Best 3209 quotes in «feminism quotes» category

Strip clubs let everyone down. Men and women approach their very worst here.

Studies have shown a woman looking for a 'sense of humour' wants a man who makes jokes and who likes to laugh. A man looking for the same quality in a woman does not expect her to be funny; rather, he wants her to laugh at his jokes.

Studies have shown consistently that while IQ bears a fairly close relationship to accomplishment among men, it bears essentially no relationship at all to accomplishment among women. (...) The adult occupations of the women, whose childhood IQ's were in the same range as the men's, were for the most part undistinguished. n fact, two-thirds of the women with genius-level IQ's of 170 or above were occupied as housewives or office workers. The waste of women's talent is a brain drain that affects the entire country.

Studies show that girls - especially smarter ones - have severe problems in the area of self-confidence. They consistently underestimate their own ability. When asked how they think they'll do on different tasks - whether the tasks are untried or ones they've encountered before - they give lower estimates than boys do, and in general underestimate their actual performance as well. One study even showed that the brighter the girl, the less expectations she has of being successful at intellectual tasks. (...) Low self-confidence is the plague of many girls, and it leads to a host of related problems. Girls are highly suggestible and tend to change their minds about perceptual judgments if someone disagrees with them. They set lower standards for themselves. While boys are challenged by difficult tasks, girls try to avoid them. (...) Given her felt incompetence, it's not surprising that the little girl would hotfoot it to the nearest Other and cling for dear life. (...) As we can see, the problems of excessive dependence follow female children right into adulthood.

Studies introduced ideas such as the theory that parents pushing their children to play with gendered toys meant children learned to act a certain way according to whether they were a boy or a girl, which was then taken to mean they were "naturally" feminine/masculine.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that my feelings towards the little man were distinctly maternal. Good God, I thought, how utterly revolting, and I turned my mind firmly to the problem at hand.

Suffering should not define you as a woman! And just because you’re a man it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect you! HELP HER to remove the taboos and the loneliness surrounding this disease; be understanding, show empathy, and don’t accuse her of being sensitive, delicate, or overly dramatic – this is a big opportunity for you guys to show that you care and to be a real man!" (Address, 2011 Endometriosis Foundation of America Blossom Ball)

[Suggesting an additional definition for 'politics':] The art of organizing and handling men in large numbers, manipulating votes, and, in especial, appropriating public wealth.

Sulkowicz’s genius was to make her burden tangible, and in so doing make it something others could share. Solidarity has been a big part of this feminist movement against violence. (“An Insurrectionary Year”)

Surely we want to get to a point where women can be strong and powerful and not sexy. Or only sexy when they feel like it, not as a requirement to getting media coverage or being valued.

Surely the Women were created (...) for some better end, than to labour in vain their whole life long.

Sure we all need money but what do you really focus on? It is a matter of the heart. If your thoughts are on material and worldly things, no good fruits can come out of it. Seek the kingdom of God first and the other things shall be added unto you not vice versa.

Surround her with a village of aunties, women who have qualities you’d like her to admire. Talk about how much you admire them. Children copy and learn my example. Talk about what you admire about them.

Survival and persistence, sung defiantly in the high notes of the diva, are no small feats in a world that wishes fervently for one's nonexistence and/or silent complicity in one's own exploitation. The narcissistic self-regard implied in the negative definition of the diva is a radical insistence on self-love when no one else loves you, when you are not, according to social norms, worthy of being loved at all, but only of being desired in a way that uses you up or consumes you. To say that diva citizenship cannot change the world is to accept a meaning of "the world" that aligns it only with the privileged. An investigation of the real function of diva citizenship has to start by asking who these acts are for, and whether the very fact of having something for herself can change a person, who might then go on to change the world just by surviving in it for one more day.

Sylvia quotes Dick as telling her: "I am afraid the demands of wifehood and motherhood would preoccupy you too much to allow you to do the painting and writing you want." Dick was sharp enough to understand that the bright flame that drew him to Sylvia disqualified her from his future. He would not allow Sylvia- or any woman- to outshine him.

