c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
For this was the age of The Girl. We had come out of the back parlor, out of the kitchen and nursery, we turned our backs upon the blackboards, shed aprons and paper cuffs. A war had freed us and given women a new kind of self-respect. The adjective poor no longer preceded the once disreputable "working girl". It was honorable, it was jolly, it was even superior to be a "career girl".
— Vera Caspary, Evvie
I am a strong and powerful woman.I am proud to be a woman and I celebrate the qualities that I have as a woman.I am not defined by other people’s opinion of who I should be or what I should do as a woman. I determine that, not anyone else.I am not passed up for a position, title, or promotion because I am a woman.I fully deserve all the good things that comes my way.Irrespective of what anyone might think, being a woman places no boundaries or limits on my abilities.I can do anything I set my mind to.I celebrate my womanhood and I am beautiful both inside and out.
— Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability
When two people marry they become in the eyes of the law one person, and that one person is the husband.
— Shana Alexander, Shana Alexander's State By State Guide To Women's Legal Rights
The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
A man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.
— Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque
Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value
— Ralph Nader
I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.
— Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply
As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaidlabor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, "wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of ies productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist societry cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation - an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives - nor CO the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity. and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, willie profiting from the wageless conclition of the labor involved.
— Silvia Federici
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.
— Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
We have to imagine something before we can build the infrastructure that will allow it to exist. We have failed here on both fronts: in imagination and in reality. Our great weirdos, from Emily Dickinson to Simone Weil to Coco Chanel, are seen as outliers, as not relevant to the way we think through what we want out of life. It's the same way we discuss radical feminist writers like Dworkin and Firestone. Dworkin is unhinged, Firestone is too eccentric to be taken seriously.
— Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto
Men and women in their very essence -in their souls if you wish- have natural parity. (...) This was a relatively new idea at the time [of Shakespeare]. It ran counter to the teaching in the Bible -Eve's being made out of Adam's rib to be his helpmate -which was the basis for the idea, held for so long, that women do not have souls of their own but are dependent on their fathers' and husbands' .
— Tina Packer, Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays
She [Cressida] knows it is men's sexual desire that makes women "angels" before they have been able to possess them; once possessed, women are "things" [Troilus and Cressida I.2, 225-28, 233-34].
— Tina Packer, Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays
If we are serious about change, we have to dig - preferably with plenty of company and with a full appreciation of the fact that although we did not start the fire, it belongs to us now.
— Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy
life's better with girls. boys need girls.
— Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
It would surely be a mistake to gauge the success of feminism by its success as a colonial project. p41.
— Judith Butler Precarious Lives
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
— Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
you tell me i am not like most girlsand learn to kiss me with your eyes closedsomething about the phrase - something abouthow i have to be unlike the womeni call sisters in order to be wantedmakes me want to spit your tongue out like i am supposed to be proud you picked meas if i should be relieved you thinki am better than them
— Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
i want to apologize to all the womeni have called prettybefore i've called them intelligent or bravei am sorry i made it sound as thoughsomething as simple as what you're born withis the most you have to be proud of when yourspirit has crushed mountainsfrom now on i will say things likeyou are resilient or you are extraordinarynot because i don't think you're prettybut because you are so much more than that
— Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
The structural foundations of traditional manhood--economic independence, geographic mobility, domestic dominance--have all been eroding. The transformation of the workplace--the decline of the skilled worker, global corporate relocations, the malaise of the middle-class manager, the entry of women into the assembly line and the corporate office--have pressed men to confront their continued reliance on the marketplace as the way to demonstrate and prove their manhood.
— Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History
It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
I know formidable women, dozens of them, women who fight and who win... Noble women. Heroic ones.
— Lyndsay Faye, The Fatal Flame
It will take you long, lonely years, but one day you will grow tired. Tired of boys, tired of contempt, and then where will you be? All these girls around you with their stories and their lives, the solace of one another, and you will be as far away from them as an anthropologist among a foreign people, curious but unable to make contact. Have faith: you will learn.
— Sarah McCarry, Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World
How are we ever going to understand what happens when a civilization comes apart at the seams, as it did in Germany, if we fail to see the most glaring distinctions, such as the gender gap?
— Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
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.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
If a guy is put off by you being a feminist, you need to ask yourself how put off you are by someone who doesn't believe in equality for women.
