Best 3209 quotes in «feminism quotes» category

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.

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 …

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 [...]

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Love is described like GOD.

Love between women could take on a new shape in the late nineteenth century because the feminist movement succeeded both in opening new jobs for women, which would allow them independence, and in creating a support group so that they would not feel isolated and outcast when they claimed their independence. … The wistful desire of Clarissa Harlowe’s friend, Miss Howe, “How charmingly might you and I live together,” in the eighteenth century could be realised in the last decades of the nineteenth century. If Clarissa Harlowe had lived about a hundred and fifty years later, she could have gotten a job that would have been appropriate for a woman of her class. With the power given to her by independence and the consciousness of a support group, Clarissa as a New Woman might have turned her back on both her family and Lovelace, and gone to live “charmingly” with Miss Howe. Many women did.

Love is not honourable, unless it is based on equality.

MacKinnon captures this is in her succinct lesson on the grammar of pornography and male dominance: 'Man fucks woman; subject verb object.

Luckily, I was not born a white man.* *This has never before been said in the history of humanity.

Ma'am is yet another horrible-sounding word in the lexicon of words that women are stuck with to describe various aspects of their body/life/mental state/hair. Vagina. Moist. Fallopian tubes. Yeast infection. Clitoris. Frizz. These are all terrible words, and yet they are our assigned descriptors. Who made up these words? Women certainly didn't. If, at the beginning of time, right after making vaginas, God had asked me, 'What would you like your most intimate and enjoyable part of yourself to be called?',' I most certainly wouldn't have said, 'Vagina.' No woman would, because vagina sounds like a First World War term that was invented to describe a trench that has been mostly blown apart but is still in use. Even off the very top of my head I feel like I could have come up with something better, like for instance the word papoose, which actually as I'm typing it feels like an incredibly brilliant word for vagina.

Magistrate: May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil! Lysistrata: If that's all that troubles you, here take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tounge. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women's business.

Magistrate: What do you propose to do then, pray? Lysistrata: You ask me that! Why, we propose to administer the treasury ourselves Magistrate: You do? Lysistrata: What is there in that a surprise to you? Do we not administer the budget of household expenses? Magistrate: But that is not the same thing. Lysistrata: How so – not the same thing? Magistrate: It is the treasury supplies the expenses of the War. Lysistrata: That's our first principle – no War!

MAGISTRATE Don't men grow old? LYSISTRATA Not like women. When a man comes home Though he's grey as grief he can always get a girl. There's no second spring for a woman. None. She can't recall it, nobody wants her, however She squanders her time on the promise of oracles, It's no use...

Mais de toute façon, engendrer, allaiter ne sont pas des activités, ce sont des fonctions naturelles; aucun projet n'y est engagé; c'est pourquoi la femme n'y trouve pas le motif d'une affirmation hautaine de son existence; elle subit passivement son destin biologique.

Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.

Male urination is a form of commentary.

Love was always and only about good feeling. In early adolescence when we were whipped and told that these punishments were 'for our own good' or 'I'm doing this because I love you,' my siblings and I were confused. Why was harsh punishment a gesture of love? As children do, we pretended to accept this grown-up logic; but we knew in our hearts it was not right. We knew it was a lie. Just like the lie the grown-ups told when they explained after the harsh punishment, 'This hurts me more than it hurts you.' There is nothing that creates more confusion about love in the minds and hearts of children than unkind and/or cruel punishment meted out by the grown-ups they have been taught should love and respect. Such children learn early on to question the meaning of love, to yearn for love even as they doubt it exists.