c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
But why does it matter what we call it, as long as there is concerted action to respond to and prevent such crimes? It matters because if we really want to fix something that is broken, if we want to heal these fractures in our society, then we need to understand their causes. If we do not, then we will forever continue to place giant sticking plasters over the wounds left by this violence, trying to bandage over losses that can never be replaced. As long as this violence continues, it is obviously the case that we do have to address the symptoms, but my argument is that we must also address the causes if we want a long-term reduction or even, perhaps, the eventual eradication of male violence against women.
— Finn Mackay
Women are always being asked when they're going to have children. It's a question they're asking even more often.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
These hormones do not make me feel feminine: every night, I lie in bed feeling wrenched, and the bulge of my sanitary napkin in my kickers looks like a cock.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
But when women are asked when they're going to have children, there is, in actually, another darker, more pertinent question lying underneath it.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Men and women alike have convinced themselves of a dragging belief: that somehow women are incomplete without having children.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
If you take a moment to consider the state of the world, the thing you notice is that there are plenty of babies being born; the planet doesn't really need all of us to produce more babies.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
First world babies are eating this planet like termites.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
In the 21st century, it can't be about who we might make, and what they might do, anymore. It has to be about who we are and what we're going to do.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Abortions are never seen as a positive thing, as any other operation to remedy a potentially life-ruining condition would.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
The idea that I might not-- in an earlier era, or a different country-- have a choice in the matter seems both emotionally and physically barbaric.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Women's bodies do not give up their babies so easily, and so silently, is the message. The heart will always remember.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
But women living in fear of aging, and pulling painful and expensive tricks to hide it from the world, does not say something amazing about us as humans.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
They think the recipe for a 'home-maker' is- a woman who isn't smart enough, lacks skills and above all isn't ambitious enough! Well she is every bit as smart as the woman who puts on a suit to go to work in a man's world to prove- times have changed! She is every bit as intelligent!
— Mrinalini Mitra, Belief
It’s amazing to me that it’s still considered a notable, commendable trait –‘Oh, she’s a well-known feminist’ –in a woman, or a girl, or a man, or a boy. That that is the unusual thing. Really, it should be the reverse. Rather than what seems like a minority having to spend time, energy, brain and heart explaining why they’re ‘into’ equality, the majority should be explaining why they’re not. You put the time into explaining why –in a world where every concept of justice, wisdom, progress and rightness is a human invention –we still prefer the human concept of ‘some people being inferior to others’ over ‘this is a vast, inky, cold, empty universe, and in it, we are the only humans that exist, all sharing a tiny milky green/ blue world, and faced with a multitude of problems, and an infinite capacity for joy, and should therefore try and stick together and accord each other some respect’.
— Caitlin Moran, Moranifesto
Masses of the people think that feminism is always the only about women seeking to be equal to men. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Her voice was erudite, interesting; the voice of someone who straddled two cultures with a surety and style that I wished my boyfriend could find. She was smart, funny, and, above all, completely capable of controlling her life and what happened to it.
— Ruth Ahmed, When Ali Met Honour
Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. I liked this definition because it does not imply that men were the enemy.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
There's just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they've got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time.
— Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
The Goddess helps us heal the deep wound within us that tells us we are unworthy.
— Tabby Biddle, Find Your Voice: A Woman's Call to Action
A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving... There can be no love without justice.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
The reply to this was that Three took out a small revolver, and this surprised me; for everyone knows that anger is most intense towards those you know: it is lovers and neighbors who kill each other. There's no sense, after all, in behaving that way toward a perfect stranger; where's the satisfaction? No love, no need; no need, no frustration; no frustration, no hate, right? It must have been fear.
— Joanna Russ
What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpents offer and had said to him instead, "Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be -- let me be a woman?
— Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me be a Woman
As we learn about the ancient Goddess religion and cultures, we get to re-evaluate the information that has come to us through patriarchal sources. We start to wake up to the fact that everything that was written about us is without us.
