaining with safety and desire. “For all our differences” nods to the fractures within “women” as a category (class, race, sexuality, nation) while still arguing that careful listening can reveal a shared architecture of constraint.

Her phrasing also carries an ethical warning. “If we listen well” suggests that solidarity is not automatic; it’s a skill, and it can be botched. Poor listening collapses difference into slogan. Good listening holds difference long enough to recognize the overlap without erasing anyone’s specifics.

Context matters: Deming wrote from the overlap of feminist thought and nonviolent political activism, where voice is never just expression but leverage. The line offers a blueprint for building movements: identity not as branding, but as a chorus assembled through disciplined attention.