Best 3209 quotes in «feminism quotes» category

I’ve heard so many people, particularly people of faith, say they could look past his wrongdoings. When they’re pressed further, the reply is always some variation of “He doesn’t mean what he says,” “It’s just to get a rise out of people,” or “It’s all for show.” When you turn a blind eye and a deaf ear and say nothing, you are in fact saying everything. You are telling others you approve of immorality and injustice. You are telling them you support the marginalization and vilification of those who are different from you. You are telling them that fear reigns supreme and that you will tolerate nefarious behavior. As President John F. Kennedy said in a speech: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crises, maintain their neutrality.” - Amy Erickson

I've never been angry to have been born a woman. There have been times I've been angry at how the world treats us, but I see being a woman as a challenge I must fight. Like being born under a stormy sky. Some people are lucky enough to be born on a bright summer's day. Maybe we were born under clouds. No wind. No rain. Just a mountain of clouds we must climb each morning so that we may see the sun.

I've learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing - though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. There's a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.

I’ve seen the way she comes on to him—I just can’t stand it. You know—what really shits me is how you spend years working on yourself to get rid of all that stupid eyelash-fluttering and giggling, and then just when you think you’re getting somewhere, you find out that guys still like women who do that sort of thing. I watch ‘em fall for it, every time.

I've thought often about why - why?! - anyone, especially other women, would try to disrupt feminist work that combats violence. What in the world could be the point of that? The only reason I've come up with, and I think it makes sense, is fear of becoming that "impure" woman.

I've wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most -- is it "angry" or "black" or "woman"?

I very much like men. They're interesting to me, and I mostly wish they would be better about how they treat women so I wouldn't have to call them out so often.

I voted for every woman who has to leave a baby too soon, who has to downgrade her career, or who is made to feel invisible in her role as a mother.

I want characters to do bad things and get away with their misdeeds. I want characters to think ugly thoughts and make ugly decisions. I want characters to make mistakes and put themselves first without apologizing for it.

I wanted the kind of life my father had had, not the one I saw my mother struggling to get away from. I thought I was peculiar in this desire, but, as things have turned out, it seems such secret ambition burning in young female breasts were not so uncommon.

I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.

I want to write a thinkpiece about what you did to me. I want to write a critical analysis about the way you put your hands to my throat, the way you threw me against the partition wall. I want to extract a dose of worldly wisdom for all women to sap the power from that pain and into abstraction so we can all live again; I want what you did to be a statistic, I want you to be a memory, I don’t want you to be those hands on my throat.

I want to weep too, not for me but for us all--for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.

I want you to know that you were wanted. I decided: I wanted you. Yi Ba thought that only men could do what they wanted, but he was wrong. I stood with my toes in the ocean, euphoric at how far I had come, and two months later, when I gave birth to you, I would feel accomplished, tougher than any man.

I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars and young women were treated like - well - young women. {...} I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one.

I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us.

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.

I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason.

I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language." I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever. Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

I was limited by stories that came before mine. We are so often limited by our own expectations of stories, by the stories that came before, by the heroes who came before.… How is it we can bear to live with ourselves, as readers and storytellers, if we swallow those limitations without questioning them?

I was traumatised into feminism -- there's no other way to describe it

I was too old-fashioned male-chauv to allow that; we discussed for a minute and I wound up with the couch

I was thinking: Girls get scared way too often. Girls get stupidly scared. I was not scared. Telling myself not to be scared kind of worked.

I was thinking that you're right about vaginas not being remotely related to flowers. They don't smell the same or feel the same, and they're not pretty in any way that would make you want to put them in a vase in your kitchen." ... "I'm not saying they can't be in the flower family, just that they can't be a lily or a daffodil. If they had to be a flower ... then they'd be an anomaly-type flower, the badass ones that eat flies." "Venus fly traps!" "Exactly

Why are women so fearful? The answer to that question lies at the root of The Cinderella Complex. (...) Many women achieve a certain amount of success in their careers and professions and still remain inwardly insecure. In fact (...), it's remarkable how many women these days retain a hidden core of self doubt while performing on the outside as if they were towers of confidence. (...) Lack of confidence seems to follow us from childhood (...) No matter how fiercely we try to live like adults - flexible, powerful and free - that girl-child hangs on (...). The effects of such insecurity are widespread, and they result in a disturbing social phenomenon: women in general tend to function well below the level of their native abilities. For reasons that are both cultural and psychological - a system that doesn't really expect a great deal from us, in combination with our own personal fears of standing up and facing the world - women are keeping themselves down.

