Best 3209 quotes in «feminism quotes» category

Until quite recently women's histories were largely overlooked but in the wake of feminism there has been increasing interest in retrieving them.

Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination.

Until women are allowed to make mediocre works of art while still succeeding in the way that many white men get to do this every single day, we will not have the power to take our creative freedoms back. We will be limited by impossible expectations reserved for the few. As long as we are put and put ourselves on a patriarchal pedestal, too high to succeed and doomed to fail, then surely we will be set up to do exactly that, every time.

[Upon the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Carrie Chapman] Catt wrote ... to the women voters of the nation: The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you can never comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!

Using one’s beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that’s how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife.

Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they chose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them.

Vaginas beat penises every time. They're like kryptonite. Penises are defenseless against them.

Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy.

Valys also didn't think I was good enough for him. He made that clear every time he acted like a martyr forced to settle. But what he didn't understand was that if he thought I might not be good enough for him, he definitely wasn't good enough for me. I was well aware of my flaws, but I knew my merits, too; I shouldn't have to be anyone's second-best. Least of all, his.

Victimhood gives us great moral superiority and entitles us to unquestioning sympathy while exempting us from examining any single one of our actions. A victim is utterly devoid of responsibility or blame. This of course leaves us vulnerable as we will carry on engaging in precisely the behaviour which provoked an unacceptable response.

Violence against a women should be given the death penalty. Why? Because abusing a woman is the same as hurting your mother. And hurting your mother is the same as hurting God. They both gave you life. -- Suzy Kassem, The Writings of Suzy Kassem

Violence against women should be given the death penalty. Why? Because abusing a woman is the same as hurting your mother. And hurting your mother is the same as hurting God. They both gave you life. -- Suzy Kassem, The Writings of Suzy Kassem

Violent men, and men in authority over violent men, and the broader public that authorises those men, are not yet shamed by the harm of coercive control over women ... Maybe we can rest some hope on the growing activity of men of goodwill calling on each other to change. When that group hits a critical mass, the majority of men will be more likely to want to change.

Vivimos en un mundo que se adueña y dispone del cuerpo de las mujeres, un mundo de dominación masculina desde el punto de vista económico, cultural e ideológico. Desde el culto a la belleza hasta los actos de mayor barbarie, como las mutilaciones genitales o los ataques con ácido, la forma más arraigada de control de las mujeres por parte de los hombres pasa por el sometimiento de sus cuerpos. La emancipación de la mujer pasa pues por la liberación de su cuerpo.

Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be listening. “We, the women of the United States,” she told the bronze Lafayette, “denied the liberty which you helped to gain, and for which we have asked in vain for sixty years, turn to you to plead for us. Speak, Lafayette, dead these hundred years but still living in the hearts of the American people.

Vosotros los jóvenes no sabéis apreciar las cosas, proseguía. No sabéis lo que hemos tenido que pasar para lograr que estéis donde estáis. Míralo, es él quien pela las zanahorias. ¿Sabéis cuántas vidas de mujeres, cuántos cuerpos de mujeres han tenido que arrollar los tanques para llegar a esta situación? La cocina es mi pasatiempo predilecto, decía Luke. Disfruto cocinando. Un pasatiempo muy original, replicaba mi madre. No tienes por qué darme explicaciones. En otros tiempos no te habrían permitido tener semejante pasatiempo, te habrían llamado marica. Vamos, madre, le decía yo. No discutamos por tonterías. Tonterías, repetía amargamente. Las llamas tonterías. Veo que no entiendes. No entiendes nada de lo que estoy diciendo.

Walter Mignolo terms and articulates _critical cosmopolitanism, juxtaposing it with globalization, which is a process of "the homogeneity of the planet from above––economically, politically and culturally." Although _globalization from below_ is to counter _globalization from above_ from the experience and perspective of those who suffer from the consequences of _globalization from above_, cosmopolitanism differs, according to Mignolo, form these two types of globalization. Mignolo defines globalization as 'a set of designs to manage the world,' and cosmopolitanism as 'a set of projects toward planetary conviviality

WANTING to be anything is the whole point of feminism. HAVING TO BE SOMETHING is what feminists fight against, or at least the ones I know.

Way beyond the calls for equal pay, self-sovereignty, choice, politi­cal, legal and educational equality, as woman we each need to search our souls, grieve the enormity of what has befallen us, then find new ways to step outside the shame, to channel the outrage into outlets for progress. We need to cease identification with our oppressors so that we may lift up other women and learn the powerful word that means "no.

Weak men dominate women!

We all know the protocol. But more powerful than our protocol is our grooming to believe in something more.

We are all free to be assholes, but we are not free to do so without consequence.

We are living in an increasingly feminized society. Some people view that as an increasingly civilized society, but it has left our boys with deep desires for honor but few outlets for displaying it appropriately.