— Laura Bates, Girl Up
Let's be real: if women were "naturally" anything, societies wouldn't spend so much time trying to police every aspect of their lives
— Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution
Once established, the young girl's dependency is systematically supported as she proceeds through childhood. For being "nice" - nonchallenging, nonconfronting, noncomplaining - she's rewarded with good grades, the approval of her parents and teachers, and the affection of her peers. What reason is there for her to turn deviant or nonconformist? The going is good, so she conforms. Increasingly, she patterns herself after what's expected of her.
— Colette Dowling, The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence
Studies show that girls - especially smarter ones - have severe problems in the area of self-confid
— Colette Dowling, The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence
Hold still we're going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away.
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
The Singularity is at once an escape and a birth fantasy. I said to him: A Zeus dream that avoids the organic body altogether. Brand-new creatures burst forth from men's heads. Presto! The mother and her evil vagina disappears.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World
...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs. Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'. Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
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.
— Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution
Women’s marches are a clever progressive divide and conquer strategy that not only turns women against men, but also turns women against each other in the guise of peace and solidarity. It is a brilliant tactic to employ media propaganda to make privileged women feel oppressed and then program them to think that vulgarity, exhibitionism and emasculation is empowering.
— Dawn Perlmutter
Feminists are incapable of crafting a coherent argument using their words. It almost always involves menstrual blood or some sort of reference to ladyparts.
— Hannah Bleau
This is just another reason for these “women” (and I use the term loosely) to be gross and obscene and call it a “political statement.” It’s not helpful. If anything, it’s demeaning and insulting to women who think with more than our genitals and who are concerned with issues bigger than our ladyparts. But by all means, keep acting the fool. All you’re doing is exposing yourselves for what you really are. The rest of us want no part of your nonsense.
— Chrissie Johnson
I began to see that while equality often entailed women crossing the sexual divide between women's work and men's work, equality rarely meant that men crossed over the divide to the women's side: our side – women's – the side where work was largely, though not exclusively, unpaid or poorly paid care of dependents.
— Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency
The disparity, however, between the rewards offered in the labor market and the vital interest to have good dependency care makes it clear that market forces have not been relied upon to supply adequate dependency work. Indeed, a clear-eyed look at the nearly universal twin features of female caregiving and female subordination indicates: 1) that a certain class of persons has been subjected to and socialized to develop the character traits and the volitional structure needed for dependency work; 2) that certain sexual behaviors commensurate with forming attachments, being submissive to another's will, and so forth have been made compulsory for women; and 3) that poor women and women of color have been forced into paid employment as dependency workers by the scanty financial resources and limited employment opportunities available to them, and middle-class women have been forced out of paid employment not commensurate with their (largely unpaid) duties as dependency workers. It has not merely “happened” that women have consistently “chosen” to make dependency relations and dependency work central to their vision of the good life, while men have chosen a wider variety of options.
— Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency
History is full of lady engineers and spies and scientists. But history is also written by the victorious, and it may not surprise you that thus far the overwhelming winners have been straight white dudes. That hasn't worked out so well for everyone else.
— Sam Maggs, Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History
I spent a great deal of my ilfe trying to be quiet and nice and not piss anyone off. I was misereable. It served no purpose. And they still came for me. It made me even easier to dismiss, to overlook, to assume I was just somebody else everybody could roll over and spout off ridiculously sexist, racist crap without dissent.But nodding and smiling gets old. It makes it easier for people to box you up and ship you off, I'm only really alive when I'm pissing people off anyway
— Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution
Young white men in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old range are often coming to grips with the fact that life isn't as easy as they were promised. I've been there myself. When you realize that life isn't going to hand you the job you want or the woman you want to fuck, you look around for someone to blame, and feminism becomes an easy target. If only women were subservient objects who stayed at home, there would be more jobs open to young white men and more women with no other option but to have sex with them for sustenance. I realize that white-man utopia sounds really pleasing to these guys, but it's basically everyone else's worst nightmare It's not so great for them either, but they won't get that for a long time, if ever.Suffice to say you won't convince them of this in an online comments section, either.
— Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution
If I had had a daughter, I always knew what I would tell her. First of all, I would try to counter all outdated stereotypical claptrap that girls are commonly told about their sex--that women are valued far more for their sexual characteristics than their character and brains--and encourage her to be a truly independent person. Only knowing who she is herself will she be able to find find her own life's work and make good decisions in choosing a partner and having children.
— Doris Anderson, Rebel Daughter : An Autobiography
Complacent eligible voters who abstained from voting because “I don’t like either candidate”— provided a deadly assist. You are the collective of assassins responsible for slaughtering the America of hope and progress.Afro Bo Peep
— Erin Passons, The Nasty Women Project: Voices from the Resistance
our society is unequal, and bodily difference is used to justify that inequality.