— Tabby Biddle, Find Your Voice: A Woman's Call to Action
Popular magazine articles and Oprah-style television shows falsely represent work-life balance as an individual challenge, a lifestyle choice available to all women. The feminism on offer is woefully thin and unpleasurable. On the high end of the income scale, feminism seems to mean working even more than men. The media celebrate women such as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her brutal work ethics--magazine articles report, awestruck, they they barely sleep, that their staffs struggle to match their work hours, that they've become the rare female leaders in their spheres by laboring harder than male colleagues. Mayer reported proudly that while at Google, she would sleep under her desk. By this measure, feminism, that Utopian striving for equality that we've carried through centuries of opposition, is boiled down merely to the right to work ourselves to death. If feminism means the right to sleep under my desk, then screw it. And this is a vision that can be palatable, just barely, only at the high end of the economy where work is plausibly couched in self-actualization. . . . If any feminism is going to be worth its name, it will improve the lives of all women instead of setting them in competition with each other or applying only to this or that region or income stratum. Liberal feminism would grant women the right to compete. A radical feminism would grant women a good life in which they have real power.
— Sarah Léonard, The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century
Above all I needed to be made to think about what it meant that I was a woman, instead of acting unreflectingly as though I were a man, bound to live out the script of a man’s life.
— Jill Ker Conway
I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.
— Gloria Steinem
Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Window issues in our lives - I want a Zero Tolerance policy on "All the Patriarchal Bullshit.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
I very much like men. They're interesting to me, and I mostly wish they would be better about how they treat women so I wouldn't have to call them out so often.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
But while compliant, raise-your-hand-and-speak-when-called-on behaviors might be rewarded in school, they are less valued in the workplace.
— Sheryl Sandberg
One female who knows what to dois better than a thousand males who don't.
— Mihri Hatun, Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish & Hebrew Poems
First and foremost feminist movement urged females to no longer see ourselves and our bodies as the property of men.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
When we see love as the will to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love.
— bell hooks
Well. If you are worried about the effects of feminism and you are a man, it's probably because you are worried that men will start to be treated like women have been treated since the dawn of time. By this I mean worse, which makes you nervous, no doubt.
— Alida Nugent, You Don't Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism
There is no beast, no rush of fire, like woman so untamed. She calmly goes her way where even panthers would be shamed.
— Aristophanes, Lysistrata
It was the women of afghanistan,my mother believed,who-once they’d been granted access to books and education- would be the salvation of the country
— Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club
And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat.
— Sylvia Plath
We're forced to walk a difficult line by this insistence that we only write about our personal journeys," I told the audience. "We end up in this position of only being allowed to represent ourselves, but having to make sure we don't misrepresent everyone. This creates some division in our communities - everyone has their own opinion about what's good representation and what isn't, and you can't please them all." (p. 231)
— Juliet Jacques, Trans: A Memoir
All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now.
— Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band
Through the practice of compassion and forgiveness, I was able to sustain my appreciation for her work and cope with the grief and disappointment I felt about the loss of this relationship. Practicing compassion enabled me to understand why she might have acted as she did and to forgive her. Forgiving means that I am able to see her as a member of my community still, one who has a place in my heart should she wish to claim it.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
The truth, 'stop violence against women' is a truth that is flawed, because it ignores the many forms of abuses of women, and then totally ignores men, children and the unborn.Why the unborn ? Well today, more and more unborn women of tomorrow are having their heart-beats terminated today, because they are female.
— Caesar J. B. Squitti, The Jesus Christ Code: The Light: The Rainbow of Truths
Growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsibility for whatever happens in your life. To choose growth is to embrace a love that heals.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
To live fully we would need to let go of our fear of dying. That fear can only be addressed by the love of living. We have a long history in this nation of believing that to be too celebratory is dangerous, that being optimistic is foolhardy, hence our difficulty in celebrating life, in teaching our children and ourselves how to love life.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Ironically, the worship of of death as a strategy for coping with our underlying fear of death's power does not truly give us solace. It is deeply anxiety producing. The more we watch spectacles of death, of random violence and cruelty, the more afraid we become in our daily lives.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
. . . when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten.
— Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band
Every woman knows what I'm talking about when I say girls grow up with a desire to please, to cede their power to other people. . . everyone knows about the sometimes aggressive and manipulative ways men often exert power in the world, and how by using the word empowered to describe women, men are simply maintaining their own power and control.
— Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band
In a world where you can get a spare kidney, a black-market Picasso or a ticket to ride into space, why can’t I see some actual sex? Some actual fucking from people who want to fuck each other? Some chick in an outfit I halfway respect, having the time of her life? I have MONEY. I’m willing to PAY for this. I AM NOW A 35-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, AND I JUST WANT A MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR INTERNATIONAL PORN INDUSTRY WHERE I CAN SEE A WOMAN COME. I just want to see a good time.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Because there’s a silent, shrugging, stoical acceptance of all the things in the world we can never be part of: shorts, swimming pools, strappy dresses, country walks, roller-skating, ra-ra skirts, vest tops, high heels, rope climbing, sitting on a high stool, walking past building sites, flirting, being kissed, feeling confident. And ever losing weight, ever. The idea of suggesting we don’t have to be fat –that things could change –is the most distant and alien prospect of all. We’re fat now and we’ll be fat forever and we must never, ever mention it, and that is the end of it. It’s like Harry Potter’s Sorting Hat. We were pulled from the hat marked ‘Fat’ and that is what we must now remain, until we die. Fat is our race. Our species. Our mode. As a result, there is very little of the outside world –and very little of the year –we can enjoy. Summer is sweaty under self-conscious layers. On stormy days, wind flattens skirts against thighs, and alarms both us and, we think, onlookers and passers-by. Winter is the only time we feel truly comfortable: covered head to toe in jumpers, coats, boots and hat. I develop a crush on Father Christmas. If I married him, not only would I be expected to stay fat, but I’d look thin standing next to him, in comparison. Perspective would be my friend. We all dream of moving to Norway, or Alaska, where we could wear massive padded coats all the time, and never reveal an inch of flesh. When it rains, we’re happiest of all. Then we can just stay in, away from everyone, in our pyjamas, and not worry about anything. The brains in jars can stay inside, nice and dry.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
My fat years were when I was not human shaped. I was a 16-stone triangle, with inverted triangle legs, and no real neck. And that’s because I wasn’t doing human things. I didn’t walk or run or dance or swim or climb up stairs; the food I ate wasn’t the stuff that humans are supposed to eat. No one is supposed to eat a pound of boiled potatoes covered in Vitalite, or a fist-sized lump of cheese on the end of a fork, wielded like a lollipop. I had no connection to or understanding of my body. I was just a brain in a jar. I wasn’t a woman.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding.
— Kate Millett
Yet feminism has never killed anyone. Machismo, it kills every day.
— Benoîte Groult
How was she not the quintessential woman in our culture, compulsively pleasing others in order to achieve some degree of perfection and power that's forever just around the corner, out of reach? It was easier for her to disappear, to free herself finally from that body, to find a perfection in dying.
— Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band
There. There you are. You have dropped a marker pin on your body, to reclaim yourself, to remind you where you are: inside yourself. Somewhere. Somewhere in there.
— Caitlin Moran
Like many liberal men in the age of feminism, he believed women should have equal access to jobs and be given equal pay, but when it came to matters of home and heart he still believed caregiving was the female role. Like many men, he wanted a woman to be 'just like his mama' so that he did not have to do the work of growing up.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Most men and women born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriages and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships. Had I been evaluating my relationships from a standpoint that emphasized growth rather than duty and obligation, I would have understood that abuse irreparably undermines bonds. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.... Women who would no more tolerate a friendship in which they were emotionally and physically abused stay in romantic relationships where these violations occur regularly. Had they brought to these bonds the same standards they bring to friendship they would not accept victimization.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
As the prevailing voices in the public spotlight are predominantly men, stepping into the spotlight with the truth of who you are as a woman is political change.