Sylvia was an early literary manifestation of a young woman who takes endless selfies and posts them with vicious captions calling herself fat and ugly. She is at once her own documentarian and the reflexive voice that says she is unworthy of documentation. She sends her image into the world to be seen, discussed, and devoured, proclaiming that the ordinariness or ugliness of her existence does not remove her right to have it.

...take down your baby bump photos from Facebook, take down pictures of your kids too. It is your job to protect your children and not parade them around like little circus freaks or glorified mini-you’s.

Take control. You are a strong, independent woman.

Take this guinea then and use it, not to burn the house down, but to make its windows blaze. And let the daughters of uneducated women dance round the new house, the poor house, the house that stands in a narrow street where omnibuses pass and the street hawkers cry their wares, and let them sing, ‘We have done with war! We have done with tyranny!’ And their mothers will laugh from their graves, ‘It was for this that we suffered obloquy and contempt! Light up the windows of the new house, daughters! Let them blaze!

Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality.

[Talking about ancient Greece](...) the great institutions (...) were created by older males who then trained younger males. They all had a strong homoerotic element. (...) This thereby increased the "rightness" of masculinity, never mind that half the world was feminine. That other half was also interested in philosophy, the arts, the law, religion, and athletics, but they had this other task -bringing children to term and nurturing them through the early years of their lives. And doing it again and again. Not that this gave status to women. On the contrary, the man's seed made the child. A woman was simply the receptacle provided by nature to carry the child until it was ready to come out. (...)

[Talking about Othello] His dying words are about the service he has done to the state -not what he has done to Desdemona. (...) He acknowledges not love but the power structure (...). Othello believes his fellow officer [Iago] rather than his wife, believes death is suitable punishment for infidelity (...). It makes me uneasy that we so easily state that Othello is a play about race. Race is one of its ingredients, but the most pervasive subject that Shakespeare is tackling is sexism. The two women [Desdemona and Emilia, Iago's wife] end up dead. Bianca, the third woman in the play, Cassio's mistress, ends up in jail for something she never did, and nobody bothers to get her out. Iago, the symbol of evil, remains alive. Brabantio, Desdemona's father, dies of a broken heart because of his daughter's disobedience. And everyone is very regretful about what has happened. But no one, other than Emilia, has pointed out that there is a terrible double standard, something rotten in the system itself.

[Talking about Rosalind in As You Like It] She disguises herself as a boy, drops all the covering inhibitions of "femininity", and really searches for her true self (...) Her disguise gives her the ability to find out about herself, what she really thinks and feels (...). And she can do all this freely, without having anyone in power tell her how women should or should not behave.(...)

Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans.

Teaching and learning _religious plurality often ends up privileging religious _texts_ over _practice_ and largely ignoring the social and historical contexts and the lived experience of people who shape, situate, and structure these religious texts. Furthermore, adopting the politics of recognition as a pedagogical principle in teaching can lead to an _uncritical silence_ about the various forms of oppression and domination of certain religious groups. Here people often use _religious difference_ as a _religious alibi_ for the oppression or violation of human rights of certain groups of people, such as women or LGBT people.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Teach your daughters their battle cries are needed far more than their silence and hear them deafen the world with their fearlessness.

Teach her about difference. Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Teach her not to attach value to difference. And the reason for this is not to be fair or to be nice but merely to be human and practical. Because difference is the reality of our world. And by teaching her about difference, you are equipping her to survive in a diverse world. She must know and understand that people walk different paths in the world and that as long as those paths do no harm to others, they are valid paths that she must respect. Teach her that we do not know – we cannot know – everything about life. Both religion and science have spaces for the things we do not know, and it is enough to make peace with that. Teach her never to universalise her own standards or experiences. Teach her that her standards are for her alone, and not for other people. This is the only necessary form of humility: the realisation that difference is normal.

Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they seem them as relational rather than as individual equal humans. Men who, when discussing rape, will always say something like 'if it were my daughter or wife or sister.' Yet such men do not need to imagine a male victim of crime as a brother or son in order to feel empathy.

Thanks to demographics, that conservative push is not going to work-the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again- and because genies don't go back into bottles and queer people are not going back into the closet and women aren't going to surrender. It's a war, but I don't believe we're losing it, even if we won't win it anytime soon either; rather, some battles are won, some are engaged, and some women are doing really well while others suffer. And things continue to change in interesting and sometimes even auspicious ways.

Thanks for nothing, regular human mom. Footnote: nothing except for the unconditional love and support and meticulous care to make sure I faced the world fully informed about my body and reproductive health.

Thanks to every generation of women from every culture on earth who ever lived, thanks to every woman who ever voiced a seditious thought or pursued her talents regardless of invisibility, my generation of women have been able to live a life different from that of every woman who came before us.

That a woman claims not to be feminist does not diminish the necessity of feminism. If anything, it makes us see the extent of the problem, the successful reach of patriarchy.

That is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men.

That evening, in her apartment, still in Warsaw, Ana takes down a book from her shelf – a rather thick, ordinary paperback. It looks old, because it's worn out and somehow shabby. But it's not ordinary. I can tell by the way she handles it so carefully, like something unique. 'This is the book I told you about,' she says, holding out the Anthology of Feminist Texts, a collection of early American feminist essays, 'the only feminist book translated into the Polish language,' the only such book to turn to when you are sick and tired of reading about man-eater/man-killer feminists from the West, I think, looking at it, imagining how many women have read this one copy. 'Sometimes I feel like I live on Jupiter, among Jupiterians, and then one day, quite by chance, I discover that I belong to another species. And I discover it in this book. Isn't that wonderful.

That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?. . . they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.

That night, I wash myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been.

That said, pointing out inaccurate or unrealistic portrayals of women to younger grade school children-ages five to eight-does seem to be effective, when done judiciously:taking to little girls about body image and dieting, for example, can actually introduce them to disordered behavior rather than inoculating them against it. I may be taking a bit of a leap here, but to me all this indicated that if you are creeped out about the characters fromMonster High, it is fine to keep them out of your house.

That she was now more tired and forgetful, while able to do three times what she had been able to do when she was somewhat less tired and forgetful but also stressed, guilty, grouchy, and overwhelmed, seemed a small price to pay.

That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social minor to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harrassment and intimidation, online at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear). Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.

That place I'm talking about ain't nothing but a bloody slit in this world of His. But everybody wants to rule over it. It ain't for the white man to rule. Ain't for any man to rule.

That's the glory of being a man. An ugly face isn't the end of you.

That was another thing about boys: No one assumed the blew a gasket for any reason other than they were just really upset. They were allowed to just be, and nobody blamed where the moon was in its cycle, or whether or not they had the ill fortune of leaking from their privates. It was plain unfair.

That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes -- the legal subordination of one sex to the other -- is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

That which is desirable in young girls means, naturally, that which is desirable to men. Of all cultivated accomplishments the first is 'innocence.' Beauty may or may not be forthcoming; but 'innocence' is 'the chief charm of girlhood.

That you are a born again Christian does not mean you will automatically succeed except you follow God's principles. Never forget faith without good work is dead.

The ability of women is not acknowledged; indeed, it is concealed. Wise women pretend that all they are doing is running a household when they command a great estate; they write for their husbands advice while he is away and they hand back the keys on his return.

The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. 'God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.' From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write 'carte blanche for chaos.' Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings -- those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse.

The ability for a woman to be free is connected with her ability to love another woman.

The academic and writer Sara Ahmed has written brilliantly about the idea of the feminist killjoy, and why it should be embraced – because feminism isn’t about making everyone around the table feel comfortable. It’s about being disruptive, challenging, and changing the terms of the debate, so that, over time, almost certainly with discomfort and backlash, everyone becomes freer.