c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large.
— Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done today,” she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had control over. They were a form of meditation, of salve. Kept busy, she had no time to ruminate and no time for opinions, certainly not feminist ones. I pressed her: “I mean, are you happy with your life, Rajima?” “I don’t know,” she said uncomfortably, as if she’d never really considered such a question. “When there is little you can do, you do what you can.” Happiness for my grandmother seemed to be a verb rather than a noun. She had so little control over her own life. Yet she took control, out of thin air for herself, when she could.
— Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, as a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, or when we impose what is right for everyone, without finding a way to enter into community and discover the "right" in the midst of cultural translation. It may be that what is "right" and what is "good" consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, to know unknowingness at the core of what we know.
— Judith Butler, Undoing Gender
But because divorce was so unheard of in middle-class Indian society, people looked at divorcées with a sort of incredulous shock and wonder, as if they were somehow criminals. They were ostracized from everyday life because of an invisible scarlet D hovering over them. Meanwhile, Second Wave feminism in the United States was changing attitudes about how women were treated in the workplace and in society, and how unmarried women were perceived in particular. Women were challenging age-old notions of their place in the world. Western media was full of unafraid, smart American women who published magazines, were marching in DC, and were generally making a lot of noise. No such phenomenon had reached our Indian shores. I’m sure my mother had read about the ERA movement, Roe v. Wade, and bra burnings. She, too, wanted the freedom to earn a living in a country where she wouldn’t be a pariah because of her marital status. We could have a fighting chance at surviving independently in the United States, versus being dependent on her father or a future husband in India. Conservative as he was, my grandfather K. C. Krishnamurti, or “Tha-Tha,” as I called him in Tamil, had encouraged her to leave my father after he witnessed how she had been treated. He respected women and loved his daughter and it must have broken his heart to see the situation she had married into. He, too, wanted us to have a second chance at happiness. America, devoid of an obvious caste system and outright misogyny, seemed to value hard work and the use of one’s mind; even a woman could succeed there. My grandfather was a closet feminist.
— Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
Dearra felt a blush on her cheeks as she responded. "It's not something I wish to repeat. Let's just say that all men seem to have one thing in common - they are all remarkably protective of their... swords. " Neither girl spoke further, but each wore a wicked grin on her face that would have sent Tebreh running in horror.
— Christine Grey, Whisper
It’s funny to me that most of the cooking in the world is done by women, and yet when you look at modern Western cuisine, it’s largely based on what a few dead Frenchmen have opined to be the correct way of doing things. It’s funny how these old European men used a label like “mother sauce” when there were no women to be found anywhere near those old professional kitchens. Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status.
— Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone’s tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food. This, of course, was in stark contrast to what was considered womanly or desirable in the West, especially when I started modeling. To look good in Western clothes you had to be extremely thin. Prior to this, I never thought about my weight except to think it wasn’t ever enough. Then, with modeling, I started depending on my looks to feed myself (though my profession didn’t allow me to actually eat very much). When I started hosting food shows, my career went from fashion to food, from not eating to really eating a lot, to put it mildly. Only this time the opposing demands of having to eat all this food and still look good by Western standards of beauty were off the charts. This tug-of-war was something I would struggle with for most of a decade.
— Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
The men on the show have it easy, in part because men on TV have uniforms: There’s the jacket, in black, blue, or gray. There’s the shirt, the pants. I can never tell whether Tom is gaining or losing weight beneath his boxy suits. He always looks the same. Tom also has the benefit of being Tom, a decorated veteran of the restaurant kitchen. Like so many chefs, he is practiced at the taste-of-this, taste-of-that eating regimen. I’m the one who has to look like a glorified weathergirl, with formfitting dresses and all, which, don’t get me wrong, I love—at least until I don’t.
— Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.
— Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
[in the context of 1881] "Don't you want to get married and have babies? Mrs. Bergman used to say that women need-" "What women need is more exercise, shorter skirts, and their own way once in a while.
— Karen Cushman, Rodzina
We are living in an increasingly feminized society. Some people view that as an increasingly civilized society, but it has left our boys with deep desires for honor but few outlets for displaying it appropriately.
— Cindy Rollins, Mere Motherhood: Morning times, nursery rhymes, and my journey toward sanctification
When, oh when will justice and reason prevail, and Woman descend from the pedestal on which Man has placed her (in order to prevent her from doing anything except standing perfectly still) and take her rightful place beside him?