— Emer O'Toole, Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently
America- often called the land of milk and honey- tends to be sweeter, more generous to those who don't rock the boat. Sarah Mullen
— Erin Passons, The Nasty Women Project: Voices from the Resistance
She felt the phrase “demand her rights” had lain inside her forever, waiting.
— Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
But she didn’t want to rest! – Her blood ran through her more slowly, its pace domesticated, like a beast that had trained its steps to fit in its cage.
— Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
The idea that "femininity is artificial" is also blatantly misogynistic. Just as woman is man's "other", so too is femininity masculinity's "other". Under such circumstances, negative connotations like "artificial", "contrived", and "frivolous" become built into our understanding of femininity - indeed, this is precisely what allows masculinity to always come off as "natural", "practical" and "uncomplicated".
— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
In my opinion, questions that are based on something real ought to be settled by something real without all this damned lazy miserable drifting
— Joanna Russ, The Female Man
I voted for every woman who has to leave a baby too soon, who has to downgrade her career, or who is made to feel invisible in her role as a mother.
— Erin Passons, The Nasty Women Project: Voices from the Resistance
Men are minded to conjure the most extraordinary tales about women who would question their place in the world.
— L.M. Myles, Cranky Ladies of History
I crunch the assigned reading in my shaking hand, an article titled “Dan Quayle was right.” It argued that children raised by single moms were destined for failure. Joined by my fellow students, we argue that our lives are not limited by our absent fathers. The teacher laughs awkwardly and backs away from our arguments. “For God’s sake, don’t take it personally.” The cardinal sin of women and oppressed people everywhere: taking their lives personally.- S.A. Williams
— Erin Passons, The Nasty Women Project: Voices from the Resistance
Just after midnight, I text my parents who live in Florida: Please tell me you didn’t help elect him.No reply.The next morning, New York City wakes up with a wet, gray yawn. The air is thick with mist. The city moves at a slower, muffled pace. New Yorkers rarely make eye contact; today isn’t much different, except when eyes meet, they lock for a moment in shared grief. Everyone’s shoulders bend forward, the world weighing heavier on them than it did yesterday.The sidewalks and the coffee shops are quiet. Even the subway paces through its underground veins in somber silence. My husband tells me: “The city hasn’t been this quiet since 9/11.”—Melissa Lirtsman
— Erin Passons, The Nasty Women Project: Voices from the Resistance
Our Arab mothers and sisters are suffering from injustices like domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriages and honour killings, some are still fighting for their right to drive or travel without male custody therefore our powerful Arab media was not only expected to broadcast this particular one of a kind Women’s march it should have held panels to dissect the issues being brought forth in order for the Arab world to better understand that gender equality is not an idea that one believes in, it is a planned movement that requires an enormous effort on the part of both men and women to reach.
— Aysha Taryam
The Women’s March had restored my faith as I am sure it has introduced the young generation to the new wave of feminism. A feminist movement that was made up of both sexes and all ages and creeds, one that did away with the arguments and stood arm in arm for a greater cause, a cause which the Arab media did not wish to project.
— Aysha Taryam
Even within our culture, there are times when breasts stop being read as bouncy sex balls: when women are breastfeeding, there's pretty wide acceptance of the fact that shouting 'phwoar' is bad form.
— Emer O'Toole, Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently
I predict an hour when the term Women In Art will be as strange sounding a topic as the title Men In Art would be now.
— Cecilia Beaux
My mother had raised me on a thousand stories of girls who were saved by the Djinn, princesses rescued from towers, peasant girls rescued from poverty.Turned out, stories were just stories.I was on my own.
— Alwyn Hamilton, Traitor to the Throne
Women have problem areas in a way that men don't. We have big hips and muffin tops. Men just have the thing where they create wars and wreak havoc all over the globe.
— Jessi Klein, You'll Grow Out of It
For a split second I wonder what I am doing here on this battlefield, on the front line. I am a princess. I am soft and regal. I am quiet, forgotten Sorrowlynn, who never leaves her rooms. And yet I am so much more. I have the capacity to be anything. To be everything! This girl running to fight for the greater good is me. For the first time ever, I feel like I am living the life I was meant to be living all along.