We are now dealing with a bizarre new morality where a woman cannot simply say, in one way or another, "I'm on the pill because I like dick.

We are not members, . . . we are commodities. . . . When our men have used us up so that we look sixty when we’re thirty and our wombs have literally dropped out of our bodies onto our spotless kitchen floors, finished, they turn to our daughters.

We are precarious. Which is to say some good things (accumulation of diverse knowledges, skills and abilities through work and life experiences in permanent construction), and a lot of bad ones (vulnerability, insecurity, poverty, social exposure).

We are so much distracted nowadays. There is so much distractions in the world today call it internet, media, football matches etc. but don't let it consume you.

We are taught we can redeem them, she said to me once. We are taught it as soon as we can read. We can turn the beast into a prince, if only we love him enough.

We are wasting time, pleads Greta, by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away. We mustn’t do this. We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain. Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us, she says. Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.

We are the blood of the witches you thought were dead. We carry witchcraft in our bones whilst magic still sings inside out heads. When the witch hunters imprisoned out ancestors when they tried to burn the magic away. Someone should have warned them that magic cannot be tamed. Because you cannot burn away what has always been aflame.

We are weaving her-story into reality. Unweaving the limiting his-stories. Creating our-story. Reaching beyond religion and patriarchy and capitalism and so-called democracy. Into new ways of being and seeing. We are the bridge between worlds We are the ones we have been waiting for.

We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a 
broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest
 ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest 
triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine 
heights of human attainments, eulogized and worshiped as a hero or 
saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or 
criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs
of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts
and alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment
 seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the 
awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.

We believe that patriarchal investment in hierarchy is so strong that even homosexuality, lesbianism, or any sexual response choice is not a threat to patriarchy as long as it supports hierarchy. Primary relationships do support hierarchy . It is well within the scope of current patriarchal boundaries for two lesbians to live as a suburban couple, have children, own a home, have two cars and be accepted at a progressive block party. Heterosexuality may be a prevalent example of male dominance, but it is not the prime mover of patriarchy - hierarchy is. If women choose to challenge patriarchy at its root, it will be in what we create with equality and not with whom we have sex.

we bwlive that feminism is a transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities

We can all deliver the final hit needed to break the glass ceiling in order to achieve complete gender liberation.

We cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.

We can have everything we want as long as what we want is a life spent searching for exhausting work that doesn't pay enough, shopping for things we don't need and sticking to a set of social and sexual rules that turn out, once you plough through the layers of trash and adverts, to be as rigid as ever.

We cannot pretend that this is all about women as victims, when many women are deeply complicit in creating and selling this culture.

We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power, if any feeling of vulnerability strikes terror in our hearts. Lovelessness torments.

We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'.

We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for the purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available.

We can pretend all we like that women are equal, ut as long as men and women are continually encouraged to supress the broad aspects of their humanity that we decry as "feminine", we're all screwed. Because it's those things qe celebrate as "other" that make us truly human. It's what we label "soft" or "feminune" that makes civilization possible, It's our empathy, our ability to care and nurtureand connect. It's our ability to come together. To buld. To remake. Asking men to cut away their "feminine" traits asks them to cut away half their humanity, just as asking women to supress ther "masculine" traits asks them to deny their full autonomy.

We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth.

We can say that the various forms of asymmetric, hierarchical divisions of labour, which have developed throughout history up to this stage where the whole world is now structured into one system of unequal division of labour under the dictates of capital accumulation, are based on the social paradigm of the predatory hunter/warrior who, without himself producing, is able by means of arms to appropriate and subordinate other producers, their productive forces and their products.

We could talk about the retraction of re-productive rights in North Carolina and Texas and Ohio, or we could conjure up a lot of statistics about domestic and sexual violence or women living in poverty. If the patriarchy is dead, the numbers have not gotten the memo.

We define masculinity in very narrow way. Masculinity is hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak-- a hard man.

We conceived of the planet as female, an all-giving Mother Nature, just as we conceived of the female body, infinitely alterable by and for man; we serve both ourselves and our hopes for the planet by insisting on a new female reality on which to base a new metaphor for the earth: the female body with its own organic integrity that must be respected.

We dare not talk of the darkness for fear it will infect us. We dare not talk of the fire, for fear it will destroy us. And so we live in the half-light, Like our mothers before us. Come to the fire, Feel it warm your skin. Come to the fire, Feel it burn in your belly, Shine out through your eyes. Come dance in the fire, Let it fuel your prayers.

We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we do not condition boys to aspire to marriage, and so there is already a terrible imbalance at the start. The girls will grow up to be women preoccupied with marriage. The boys will grow up to be men who are not preoccupied with marriage. The women marry those men. The relationship is automatically uneven because the institution matters more to one than the other. Is it any wonder that, in so many marriages, women sacrifice more, at a loss to themselves, because they have to constantly maintain an uneven exchange?

We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak—a hard man.