I went back to the women and said, 'Tell me exactly what you want us to do.' And they said, 'Don't do anything for us, do something for our children'.

Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.

I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. I no longer want to believe that these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.

I will stand up and speak in my own voice and no man will ever silence me again.

Women need to do more. We need to find out what it is we're afraid of, and go beyond.

Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. (Southey's reply to Charlotte Bronte)

I wish we could sit together around the fire and tell one another the story of WOMAN, recounting the ceremonies of reverence for our deity and us in Her Image. I wish we could collectively hear the seasoned voices of our aunties, our grand-mothers and their grand-mothers through them, telling the age-old story of the love of woman, the love of life, the love our connection to the great mother Earth, from whence we come and into whose loving womb we will return when this journey is over, to be reborn again.

I wish that I could make a world of my own Where women chase their dreams instead of hopeless relationships to prove their worth. Where women are loved for their brains and not for the size of their waists. Where women are judged based on their thoughts; instead of what they choose to put on their skin. Where women are no more object for sex or materials to promote nudity but to be respected and much more appreciated. I wish I could make a world of my own; where women could save themselves and build castles from the breaks that have been thrown at them …

Listening to criticisms – and being self-critical – has been and remains central to the survival, growth, expansion, relevance, and applicability of feminism

Listen my dear sister! You only fix something, when it’s broken. And you - are far from broken. Say to yourself, I am perfect, the way I am. Say to yourself, I am beautiful the way I am. Say to yourself, those who do not accept me the way I am, do not deserve me in their life.

Listening to criticisms – and being self-critical – has been and remains central to the survival, growth, and expansion of feminism.

Liza considering back-peddling but thought about her empty bank account. “That’ll be fine, sir. I don’t wear skirts anyway.” He hmphed as though he suspected she might also be inclined to burn her bra on the courthouse steps and snapped, “No jeans either, this is a professional establishment.

I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex [...]

Living your life on your own terms is utterly glorious. It makes perfect sense to you, but you have to be willing to let go of everything else. It has to be okay if nobody else likes that, but then when other people see that you are brave, you don’t mind. They’re fascinated by that because we all love brave people. We all love it when people are heroic.

Logic has never been idealism’s strong suit. Every time I’d pointed out some inequity in our realtionship to Joe, something as basic as who had first dibs on the car, he said, “What are you going to do? Call NOW?” as he drove away, laughing. He thought the National Organization of Women was a joke, and feminism itself hysterically funny. It wasn’t funny. It was nothing less than self-determination. It’s what, in the end, we were all after. Me, Margo, Howie, Joe. We wanted equality. We wanted justice. We wanted not to be controlled by the world as it was.

Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.

Look, choosing to wait until marriage makes me feel empowered. But if the same choice cripples you, then it wasn't the right one.

Looking at my life through the lens of history has made me increasingly grateful to standout women who pushed those boundaries to make the changes from which I have benefited.

Looking back, it made no sense for my college friends and me to distance ourselves from the hard-won achievements of earlier feminists. We should have cheered their efforts. Instead, we lowered our voices, thinking the battle was over, and with this reticence we hurt ourselves.

Look at all the women in my stories. They’re very independent; they create their own universes; they are very unorthodox. They aren’t held down by rules and regulations.

Look at how a man behaves with the women in his life and you will know whether he is a gentleman or a scoundrel!

Look, you had it easier than me,' she says. 'You think Nana and Papa were busy supporting women's rights? No, they wanted me to meet a nice man and get married and cook and clean for him and give them grandchildren, and that's it. You were born into a world where feminism existed and was readily available to you. I had to acquire that knowledge. I didn't know I could be on my own.

Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women

Lo único que hacen las feministas es quemar sujetadores, las veinticuatro horas del día, siete días a la semana, sin parar para comer, dormir o ir al lavabo. Una feminista que se precie se hace pis encima antes que dejar un sujetador sin quemar. Si leyéramos el currículum de una feminista, veríamos que en el apartado «Ocupación actual» pone «Quemadora de sujetadores». Y en el apartado «Aptitudes» pone «Se le da muy bien quemar sujetadores». Y en el apartado «Otros intereses» pone «Buscar sujetadores y quemarlos». Y en el apartado «Planes de futuro a medio plazo» pone «Quemar toneladas de sujetadores». Y en el apartado «Planes de futuro a largo plazo» pone «Haber quemado todos los sujetadores del mundo».

Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version.. Love is full strenght. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love's hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.