— Bethany Wiggins, The Dragon's Price
The only big weapon anyone has against you is that you’re human. Fucked-up, a bit. Imperfect, yes. In this, you are like every great human who has ever lived, male and female alike. If you’re slutty, well, Mary Wollstonecraft was pretty slutty. If you’re needy, my God, Charlotte Brontë’s needs could devour a person alive. If you’re mean, or self-destructive, or crazy, I assure you, Billie Holiday managed to record ‘Strange Fruit’ while being spectacularly self-destructive, and Sylvia Plath wrote Ariel while being both crazy and very, very mean. The world is still better with those works in it. Humanity is still lucky that those particular women existed, and that, despite their deep flaws and abudance of raw humanity, they stood up and said what they had to say.
— Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why
I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.
— bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
Women will only be truly sexually liberated when we arrive at a place where we can see ourselves as having sexual value and agency irrespective of whether of not we are the objects of male desire.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.
— Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature
Unfortunately, every era needs to demonize feminist. The Feminazi was the 1990s version. The term was coined by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh to describe women who support abortion rights. It was taken up by ultra-right-wing conservatives everywhere and came to refer feminists in general. (…) A Feminazi is a strident, controlling bitch who –Oh, horrible crime!– insists on equal right for women. She doesn’t agree with the right-wing construct that the man is the ruler of the home. Her goal in life is to turn men into whimpering slaves who take care of the kids and share the housecleaning, something men must resist at all costs or American society will crumple even more. The Guerrilla Girls are still waiting for the day when everyone will think of the Feminist as a positive stereotype. Don’t let us wait too long.
— Guerrilla Girls, Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes
I started to see the bigger picture of things: Islam was not relegated to the tiny, sometimes frustrating and seemingly arbitrary details of practice, but rather entered the larger picture of spirituality and worship that contextualized my womanhood. In order to be able to derive these logical conclusions about my religion, I had to go back to the basics and understand the very fundamental principles upon which it was founded: justice, social equality, racial equality, financial equality, and, possibly most important of all, gender equality. Thus began my lifelong love affair with Islamic feminism.
— Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story
The theft of brown women's narratives is not only an injustice placed on them, but also one extended to their male counterparts; by insisting they need to be liberated from their 'barbaric' civilization, Laura [Bush] summoned the colonial assertion that brown women need saving from brown men, when, in actuality, brown women have suffered at the hands of white men more than at those of any other oppressor in history.
— Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together...
— Lilla Watson
...the essential task of feminism is not to go looking around for a ready-made theory and then try to make it relevant to our (little?) "issue" or "problem". This is self-depreciating in the extreme, a fact that is obvious if one realises that feminism is cosmic in its dimensions.
— Mary Daly
I don't want other people to decide who I am. I want to decide that for myself.
— Emma Waston
We’re your daughters, mister. We’re your girlfriends, we’re your sisters, we’re your precious baby girls. Goddammit, listen.
— Colleen Curran
Addressing the economic plight of women may ultimately be the feminist platform that draws a collective response. It may well become the place of collective organizing, the common ground, the issue that unites all women.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Impressionable young students must be given true examples of the Arab woman through her own words. When I say students I do not mean young girls alone for in order to raise a generation that truly believes in gender equality it is the young boys that have to listen first, those boys who will grow up to have female rivals at every stage of their professional careers. In order to foster greater respect for their future interactions as equals at par with each other in every way we must introduce them both to those female thinkers, those female warriors who have fought to create a distinct voice, that voice that emanates from an agony, a sense of injustice and suffocation from years of silence, that no male thinker, no matter how great, can mimic.
— Aysha Taryam
If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for feminist movement in conjunction with efforts to obtain better paying jobs for women and finding jobs for unemployed women of all classes, feminism would have been seen as a movement addressing the concerns of all women.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It shows us that no matter how misguided feminist thinkers have been in the past, the will to change, the will to create the context for struggle and liberation, remains stronger than the need to hold on to wrong beliefs and assumptions.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Don't be concerned with other women's beauty. Only admire God's amazing work and wish them well., this earth was made to bite us in half and grind us to bone, but we were made to be kind.
— Key Ballah, Preparing My Daughter For Rain:: notes on how to heal and survive.
There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.
— Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
The United States as we know it was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, this idea that some rights are so sacrosanct not even a government can take them away. Of course, this country’s founding fathers were only thinking of wealthy white men when they codified this principle, but still, it’s a nice idea, that there are some freedoms that cannot be taken away.What this debate shows us is that even in this day and age, the rights of women are not inalienable. Our rights can be and are, with alarming regularity, stripped away.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?
— Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism
Owning her face, unapologetically, or—even more revolutionarily—happily was the bravest thing she could possibly do.