— Tabby Biddle, Find Your Voice: A Woman's Call to Action
The feminine political voice is personal. It's intimate. It's caregiving and life enhancing. It's about bringing more love, caring and justice into the world. It's also fierce and determined.
— Tabby Biddle, Find Your Voice: A Woman's Call to Action
Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you.
— Emma Cline, The Girls
Mary Woolley wasn't only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. "Feminism is not a prejudice," she said, "It is a principle.
— Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Because I believe that deep down in woman's nature lies slumbering the spirit of revolt.Because I believe that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary child-rearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions.Because I believe that woman's freedom depends upon awakening that spirit of revolt within her against these things which enslave her.Because I believe that these things which enslave woman must be fought openly, fearlessly, consciously.
— Margaret Sanger
Her voice is still pitched high, thanks to her youth, but it has a certain incipient darkness to it, a low richness that will mature in the coming years to the smoky tones of a priestess or a queen -- a woman of great natural power.
— Libbie Hawker, Daughter of Sand and Stone
Men always laugh whenever a woman says she has political skill. But it's not such a difficult thing to master.
— Libbie Hawker, Daughter of Sand and Stone
When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.... An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught that we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as we were also taught to believe that we were loved. For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
If you go door to door in our nation and talk to citizens about domestic violence, almost everyone will insist that they do not support male violence against women, that they believe it to be morally and ethically wrong. However, if you then explain that we cannot end male violence against women by challenging patriarchy, and that means no longer accepting the notion that men should have more rights and privileges than women because of biological difference or that men should have the power to rule over women, that is when the agreement stops. There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please these men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
A man is likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative and creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over it becomes normal.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
Practically every mental health care practitioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gurus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers. Indeed, as someone committed to being honest in daily life I experience the constant drag of being seen as a 'freak,' for telling the truth, even when I speak truthfully about simple matters. If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situation, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, just as worthy of acknowledgement. These are the little things, but sometimes it is the little things that sting the most.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask what we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
We define masculinity in very narrow way. Masculinity is hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak-- a hard man.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
In retrospect, it is evident that highlighting abortion rather than reproductive rights as a whole reflected the class biases of the women who were at the forefront of the movement. While the issue of abortion was and remains relevant to all women, there were other reproductive issues that were just as vital which needed attention and might have served to galvanize masses. These issues ranged from basic sex education, prenatal care, preventive health care that would help females understand how their bodies worked, to forced sterilization, unnecessary cesareans and/or hysterectomies, and the medical complications left in their wake. Of all these issues individual white women with class privilege identified most intimately with the pain of unwanted pregnancy. And they highlighted the abortion issue. They were not by any means the only group in need of access to safe, legal abortions. As already stated, they were far more likely to have the means the to acquire an abortion than poor and working-class women. In those days poor women, black women included, often sought illegal abortions. The right to have an abortion was not a white-women-only issue; it was simply not the only or even most important reproductive concern for masses of American women.
— bell hooks
Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination we chart the journey, creating a map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love--starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
She will not bow her head to any woman or man, so why, indeed, should she bow to a needle?
— Libbie Hawker, Daughter of Sand and Stone
And perhaps some other later girl, leafing through her father's library, would come across a footnote in an academic journal and read the name 'Faith Sunderly.' Faith? she would think. That is a female name. A woman did this. If that is so...then so can I. And the little fire of hope, self-belief and determination would pass to another heart.
— Frances Hardinge
The laws of the solar system that previously only God had known could suddenly be read using scientific method. The view of the world changed. From one where God intervened, had opinions, smote, parted oceans, moved mountains and personally opened millions of flowers every day. To one where God was absent and the universe was a clock that he had created and wound up, but that now ticked of its own accord.
— Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?: A Story About Women and Economics
I un-gritted my teeth to speak. "I need no more proof of tyranny.""Our only desire is the wellbeing of the common man.""I am not a man.