— Elizabeth Peters, The Deeds of the Disturber
Where I grew up, women’s liberation was when you let a chick out of her cage so she could stretch her legs for 15 minutes.
— John Rachel
Once The Game Is Over, The King And The Pawn Go Back In The Same Box
— Italian proverb
To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour.
— Judith Butler, Undoing Gender
Feminism is really just the long slow realization that the things you love hate you.
— Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
There is nothing novel or comedic or righteous about men using the threat of sexual violence to control non-compliant women. This is how society has always functioned. Stay indoors, women. Stay safe. Stay quiet. Stay in the kitchen. Stay pregnant. Stay our of the world. IF you want to talk about silencing, censorship, placing limits and consequences on speech, this is what it looks like.
— Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
I can weave threads of myself into a tapestry already designed by others.
— Sara Raasch, Snow Like Ashes
Many women do not join organized resis­tance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices. They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppres­sion. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme re­strictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed.
— bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
In other words, for purposes of sex discrimination law, to be a woman means either to be like a man or like a lady. We have to meet either the male standard for males or the male standard for females.
— Catharine MacKinnon
The feminine body is expected to be flesh, but discreetly so;
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
A woman in love with another woman is revolution’s revolution: it is not an act of war. it is not an act of desperation. it is not an act of fear. it is - it always has been and it always, always will be - an act of love.
— Anonymous
The relation of woman to husband, of of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
she gives birth in pain, she heals males' wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
; the man who does not "understand" a woman is happy to replace his subjective deficiency with an objective resistance; instead of admitting his ignorance, he recognizes the presence of a mystery exterior to himself: here is an excuse that flatters his laziness and vanity at the same time.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
A startling thought this, that a woman could handle businessmatters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought toScarlett who had been reared in the tradition that men wereomniscient and women none too bright. Of course, she haddiscovered that this was not altogether true but the pleasantfiction still stuck in her mind. Never before had she put thisremarkable idea into words. She sat quite still, with the heavybook across her lap, her mouth a little open with surprise,thinking that during the lean months at Tara she had done a man'swork and done it well. She had been brought up to believe that awoman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed theplantation without men to help her until Will came. Why, why, hermind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in theworld without men's help--except having babies, and God knows, nowoman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
If we constantly rewrite history to fit how we see things now, we forget how things used to be and, equally important to future scholars, how we used to see them.
— Anne Summers, Damned Whores And God's Police: The Colonization Of Women In Australia
I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
A Hillary Clinton presidency would symbolically break the glass ceiling for women in the United States, but it would be unlikely to break through the military-industrial complex that has been keeping our nation in a perpetual state of war--killing people around the world, many of them women and children.
— Liza Featherstone, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton
The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance,” I think I am going to strangle them. Perhaps most annoying about that sound-bite is the somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-youdidn’t” sort of way in which it is most often recited, a magnificent irony given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification, as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality, gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there’s one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it’s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It’s like a junior high school mixer, where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another, and with all the external expectations that other people place on us.Sure, I can perform gender: I can curtsy, or throw like a girl, or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn’t explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come to me more naturally than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn’t capture the very real physical and emotional changes that I experienced when I hormonally transitioned from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn’t even begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same, wore the same T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers that I always had, yet once other people started reading me as female, they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience—with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions—completely off the hook.
— Julia Serano, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality: it becomes foreign to her; and at the same moment she is grasped by others as a thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments; she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid to show her flesh.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
The right to choose to abort a fetus is critical, as is the ability to effect that choice in real life, so it's great that Hillary Clinton wants to repeal the Hyde Amendment. But without welfare, single-payer health care, a minimum wage of at least $15--all policies she staunchly opposes--many people have to forgo babies they'd really love to have. That's not really a choice.It seems ill-conceived to have tethered feminism to such a narrow issue as abortion. Yet it makes sense from an insular Beltway fundraising perspective to focus on an issue that makes no demands--the opposite, really--of the oligarch class; this is probably a big reason why EMILY'S List has never dabbled in backing universal pre-K or paid maternity leave; a major reason 'reproductive choice' has such a narrow and negative definition in the American political discourse.The thing is, an abortion is by definition a story you want to forget, not repeat and relive. And for the same reason abortion pills will never be the blockbuster moneymakers heartburn medications are, abortion is a consummately foolish thing to attempt to build a political movement around. It happens once or twice in a woman's lifetime.Kids, on the other hand, are with you forever. A more promising movement--one that goes against everything Hillary Clinton stands for--might take that to heart.