— Georgia Clark
The Rites of Beauty also seduce women by meeting their current hunger for color and poetry. As they make their way into male public space that is often prosaic and emotionally dead, beauty's sacraments glow brighter than ever. As women are inundated with claims on their time, ritual products give them an alibi to take some private time for themselves. At their best they give women back a taste of mystery and sensuality to compensate them for their days spent in the harsh light of the workplace.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
— Audre Lorde
Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
I felt guilty all of a sudden, as if just by existing and talking to him I was leading him on.
— Meredith Russo, If I Was Your Girl
And, why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great -that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly". Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because, you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty -so as to be forgiven; or to forgot, to bury it until next time.
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
I’m using beauty to subvert the system.
— Georgia Clark, The Regulars
As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely bu condemning its government or by saying three times "As a woman my country is the whole world." -Notes Towards a Politics of Location.
— Adrienne Rich
This FEMINIST Goes Hard.
— Stephanie Lahart
She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she'd been proven right.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never know how many other women shared it.
— Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand.
— Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing In The Seventies and Eighties
Today's feminism infantilizes women. If feminism is not about freedom, then what the heck is it for? It just becomes a grievance lobby of victimhood games.
— Janet Albrechtsen
In truth, to go for a walk with one's eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
She was a professional. A professional who didn’t need five inches of makeup and f*ck-me cleavage to do her job.
— Georgia Clark, The Regulars
What do you think Amy Poehler is doing right now?
— Georgia Clark, The Regulars
My voice is strong and imposing, and my legs are powerful enough to hold up its weight. I wake up every day assured of my right to not only participate in the world as an equal part of it, but to loudly reject the narrative that keeps trying to tell me to pipe down, fold in, shrivel up, simper, apologise and slink my way through life so as not to offend or upset anyone with the complicated, beautiful mess that is me. I have fought the odds to get here, empowered by the knowledge that every single woman who has come before me has fought her own battle in order to survive. We fight like girls. This is how we prevail. And this is why we're still standing.
— Clementine Ford, Fight Like A Girl
Dex's mother knew she should be afraid for her daughter. This, she'd been told, was the tragedy of being a girl. To live in fear–it was the fate of any parent, maybe, but the special provenance of a mother to a daughter, one woman raising another, knowing too well what could happen. This was what lurked inside the luckiest delivery rooms, the ones whose balloons screamed It's a girl!: pink cigars and flowered onesies and fear.
— Robin Wasserman
I think that's when I understood that you only ruined my life because my life needed ruining. Because the life you rejected demanded that I spend all my time telling my daughter to be less and my son to be more.
— Courtney Milan, The Suffragette Scandal
The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming.
— bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
Heightened awareness often gives the illusion that a problem is lessening. This is most often not the case. It may mean simply that a problem has become so widespread it can no longer remain hidden or be ignored.
— bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
Most feminist groups began with women talking about how we saw ourselves and other women, how we acted. We openly confessed our fears and hatred of other women. We talked about how to combat jealousy, the politics of envy, and so on.
— bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
If overthrowing some five thousand years of patriarchy seems like a big order, just focus on celebrating each self-respect step along the way
— Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues
I want you to promise me that you'll stop comparing yourself to everyone else.' 'What?' I broke off the hug, not understanding. 'You. Evelyn. You're always like, 'I wish I coulld be like this' or 'I wish I could be more like so-and-so'. You're obsessed with being normal, but that's well boring, and you're extraordinary, Evie. Promise me you'll stop trying to stop stop being you'.
— Holly Bourne, Am I Normal Yet?
if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul,body and pride of man?
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Bad feminism seems like the only way I can both embrace myself as a feminist and be myself, and so I write. I chatter away on Twitter about everything that makes me angry and all the small things that bring me joy. I write blog posts about the meals I cook as I try to take better care of myself, and with each new entry, I realize that I'm undestroying myself after years of allowing myself to stay damaged.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
Stop shoving things up me. Stop shoving and stop cleaning it up. My vagina doesn't need to be cleaned up. It smells good already. Not like rose petals. Don't try to decorate.
— Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues
Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?In this style, argue tyrants of every denomination, from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to crush reason; yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
You are a goddess. You are a catch. You are, like, the outcome of every self-help book ever written.
— Georgia Clark, The Regulars
It became a kind of passion. Discovering the key, unlocking the vagina's mouth, unlocking this voice, this wild song.
— Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues
I think the most important thing I do in my professional life today is delivering public, impermeable "no"s and sticking to them. I say no to people who prioritize being cool over being good. I say no to misogynists who want to weaponize my body against me. I say no to men who feel entitled to my attention and reverence, who treat everything the light touches as a resource for them to burn. I say no to religious zealots who insist that I am less important than an embryo. I say no to my own instinct to stay quiet.
— Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
Deeds are stronger than words, and children are not biblical scholars. As long as they see girls and women treated as inferior by their faith, that's what they will learn, no matter what their holy book says.
— Peter Wilkes
Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. -The Subjection of Women
— John Stuart Mill
We're all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Be all this as it may, men should not have to depend upon physical strength for distinction, otherwise animals would have the advantage over them, as would the physically strongest among us.
— François Poullain de la Barre, De l'égalité des deux sexes , discours physique et moral où l'on voit l'importance de se défaire des préjugez
.all the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but their affections. - The Subjection of Women
— John Stuart Mill
NORA: Yes; it is just so, Torvald. While I was still at home with father, he used to tell me all his views, and so of course I held the same views; if at any time I had a different view I concealed it, because he would not have liked people with opinions of their own. He used to call me his little doll, and play with me, as I in my turn used to play with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house.
— Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
NORA: No; only merry. And you were always so friendly and kind to me. But our house has been nothing but a nursery. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa's doll-child. And my children were, in their turn, my dolls. I was exceedingly delighted when you played with me, just as children were whenever I played with them. That has been our marriage, Torvald.
— Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
Eight or nine out of ten mothers in our society today believe that they have accomplished their duty if their daughters, once married, are not sent home in divorce. -Daughters in Boxes
— Kishida Toshiko
The promise of Plath's work was that a woman could de-fang the charges of hysteria by owning them. Unlike Solanas, who seemingly never saw herself as flawed or sick, or Wollstonecraft and Bronte, who swept their flaws under the carpet so as not to compromise themselves, or even Jacobs, who was honest, but played a delicate game of apologizing for "sins" that were not her fault so as to reach her audience, Plath took her own flaws as her subject, and thereby made them the source of her authority. By detailing her own overabundant inner life, no matter how huge and frightening it was -- her sexuality, her suicidality, her broken relationships, her anger at the world or at men -- she could, in some crucial way, own that part of her story, simply because she chose to tell it. And, if she could do this, other women could do it, too.
— Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why
I doubt it's a strictly factual account, but these attitudes are deeply imbedded.Which means that our only hope of changing them, of ending the wrecks, lies not in stopping or even changing the Internet -- even with the best blocking functions, report-abuse functions, real-name transparency protocols, and twenty-four-hour moderation in the world, hate (to quite Jurassic Park) finds a way -- but in changing ourselves, and our definitions of womanhood. We have to stop believing that when a woman does something we don't like, we are qualified and entitled to punish her, violate her, or ruin her life. We have to change our ideas of what a "good" woman, or a "likable" woman, or simply a "woman who can leave her house without fearing for her life because she is a woman," can be.
— Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why
I hear many young women say they can't find well-known feminists with whom they identify. That can be disheartening, but I say, let us (try to) become the feminists we would like to see moving through the world.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
We've heard history for centuries. It's time for herstory.
— Mommy Moo Moo
Frequently, I have been asked how I got to be this way. How did I, born black in a white country, poor in a society where wealth is adored and sought after at all costs, female in an environment where only large ships and some engines are described favourably by using the female pronoun-how did I get to be Maya Angelou?
— Maya Angelou, Mom & Me & Mom
Now imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There’s no such thing as ugly.
— Georgia Clark, The Regulars
I ask my father to read an article about male entitlement and emotional labor."Can you just tell me what it says?" he says.
— Martha Grover, The End of My Career
Economist Marvin Harris described women as a "literate and docile" labor pool, and "therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries." The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
In India, a "bride burning"-- to punish a woman for inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry-- takes place approximately once every two hours, but rarely constitute news.
— Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
His shadow stretched out past mine. I remembered Mom telling me how frightening men were, all men really, how helpless it often felt to be a woman among men, and for the first time I understood what she meant.
— Meredith Russo, If I Was Your Girl
I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart.—I shall be employed about things, not words!
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.' Critic John Berger's well-known quote has been true throughout the history of Western culture, and it is more true now than ever.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
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.
— Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
And if you looking for a surefire way to turn a comfortable party into a very alcohol-fueled romp through gender politics, bring up feminism.
— Alida Nugent, You Don't Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism