Best 3209 quotes in «feminism quotes» category

Religion is the last cultural barrier to gender equity.

Religious literacy is one way out from under the thumb of fundamentalism; constructing new literacies is another.

Remember, for a society to truly progress we don't need woman or man, we need a fully-fledged human - nothing short of that would do.

Remember the most beautiful yet the most uncomfortable pair of heels you own? You feel like a queen when you wear them, almost making people look up to your elegance. While on the inside you know how you struggle to keep your toes straight, firm your ankle so it doesn't slip, tolerate the knee pain so you are standing tall! Well that's an everyday life of a strong woman, There is so much going on in the inside- no one can guess a thing on your exterior. You don't need to wear heels everyday. It's okay to be weak and vulnerable- once in a while

... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

Remember those dudes catcalling on the street? They have literally become cats (there is always room for more cats).

Remember to draw a line between being nice in a strong way and simply being a people pleaser. Nice: Positive, yet honest and straightforward. People pleaser: Sweeping things under the rug to avoid making waves.

Remember that when a women gets the job you wanted or dates that bloke you fancied or wears a dress you loved but couldn't afford, she hasn't taken anything from you. There is time and space for you to do it too. One of the cleverest things the patriarchy did was make us believe that there is only one tiny sliver of success cake available; that we all have to fight over it; that a woman who tramples on her competitors to chow it down first is somehow 'ruthless' or to borrow a phrase from Apprentice-ese, 'a natural business mind.' This is a scare-mongering lie. There are so many cakes to eat. And if you can't find the slice you want, try baking one. Cake for everyone! Let them eat cake! I've got lost in the metaphor.

Remember when they call you girl, they're trying to tell you something. They're trying to tell you that they're more than you, that the body you're in makes you less. But you know, and I know, that you're exactly what you need to be.

Reproductive freedom is not just the ability not to have a child through birth control. It's the ability to have one if and when you want.

Rescuing girls from brothels is the easy part, however. The challenge is keeping them from returning. The stigma that girls feel in their communities after being freed, coupled with drug dependencies or threats from pimps, often lead to return to the re-light district.

Repudiating the vulnerability I felt had wrecked the lives of women around me, I modelled myself on my controlled father. I wanted his freedom and his focus. To him, a family was an aquarium: controlled, contained. To the women I knew, a family was everything.

Resistance to a system is almost always presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to use it to adapt rather than to oppose.

Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.

Rest in your God-breathed worth. Stop holding your breath, hiding your gifts, ducking your head, dulling your roar, distracting your soul, stilling your hands, quieting your voice, and satiating your hunger with the lesser things of this world.

Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.

Romantic love as most people understand it in patriarchal culture makes one unaware, renders one powerless and out of control. Feminist thinkers called attention to the way this notion of love served the interests of patriarchal men and women. It supported the notion that one could do anything in the name of love: beat people, restrict their movements, even kill them and call it a "crime of passion," plead, "I love her so much i had to kill her.

Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein's earliest and most vociferous accusers, recalled being asked "in a soft NPR voice, 'What if what you're saying makes men uncomfortable?' Good. I've been uncomfortable my whole life. Welcome to our world of discomfort.

Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.

Salome interrupts. We're not members! she repeats. We are the women of Molotschna. The entire colony of Molotschna is built on the foundation of patriarchy (translator's note: Salome didn't use the word "patriarchy" - I inserted it in the place of Salome's curse, of mysterious origin, loosely translated as "talking through the flowers"), where the women live our their days as mute, submissive, and obedient servants. Animals. Fourteen-year-old boys are expected to give us orders, to determine our fates, to vote on our excommunications, to speak at the burials of our own babies while we remain silent, to interpret the Bible for us, to lead us in worship, to punish us! We are not members, Mariche. We are commodities.

Same thing now; my freedom had to be paired with availability, or else it became a disorder.

Sanity is socially and politically determined and when politics change, the definition of who is well and unwell, who is sane and who is sick, tends to change with it. The traits of good mental health, of the supposedly well-balanced individual, are often suspiciously similar to those of the compliant citizen, the obedient worker, the dutiful woman - whatever those traits might be, depending on the mood of the world and the whims of the powerful. Those who oppose the existing order can count on being labelled as deranged, as irrational, especially if they make the mistake of showing emotion in a power regime that considers all emotions weakness, all feelings laughable - except the rage of the ‘white working class’, as long as this is properly harnessed in the service of vested interests.

say, beautiful & point to the map of your body say, brave & were your skin like a gown or a suit say, hero & cast yourself in the lead role /// when a girl pronounces her own name there is glory when a woman tells her own life story she lives forever

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.

Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

School does not make people, it is learning that makes people great, that is why you see first class students fail and poor. The world is not ruled by those who went to school, it is ruled by those who learn everyday.

Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life ... I do not accept your definition of faith i.e. belief in life after death ... Your faith rests on the future of yourself and others as individuals, mine in the future and fate of our successors. It seems to me that yours is the more selfish ... [as to] the question of a creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe.

Scriassine studied me in turn. "You're not so dumb, you know. Generally I dislike intelligent women, maybe because they're not intelligent enough. They always want to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, how terribly smart they are. So all they do is talk and never understand anything. What struck me the first time I saw you was that way you have of keeping quiet.

Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn’t quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day, you’ll wake up and want something else, and you’ll have to choose. Because the other thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you’re left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no more pieces of cultural detritus from which to construct a personality. I tried and failed to be a character in a story somebody else had written for me. What concerns me now is the creation of new narratives, the opening of space in the collective imagination for women who have not been permitted such space before, for women who don’t exist to please, to delight, to attract men, for women who have more on our minds. Writing is a different kind of magic, and everyone knows what happens to women who do their own magic - but it’s a risk you have to take.

Scientists do not simply read nature to find truths to apply in the social world. Instead, they use truths taken from our social relationships to structure, read, and interpret the natural

Sea cual sea su forma, la industria del sexo representa un medio de explotación de un sexo sobre el otro a través de la fuerza, la intimidación o la manipulación. El éxito y la eficacia de este sistema comercial pasa por la desvalorización de la mujer como sujeto. Reducidas a envoltorio corporal, las mujeres se encuentran atrapadas en la trampa de un sistema económico y social que reafirma el estatus promovido por la ideología patriarcal del hombre como dominador.

Sed felices. Porque no existe nada más valiente que alguien feliz a pesar de todo. Porque la felicidad no es una meta, es un modo. (...) Sed felices. Solo porque os lo van a poner muy difícil. Solo por joder.

Seems a lot of men never saw one such as me. A girl what could keep up and fight and ride and curse with the best of them. A girl what ain’t trapped in some dress or some house or some bed. A girl what ain’t waiting on some man to do what she ought to her own damn self.

Según el mencionado columnista, los grupos de feministas y las relatoras especiales de la ONU deberían dejar de quejarse de una vez, porque las mujeres británicas se cuentan entre las más privilegiadas y liberadas del mundo. Pueden votar, acceder a la educación, controlar sus propios bienes y sus propias vejigas. Pero si tenemos esos derechos es porque cientos de mujeres se quejaron y protestaron hasta conseguirlos.

Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women. According to Appel, cult members develop..."an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. "Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is "beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: "I destroyed all my fat photographs!"; "It's a new me!

Selene’s life is a lesson to us that the trajectory of women’s equality hasn’t always been a forward march. In some ways the ancients were more advanced than we are today; there have been setbacks before and may be more in the future.

Self respect by definition is a confidence and pride in knowing that your behaviour is both honorable and dignified. When you harass or vilify someone, you not only disrespect them, but yourself also. Street harassment, sexual violence, sexual harassment, gender-based violence and racism, are all acts committed by a person who in fact has no self respect. -Respect yourself by respecting others.

Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. “How far we’ve come. How much work there is still to do!” She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes. Florence reread the last line with a turbulent flip in her stomach. Was this an invitation?

Sexism is hence to bad science as misogyny is to moralism. Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.

Sexist comments, intimidation, groping, violating boundaries, and aggression are merely seen as "typical" for men. But "typical" is dangerously interchangeable with "acceptable".

Sex discrimination and hate crimes against women don't come from the leather community or its pornography. They occur within contexts like industrial capitalism and marriage that most people take for granted as if they had always existed, like gravity or continental drift. If feminism is going to change the world, it has to focus its critical lens on what most people think is normal, not on what most people think is abnormal.

Sex has, through being photographed, become a thing to be observed, to be performed, rather than experienced so deeply that it is unnecessary even to open one’s eyes.

Sexism is not confined by border, race, class, sexuality or gender and, to my mind (and Margo Kingston's in Chapter 6), it is inextricably bound up with a mindset of entitlement that also afflicts our relationship with the planet.

Sexual promiscuity and sexual liberation were not one and the same.

Sexual objectification doesn't get oppressive until it is done consistently, and to a specific group of people, and with no regard whatsoever paid to their humanity. Then it ceases to become about desire and starts to be about control. Seeing another person as meat and fat and bone and nothing else gives you power over them, if only for an instant. Structural sexual objection of women draws that instant out into an entire matrix of hurt. It tells us that women are bodies first, idealised, subservient bodies, and men are not.

Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.

[Shakespeare realized that] Women are able to understand themselves better on a personal level and survive in the world if they dress in men's clothing, thus living underground, safe (...). The presence of women disguising themselves as men dictates that the play be a comedy; women remaining in their frocks, a tragedy. In four great tragedies -Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear- almost all the women die (...). How much the women have to adhere to the rules and regulations of their enviroment makes a large difference. Once Rosalind [disguised as a man in As You Like It] has run away from the court, she has no institutional structures to deal with. Ophelia [in her frocks] is surrounded tightly by institutional structures of family, court, and politics; only by going mad can be get out of it all.

She could not understand how she was here, when she had never said yes to being brought anywhere. She could not remember speaking to him, much less agreeing. She was beginning to learn the danger of silence, and that someone who wishes to hear a yes will not go out of his way to listen for a no.

She felt the phrase “demand her rights” had lain inside her forever, waiting.

[She] finally realized it was because he himself did not understand what it meant to be different and to have people expect you to change for their sake. She realized that no man could understand this, really, though they expected their wives to do so every day.