— Liza Featherstone, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton
: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Advocating sexual repression as a solution to violence against women ends up mobilizing women around their fears rather than their visions.
— Alice Echols
Anyone that insults my country, my intelligence, my feminist ideals, all women in general, and a favorite childhood food, and refers to both himself and me in the third person in one sentence automatically gets an honorary spot on my Hate With Every Fiber of My Being For All Time list.
— J.T. Geissinger
Ancient peoples who lived close to the earth and in harmony with nature recognized the powerful energy that emanated from the moon and governed life on earth. The ever-changing phases of light and darkness created a balance in nature, and people lived in accordance with the moon's cycles and seasons. They observed the correlation between lunar cycles and the monthly menstrual cycles of women, and therefore gave the moon a female identity.
— Janet Lucy, Moon Mother, Moon Daughter
[Our] struggle for liberation has significance only if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people.
— bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Equality makes way for an increased number of free, considered choices, and an increased number of people with access to them. But choice itself isn't the same as equality...
— Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
Why was it that women were expected to restrain our every passion for the sake of propriety, but men couldn't do it even for the sake of the women they loved?
— Stephanie Dray, America's First Daughter
Advertising and marketing philosophies that thrive on emphasizing 'natural' differences don't stay in the realm of advertising and marketing--they spill into how we justify sexism and racism at every life stage.
— Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
I'm not a feminist. Many of those who carry its flag are as selfish as male chauvinists. They want privileges but not responsibilities. Bullies hiding under a fine cause.
— Prince-Alex Iwu
For every woman who burned a bra, there's a man burning to wear one.
— Miss Vera
Let's Level the Playing Field!
— Amy Mintz
The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.
— Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom
My spirit is willing to do what is right; and my flesh, I hope, is strong enough to accomplish the will of Heaven
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Gracious Creator of the whole human race! hast thou created such a being as woman, who can trace thy wisdom in thy works, and feel that thou alone art by thy nature, exalted above her-for no better purpose? Can she believe that she was only made to submit to man her equal; a being, who, like her, was sent into the world to acquire virtue? Can she consent to be occupied merely to please him; merely to adorn the earth, when her soul is capable of rising to thee? And can she rest supinely dependent on man for reason, when she ought to mount with him the arduous steeps of knowledge?
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Agni was her brother and she loved him, and he often understood her, but he was a man. In the end he thought as a man thinks, of owning and mastering.
— Judith Tarr, White Mare's Daughter
There's no fuzzy middle ground. You either believe that women are people or you don't. It's that simple.
— Joss Whedon
At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.
— Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom
Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.
— Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom
Significantly, in future feminist movement we will spend less time critiquing patriarchal marriage bonds and expend more effort showing alternatives, showing the value of peer relationships which are founded on principles of equality, respect, and the belief that mutual satisfaction and growth are needed for partnerships to be fulfilling and lasting.
— bell hooks
Still, somehow, inexplicably, “man-hater” is a word tossed around with insouciance as if this was a real thing that did harm. Meanwhile we have no real word for men who kill women. Is the word just “men”?
— Jessica Valenti, Sex Object
Treating feminism like it's a personal accessory that just isn't appropriate anymore obscures the places where feminism hasn't made strides for people who still need it.
— Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT KING TRITON. Specifically, King, why are you elderly but with the body of a teenage Beastmaster? How do you maintain those monster pecs? Do they have endocrinologists under the sea? Because I am scheduling you some bloodwork......Question: How come, when they turn back into humans at the end of Beauty and the Beast, Chip is a four-year-old boy, but his mother, Mrs. Potts, is like 107? Perhaps you're thinking, "Lindy, you are remembering it wrong. That kindly, white-haired, snowman-shaped Mrs. Doubtfire situation must be Chip's grandmother." Not so, champ! She's his mom. Look it up. She gave birth to him four years ago... As soon as you become a mother, apparently, you are instantly interchangeable with the oldest woman in the world, and / or sixteen ounces of boiling brown water with a hat on it. Take a sec and contrast Mrs. Pott's literally spherical body with the cut-diamond abs of King Triton, father of seven.
