Best 3209 quotes in «feminism quotes» category

When I was doing the Mademoiselle application my husband would peer over my shoulder and say, "What are you doing competing with the best brains in the country? Why don't you just wash the dishes?" When the telegram came from Mademoiselle, I ran outside and shouted, "Guess who has the best brains in the country?

When I was young, when the women of my generation were in their formative years, we were not taken seriously. Nor, just as damagingly, were our mothers, or our grandmothers.

When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women.

. . . when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten.

When men in Congress come to blows at somemthing someone said, I always notice that it shows their blood is quick and red; But if two women disagree, with very little noise, It proves, and this seems strange to me, that women have no poise.

When my father is stern, no one chastises him. I don’t think it’s fair that when I act similarly, I’m seen as cruel. I’m making a huge decision, and I’m trying to be wise about it.

When men decided women could be educated - this is what I think - they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them were collars and ties. It was a way to concede the right to learning, yet remain safe; the products of the system would always be inferior to the original model. Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it.

When our mother is seen only as the one-dimensional Mary of modern times, instead of the great dual force of life and death, She is relegated to the same second-class status of most women in the world. She is without desires of Her own, selfless and sexless except for Her womb. She is the cook, the mistress, bearer and caretaker of children and men. Men call upon Her and carry Her love and magic to form a formidable fortress, a team of cannons to protect them against their enemies. But for a long, long time the wars that women have been left to wage on behalf of men, on behalf of the human race, have started much sooner, in the home, in front of the hearth, in the womb. We do what we must to protect and provide for our young our families, our tribes

When no possessions keep us, when no countries contain us, and no time detains us, man becomes a heroic wanderer, and woman, a wanderess.

When, oh when will justice and reason prevail, and Woman descend from the pedestal on which Man has placed her (in order to prevent her from doing anything except standing perfectly still) and take her rightful place beside him?

When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.

When society was patriarchal, as it was in the New Testament context and as it has been everywhere in the world except in modern society in our day, the church avoided scandal by going along with it - fundamentally evil as patriarchy was and is. Now, however, that modern society is at least officially egalitarian, the scandal is that the church is NOT going along with society, not rejoicing in the unprecedented freedom to let women and men serve according to gift and call without an arbitrary gender line. This scandal impedes both the evangelism of others and the edification - the retention and development of faith - of those already converted.

When some women felt fear, they covered it with an iron grate of courage, I thought. Men might be dangerous, but they were very often unperceptive. If fear only rumbled through a woman’s soul and glittered through her eyes, then perhaps the man she feared would not be aware it was there at all. He might even think that she was entirely confident, dauntless. He might believe her veneer of bravery.

When the awful time of reckoning comes, and the Jehovah God appears to demand why his command has been disobeyed, Adam endeavors to shield himself behind the gentle being he has declared to be so dear. ‘The woman thou gavest to be with me, she gave me and I did eat,’ he whines—trying to shield himself at his wife's expense! Again we are amazed that upon such a story men have built up a theory of their superiority!

When the women begin to take an active part in the struggle, no power on earth can stop us from achieving freedom in our lifetime.

When they play MARRY/FUCK/KILL, you'll never be KILL again!

When we are preoccupied with wealth and material acquisitions, it chokes God's word in us and makes it unfruitful. But if we follow His plan of being prosperous you will enjoy the blessings of this life.

When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights.

When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that "having it all" is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of "choice," we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult.

When we have pleaded for understanding, our character has been distorted; when we have asked for simple caring, we have been handed empty inspirational appellations, then stuck in a far corner. When we have asked for love, we have been given children. In short, even our plainer gifts, our labors of fidelity and love, have been knocked down our throats.

When we hear that "war" is made for "peace", or that "pain" is sought for "pleasure" or that "brutality" helps one "feel", in our minds, language ceases to describe reality. Words lose their direct relationship with actuality. And thus language and culture begin to exist entirely independently of nature.

When we see love as the will to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love.

When we say fathers are "helping," we are suggesting that child care is a mother's territory, into which fathers valiantly venture. It is not.

When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.

When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded work (like manhood, womanhood, politics, economics, marriage, and even equality), we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don't fit our tastes. In an attempt to simplify, we try to force the Bible's cacophony of voices into a single tone, to turn a complicated and at times troubling holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says.

When we were young, we said the hell with it and used our breasts as shields. But the tears fall so easy when they take away love.

When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.... An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught that we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as we were also taught to believe that we were loved. For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.