— Rod Duncan, The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter
People save their strong opinions for women. Why don’t they look at men? If I have to read another book or see another movie about a woman being courageous, I’ll throw up. Where are the books and movies about the men who do this stuff? But no, it’s always about the women. They not only have to get through it, they’re supposed to stand up, become a symbol, allow their whole lives to become derailed and defined by it. What if you don’t want to? People bang on about women having the right to make choices—well, they need to realise women have the right to choose in these matters, too.
— Kirsty Eagar, Summer Skin
Being a woman, in this world, ultimately makes you crazy.
— Holly Bourne, Am I Normal Yet?
More than anything, I began to hate women writers. Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Browning, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. Bronte, Bronte, and Bronte. I began to resent Emily, Anne, and Charlotte—my old friends—with a terrifying passion. They were not only talented; they were brave, a trait I admired more than anything but couldn't seem to possess. The world that raised these women hadn't allowed them to write, yet they had spun fiery novels in spite of all the odds. Meanwhile, I was failing with all the odds tipped in my favor. Here I was, living out Virginia Woolf's wildest feminist fantasy. I was in a room of my own. The world was no longer saying, "Write? What's the good of your writing?" but was instead saying "Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me.
— Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs
No wonder then that men who cared, who were open to change, often just gave up, falling back on the patriarchal masculinity they found so problematic. The individual men who did take on the mantle of a feminist notion of male liberation did so only to find that few women respected this shift. Once the 'new man' that is the man changed by feminism was represented as a wimp, as overcooked broccoli dominated by powerful females who were secretly longing for his macho counterpart, masses of men lost interest.
— bell hooks
Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they chose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them.
— bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust.
— bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
Boys are rewarded for playing games where they line up by height and then run into walls. Perhaps I'm making that up--or perhaps you should do a Google search for "Guy Runs into Wall for Fun."Not only do women hold up half the sky; we do it while carrying a 500-pound purse.From age sixteen to age twenty, a woman's body is a temple. From twenty-one to forty-five, it's an amusement park. From forty-five on, it's a terrarium.Bring your sense of humor with you at all times. Bring your friends with a sense of humor. If their friends have a sense of humor, invite them, too
— Gina Barreca, "If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?": Questions and Thoughts for Loud, Smart Women in Turbulent Times
Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about.
— Rebecca Solnit
One would think that potential motherhood should make women as a class as sacred as the priesthood. In common parlance we have much fine-spun theorizing on the exalted office of the mother, her immense influence in moulding the character of her sons; "the hand that rocks the cradle moves the world," etc., but in creeds and codes, in constitutions and Scriptures, in prose and verse, we do not see these lofty paeans recorded or verified in living facts. As a class, women were treated among the Jews as an inferior order of beings, just as they are to-day in all civilized nations. And now, as then, men claim to be guided by the will of God.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible
Whether they regard themselves as pro- or antifeminist, most women want men to do more of the emotional work in relationships. And most men, even those who wholeheartedly support gender equality in the workforce, still believe that emotional work is female labor. Most men continue to uphold the sexist decree that emotions have no place in the work world and that emotional labor at home should be done by females.
— bell hooks
We cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible
Our civil and criminal codes reflect at many points the spirit of the Mosaic. In the criminal code we find no feminine pronouns, as "He," "His," "Him," we are arrested, tried and hung, but singularly enough, we are denied the highest privileges of citizens, because the pronouns "She," "Hers" and "Her," are not found in the constitutions. It is a pertinent question, if women can pay the penalties of their crimes as "He," why may they not enjoy the privileges of citizens as "He"?
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible
Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more, I write to you.
— Alice Walker
No matter that information abounds that lets the public know that gay males come from two-parent homes and can be macho and women-hating, misguided assumptions about what makes a male gay still flourish. Every day boys who express feelings are psychologically terrorized, and in extreme cases brutally beaten, by parents who fear that a man of feeling must be homosexual. Gay men share with straight men the same notions about acceptable masculinity.
— bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
The confusion boys experience about their identity is heightened during adolescence. In many ways the fact that today's boy often has a wider range of emotional expression in early childhood, but if forced to suppress emotional awareness later on makes adolescence all the more stressful for boys. Tragically, were it not for the extreme violence that has erupted among teenage boys throughout our nation, the emotional life of boys would still be ignored. Although therapists tell us that mass media images of male violence and domination teach boys that violence is alluring and satisfying, when individual boys are violent, especially when they murder randomly, pundits tend to behave as though it were a mystery why boys are so violent.
— bell hooks
Now we are beginning to come to a point where human consciousness is moving back to female energy. The Earth is crying out very loudly, and the herbalists are springing up. Women are becoming healers again. That energy is coming back.
— Sun Bear, Walk in Balance: The Path to Healthy, Happy, Harmonious Living
Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We should give to our rulers, our sires and sons no rest until all our rights— social, civil and political— are fully accorded. How are men to know what we want unless we tell them? They have no idea that our wants, material and spiritual, are the same as theirs; that we love justice, liberty and equality as well as they do; that we believe in the principles of self-government, in individual rights, individual conscience and judgment, the fundamental ideas of the Protestant religion and republican government.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which hasbeen built up around her; she must reverence that within her which struggles for expression. Hereyes must be less upon what is and more clearly upon what should be. She must listen only witha frankly questioning attitude to the dogmatized opinions of man-made society. When shechooses her new, free course of action, it must be in the light of her own opinion—of her ownintuition. Only so can she give play to the feminine spirit. Only thus can she free her mate fromthe bondage which he wrought for himself when he wrought hers. Only thus can she restore tohim that of which he robbed himself in restricting her. Only thus can she remake the world.The world is, indeed, hers to remake, it is hers to build and to recreate. Even as she haspermitted the suppression of her own feminine element and the consequent impoverishment ofindustry, art, letters, science, morals, religions and social intercourse, so it is hers to enrich allthese
— Margret Sanger
What the world needs now is liberated men who have the qualities Silverstein cites, men who are 'empathetic and strong, autonomous and connected, responsible to self, to family and friends, to society, and capable of understanding how those responsibilities are, ultimately, inseparable.' Men need feminist thinking. It it the theory that supports their spiritual evolution and their shift away from the patriarchal model. Patriarchy is destroying the well-being of men, taking their lives daily.
— bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
There seems to be a fear that if men are raised to be people of integrity, people who can love, they will be unable to be forceful and act violently if needed.... We see that females that are raised with the traits any person of integrity embodies can act with tenderness, with assertiveness, and with aggression if and when aggression is needed.
— bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
The patriarchal/kyriarchal/hegemonic culture seeks to regulate and control the body – especially women’s bodies, and especially black women’s bodies – because women, especially black women, are constructed as the Other, the site of resistance to the kyriarchy. Because our existence provokes fear of the Other, fear of wildness, fear of sexuality, fear of letting go – our bodies and our hair (traditionally hair is a source of magical power) must be controlled, groomed, reduced, covered, suppressed.
— Yvonne Aburrow
The Gnostic’s passionate adoration of Sophia was known as philosophia – the love of Sophia – a mystical communication with divine feminine wisdom, having little to do with the strictly intellectual, most often masculine, pursuit currently labeled “philosophy.
— Zeena Schreck
Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
[Woman] is simply what man decrees; thus she is called "the sex," by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex -- absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the Other.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
If Eve was inferior to Adam because she was created after him, then Adam was inferior to the fishes, because they preceded him.
— Lillie Devereux Blake
The idea that women are 'our own worst enemies' forces us to admit that we don't have the power to be, even if we wanted too.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
Girl or boy, we fight our battles. But the God's let us choose our weapons.
— George R.R. Martin
Everyone has a home but me.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
You can't exploit a woman who has based her entire career on exploiting herself.
— Maggie Georgiana Young
Patriarchy is women structuring lifelong decisions around men they haven't met.