— Lindy West
We say "misogynist"; I've written that "misogyny kills," but the world falls flat on your tongue - it's too academic sounding, not raw or horrifying enough to relay the truth of what it means.
— Jessica Valenti, Sex Object
No matter the content, the message is clear: we are here for their enjoyment and little else. We have to walk through the rest of our day knowing that our discomfort gave someone a hard-on.
— Jessica Valenti, Sex Object
The rise of feminist underpants is a weird twist on Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, wherein consumer products once divorced from inherent use value are imbued with all sorts of meaning. To brand something as feminist doesn't involve ideology, or labor, or policy, or specific actions or processes. It's just a matter of saying, 'This is feminist because we say it is.
— Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
Empowertising not only builds on the idea that any choice is a feminist choice if a self-labeled feminist deems it so, but takes it a little bit further to suggest that being female is in itself something that deserves celebration.
— Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
I dislike Tolkien, another Oxonian Old Norse obsessive, with his war games and made-up language in a world without women.
— Sarah Moss
Often ignored by civil rights historians, a number of campaigns led to trials and even convictions throughout the South. These cases, many virtually unknown, broke with Southern tradition and fractured the philosophical and political foundations of white supremacy by challenging the relationship between sexual domination and racial equality.
— Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
I want to weep too, not for me but for us all--for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Sister of My Heart
Empowerment wasn't defined as a static concept or standalone occurrence, but as an evolving way to rethink entire power structures and value systems, draw on shared skills and knowledge, and endow marginalized communities with tools for economic sustainability.
— Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
They grab you by the breasts, they pluck your derriere, they stuff you in a pot, they saute you with sperm, they grab you by the beak, they stick you in a house, they fatten you up on conjugal oil, they shut you up in your cage. And now, lay.
— Hélène Cixous
I listened to Howard Stern every morning in college. I loved Howard. I still do, though I had to achingly bow out as my feminism solidified. (In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you.)
— Lindy West
She will be your living hell.
— David Bowie
In a time of feminism taken into account, there's a sense that if one's choices--even in something as minor as a favorite chill-out show--can't be rationalized, they should probably be kept quiet. As with most-feminist movies and most-feminist underpants, this suggests that feminism is a unvarying foundation of a larger system. It suggests feminism is something that either is or is not okay to consume, rather than a sense through which creators and audiences see stories, characters, and communication.
— Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
The saying goes that for a wound caused by dog bite to heal you have to eat that same dog, and I did scoop up a mouthful for myself
— Han Kang, The Vegetarian
In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don't follow this code become unlikable. Critics who criticize a character's unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability.
— Roxanne Gay
In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you
— Lindy West
I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. "It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. "Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. "I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?"That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed at home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could point your finger at. ..."Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn't be too careful.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
In my own opinion (key word), the foundation of feminism is this: being able to choose. The core of anti-feminism is, conversely, telling a woman she can't do something solely because she's a woman—taking any choice away from her specifically because of her gender. ... One of the weird things about modern feminism is that some feminists seem to be putting their own limits on women's choices. That feels backward to me. It's as if you can't choose a family on your own terms and still be considered a strong woman. How is that empowering? Are there rules about if, when, and how we love or marry and if, when, and how we have kids? Are there jobs we can and can't have in order to be a "real" feminist? To me, those limitations seem anti-feminist in basic principle.
— Stephenie Meyer
The lack of a husband was, for some applicants, a selling point. I imagine many of my readers are aware of the awkward position in which governesses often find themselves -- or, rather, the awkward position into which their male employers often put them, for it does no one any service to pretend this happens by some natural and inexorable process, devoid of connection with anyone's behaviour.
— Marie Brennan, The Voyage of the Basilisk
Being a feminist in principle is easy compared to being a feminist in practice. For men and women, living each day in practical defiance of thousands of years of gender-based streaming is so much harder than walking in marches, running workshops, and writing blog posts. It means questioning everything you do, moment by moment, day by day. It means thinking differently and making dozens of conscious decisions every day that you might have made on auto-pilot before. It's hard. It's taxing. It's tiring.