When will women become civilized enough to stop mistreating men? When will they cease from training their lovers to become providers, merely because they have the power to do so? As long as they continue as they are, men have no alternative to polygamy.

When wisdom comes, transformation comes. Wisdom makes the difference between the succeeding man and the failing man.

When women with class power opportunistically use a feminist platform while undermining feminist politics that helps keep in place a patriarchal system that will ultimately re-subordinate them, they do not just betray feminism; they betray themselves.

When will women not be compelled to view their bodies as science projects, gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained? When will a woman cease to be made of pain?

When women can decide whether and when to have children; when women can decide whether and when and whom to marry; when women have access to healthcare, do only our fair share of unpaid labor, get the education we want, make the financial decisions we need, are treated with respect at work, enjoy the same rights as men, and rise up with the help of other women and men who train us in leadership and sponsor us for high positions—then women flourish … and our families and communities flourish with us.

When women's truths are denied, they have no recourse but to turn to a socially acceptable fiction; when the only means to achieve their ends are laced with falsehood, women embrace that means because they have to.

When you can't find someone to follow, find a way to lead by example.

When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow feel invested in how you behave, as if your actions reflect directly on all womanhood.

When you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about or if you went away.

When you want to join a prestigious social club, do you wonder if your race will make it difficult to join? If you do well in a situation, do you expect to be called a credit to your race? Or to be described as different from the majority of your race? If you need legal or medical help, do you worry that your race might work against you? If you take a job with an affirmative action employer, do you worry that your co-workers will think that you are unqualified and were hired only because of your race? Do you worry that your children will not have books and school materials that are about people of their own race?

When you make a decision, own it. Never apologize for your decision - even if you have to revisit it later or the results are not what you wanted. When I've made a decision that didn't garner positive results, I've said, "We made the best decision we could based on the facts at the time, but given where we are now as a company and what our goals are, we now need to revisit this decision.

When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/biology/French test and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so scared!’ and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: ‘Yes, I’m good at history/biology/French, and I’m good at this, too.’ It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

when you speak about feminism they like to hit you with things i call 'what about's– what about women in the middle east what about women in third world countries what about focusing on them and not the problems here and this all sounds good in theory yes we need to help them yes we need to help young girls trapped in child marriages yes we need to help women marred by acid attacks yes we need to help victims of human trafficking yes we need to help women who wil be imprisioned beaten killed for speaking out about their sexual assault for getting an abortion for leaving an abusive husband yes we need to help them of couse we do it is our job as decent humans to help them but we can help them and help ourselves at the same time we can help young girls in child marriages and we can fight to end the objectification of young girls here we can help women marred by acid attacks and we can work harder to arrest abusers and assailants here we can help victims of human trafficking and we can stop stigma and violence against sex workers here we can help women who will be imprisioned for speaking out about their sexual assault beaten for getting an abortion killed for leaving an abusive husband and we can also help women who will be imprisioned for killing their pimp and captor beaten for refusing to have sex killed for rejecting a man here women are still getting hurt here there is still not total equality here they say what about this what about that what about them i say well what about here they say nothing because that they mean when they say what about the middle east what about the third world countries what about them is what about sitting down what about shutting up what about not saying anything at all

Where once I prayed for forgiveness from a father God who held up huge palms and said “Thou shalt not,” now I find peace with a sister god who takes my open hands in hers and says, “You will.

Where in a medical dictionary does it say a woman cannot handle such things? What is a man's soul made of that a woman's is not? I had no idea my innards were composed of cotton and kittens, while yours are filled with steel and steam-driven parts.

When you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women. ... And I don't quite know how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in women brings only shame?

Where I grew up, women’s liberation was when you let a chick out of her cage for 15 minutes so she could stretch her legs.

Where I grew up, women’s liberation was when you let a chick out of her cage so she could stretch her legs for 15 minutes.

Where is there a Woman, who having generously trusted her liberty with a husband, does not immediately find the spaniel metamorphosed into a tyger, or has not reason to envy the lesser misery of a bond-slave to a merciless tyrant?

Wherever problem persist, wisdom is lacking. There is no problem anywhere except wisdom problem. Wisdom provides solutions where there is complications.

Whether a woman loves or hates worry work, it can scatter her focus on what she does for pay and knock her partway or clean off a career path. This distracting grind of apprehension and organization may be one of the least movable obstacles to women's equality in the workplace.

Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

Which statements are true according to the passage? A) Science, governments, and your doctor should be trusted. B) 'Comforting her deep into the night' is a euphemism for sneaking candy. C) The ugliest phrase used in this passage is 'female.' D) Bad things really do come in threes.