— Maggie Georgiana Young
The "new" Anglo-American feminist theory argues that too little mothering, and, in particular, the absence of mother-son connection, is what engenders both sexism and traditional masculinity in men. (...) This perspective positions mothering as central to feminist politics in its insistence that true and lasting gender equality will occur only when boys are raised as the sons of mothers. As the early feminist script of mother-son connection required the denial of the mother's power and the displacement of her identity as mother, the new perspective affirms the maternal and celebrates mother-son connection. In this, it rewrites the patriarchal and early feminist narrative to give (...) voice and presence to the mother and make mother-son connection central to the redesign of both traditional masculinity and the larger patriarchal culture.
— Andrea O'Reilly, Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons
One way [to recovery] would be by creating the best possible romance book or happy ending scenario for you ... out od your own experience. Another way would be to look at it as it is: a wake-up call to action to create a more humane world, without discrimination and sexism.
— Elina Juusola, Love on the Line: How to Recover from Romance Scams Gracefully and Without Victimisation
The girl's face hollowed with resignation; it had been a long time, but Sonja remembered what it was to have that face, what it was to feel you were no brighter than the dumbest man, no stronger than the weakest boy, and with those ideas crowding your head no wonder subordination was the only inevitable outcome.
— Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
I don't want anyone, especially a man, telling me what I can or cannot do with my money, job, or body.
— Belle Davis
The engine of capitalist patriarchy runs on the dirty fuel of women’s shame.
— Laurie Penny
One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is "I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart.
— Gloria Steinem
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.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.
— Vita Sackville-West
How am I supposed to be this honest? I know you’re not a Magic 8 Ball. You’re just some lady that wrote a book. I fall asleep with that book in my arms because words protect hearts and I’ve got this ache in my chest that won’t go away. I read Raging Flower and now I dream of raised fists and solidarity marches led by matriarchs fueled by café con leche where I can march alongside cigar-smoking doñas and Black Power dykes and all the world’s weirdos and no one is left out. And no one is living a lie.
— Gabby Rivera
An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus Tshirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment “Thou shall not kill.”But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies.Thus the Bible is making clear, that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
Like any girl, she still felt the echoes from earlier eras of repression. She'd been raised by a mother who'd fought hard to get a wage she deserved, to have access to education when she lacked every advantage, to travel on her own terms. The idea she was being asked-that she was expected to simply play along-made the blood throb in her veins. She was already in the damn stays. Wasn't the enough?
— Alexandra Bracken, Passenger
The ultimate decision [of wearing hijab] must be that of the individual. Western opinions on the hijab or burkas are rather irrelevant. We don't get to decide for Muslim women what does or does not oppress them, no matter how highly we think of ourselves.
— Roxane Gay
Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are. They all have the same vulnerability to rape, to battery, as children to incest. Poorer women have more vulnerability to prostitution, which is basically a form of sexual exploitation that is intolerable in an egalitarian society, which is the society we are fighting for.
— Andrea Dworkin
Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism.In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled "Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs", and explains that it started "only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger - and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn't usually mean including women.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
I am willing to make people uncomfortable so that my daughter doesn't have to!
— Kelly Sue DeConnick
Again and again a man would tell me about early childhood feelings of emotional exuberance, of unrepressed joy, of feeling connected to life and to other people, and then a rupture happened, a disconnect, and that feeling of being loved, of being embraced, was gone. Somehow the test of manhood, men told me, was the willingness to accept this loss, to not speak it even in private grief. Sadly, tragically, these men in great numbers were remembering a primal moment of heartbreak and heartache: the moment that they were compelled to give up their right to feel, to love, in order to take their place as patriarchal men.
— bell hooks
In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
Inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.
— Gloria Steinem
I became a feminist upon the realization that, whether physical, mental, or emotional, everything involved in obtaining love and approval from men required some form of self-mutilation.
— Maggie Georgiana Young
I also noticed that humor was even more of a survival tactic here than in most women's groups. As one asked: What did Columbus call primitive? Answer: Equal women.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road