— Terry Fallis, Poles Apart
If vulgarity is a game that begins by excluding women, but ultimately excludes men from themselves, modesty is the game both can play. It begins as a woman’s game – one, interestingly, where she appears to lose, to be ‘missing out’ – but really she invites a man to relate to her in a way that is both uniquely human and ultimately more erotic. So modesty maysuperficially seem just to be a woman’s game because it is one she must begin, but in playing it she invites men to relate to her in a different way, a way that ultimately means that the men win, too, because they are no longer cut off from adult masculinity.
— Wendy Shalit
Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct. 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
In the same year, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique added fuel to the fire of a growing feminist discontent. The author spoke to middle-class White women, bored in suburbia (an escape hatch from increasingly Black cities) and seeking sanction to work at a “meaningful” job outside the home. Not only were the problems of the White suburban housewife (who may have had Black domestic help) irrelevant to Black women, they were also alien to them. Friedan’s observation that “I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children” seemed to come from another planet.
— Paula J. Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
They do not fear the men beneath the tree
— They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Even the most egregious captive state, bound and gagged on her damp bunk, felt eerily familiar to her. With nothing to do but lie there and think of things, she reflected that captivity took many different forms. A woman under the domination of her father or husband was as much a prisoner as a hostage on a boat. She had merely traded one form of servitude for another.
— Susan Wiggs, The Hostage
It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had been one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing, keeping up with Jem, and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess.
— Harper Lee
The conventional public opposition of 'liberal' and 'conservative' is, here as elsewhere, perfectly useless. The 'conservatives' promote the family as a sort of public icon, but they will not promote the economic integrity of the household or the community, which are the mainstays of family life. Under the sponsorship of 'conservative' presidencies, the economy of the modern household, which once required the father to work away from home - a development that was bad enough - now requires the mother to work away from home, as well. And this development has the wholehearted endorsement of 'liberals,' who see the mother thus forced to spend her days away from her home and children as 'liberated' - though nobody has yet seen the fathers thus forced away as 'liberated.' Some feminists are thus in the curious position of opposing the mistreatment of women and yet advocating their participation in an economy in which everything is mistreated.
— Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays
My activism does not need proof to be real. It exists in the work of my bones against weight in the morning.
— Amandla Stenberg
They say women have no conscience about laws, don't they?" Mrs MacAvelly suggested. "Why should we?" answered her friend. "We don't make 'em– nor God– nor nature. Why on earth should we respect a set of silly rules made by some men one day and changed by some more the next?
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Women were expected to sit in the pews, receiving messages from men in the pulpit. Their role was to recognize God in their pastor, not to expect or demand that he recognize God in them.
— Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
I'm not feisty. But when you're as small as I am and female if you don't stand up for your rights, you're sure to be pushed around by big, hairy, smelly men with delusions about male superiority.
— Robert A. Heinlein, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her femininity
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone--the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten?
— Erica Jong
Couldn't a woman be happy doing a great many things, just as a man could?
— Zoë Marriott, Shadows on the Moon
Just because Eve does not speak does not mean she does not think. Or want. Or wonder. Just because Eve says very little in this story does not mean she is passive and dumb. Isn't it just as likely that she was a curious, growing being full of ideas and questions with no one to talk to? I imagine her left alone, bursting with curiosity and imagination, exploring the peripheries of the garden, delving into the mystery of the forbidden and the secret, far from center stage. How else could she have run into a character like the serpent?[......]It seems obvious that the serpent would choose Eve to talk to and not Adam, because the serpent could sense that Eve was craving dialogue. The serpent, with its sharp intellect, its curiosity and knowledge, becomes a psuedo-G-d, opening Eve's eyes to possibilities that exist only in her dormant imagination. The serpent is referred to as male, but perhaps it is more interesting to imagine it as Lilith in disguise. Though it was probably meant to show Lilith's satanic nature, an illustration in a sixteenth-century text does show Lilith with the body of a snake tempting Eve. The serpent seems to have some Lilith-like qualities: a powerful gift of speech, an intimate knowledge of G-d, a quality of defiance and a strength of will- surprising in an ideal garden. I like the picture this makes- While G-d teaches Adam about planting and sowing, Lilith teaches Eve about power and freedom.
— Yiskah Rosenfeld, Yentl's Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism
I find feminism in smiles of a country girl not in Woolf’s artworks.
— Ali Rezavand Zayeri
Having had nothing, I will not settle for crumbs.
— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Twenty two year old Connie Jones, who had boarded in the home of charismatic Methodist and pacifist Ormond Burton, was a member of the No More War movement and the Christian Pacifist Society. She first attended the Friday night public meetings at which the pacifists argued their case in 1941. She stepped onto the podium, stating, "the Lord Jesus Christ tells us to love one another," and was promptly arrested by Wellington's chief inspector of police. Charged with obstruction under the Emergency Regulations, she was sentenced to three months' hard labour with harsh conditions at the Point Halswell Reformatory - an experience that did nothing to dampen her commitment to pacifism.
— Barbara Brookes, A History of New Zealand Women
...and in Wellington women in the bakery trade were able "to perform certain skilled operations for which they are particularly suited, at rate equivalent to two thirds the journeyman's rate".
— Barbara Brookes, A History of New Zealand Women
It's about women of color owning their own space and their voices being treated with dignity and respect. It's about women of color not having to shout over voices to be heard. We are the dominant force almost all the time. White women are the stars of all the movies. White women are the lead speakers in feminist debates, and it's little white girls that send the nation into a frenzy when they've been kidnapped. ...check your privilege. We're the ones that need to give women of color space for their voices.
— Gabby Rivera, Juliet Takes a Breath
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
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny thatthe effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen themby repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalentof destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipationis imperative.
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
Every day that we exist on this planet the forces of white men in power are aimed at policing women's bodies and subjugating our identities to make us feel lesser than, to control us through physical and economic annihilation.
— Gabby Rivera, Juliet Takes a Breath
As bell hooks wrote in a 1998 essay, "Naked Without Shame," about black women's bodies and politics, "Marked by shame, projected as inherent and therefore precluding any possibility of innocence, the black female body was beyond redemption." She points out that since the time of U.S. slavery, men have benefited from positioning black women as naturally promiscuous because it absolves them of guilt when they sexually assault and rape women of color. "[I]t was impossible to ruin that which was received as inherently unworthy, tainted, and soiled," hooks wrote. Women of color, low-income women, immigrant women- these are the women who are not seen as worthy of being placed on a pedestal. It's only our perfect virgins who are valuable, worthy of discourse and worship.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only anoblique consideration will be found here of man; it’s up to him to saywhere his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us oncemen have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
Idolizing virginity as a stand-in for women's morality means that nothing else matters- not what we accomplish, not what we think, not what we care about and work for. Just if/how/whom we have sex with. That's all.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
I believe that to be a free woman is to be both passionate and intelligent
—  and I am a free woman at last.
...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
Forget the myths you have heard about radical feminism, for only some of them are true. Instead, prepare to think about why so many lies are told about this particular brand of feminism, how it acts as a scapegoat for all that is most threatening about our social movement and how any revolutionary movement for change could really ever be anything but threatening. These are the women you were warned about; you can be too.
— Finn Mackay, Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement
I don't believe what you believe," I yelled, "and I don't respect your beliefs and I don't respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I'm struggling with? I don't want to live by the things you live by, I don't want that kind of life and I don't see why I should be judged by its standards.
— Erica Jong
Look, choosing to wait until marriage makes me feel empowered. But if the same choice cripples you, then it wasn't the right one.
— Rachael  Allen, The Revenge Playbook
When will women not be compelledto view their bodies as science projects,gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained?When will a woman ceaseto be made of pain?
— Marge Piercy, What Are Big Girls Made Of?: Poems
Did my mother hum to me when I was little? Did she touch me, hold me, fill me with her noise and her thoughts? This loneliness I feel is of the womb, born by women. I was sixteen when they all died and I thought I understood this loss, but it comes to me that I didn't know what women gave to the world. It wasn't about their lips, their eyes or the gentle quality of their voices. It was about the way that all men are a part of them. And now we are part of nothing.
— Aliya Whiteley, The Beauty
Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice.
— Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist
I will stand up and speak in my own voice and no man will ever silence me again.
— Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen
By fetishizing youth and virginity, we're supporting a disturbing message: that really sexy women aren't women at all- they're girls.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
A society has no chance of success if it's women are uneducated.
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
What has being a girl to do with anything if a person in properly qualified?' ... 'It's what you call prejudice,' she said.
— Ruth Park
David Cameron is a C-3P0 made of ham.
— Caitlin Moran, Moranthology
As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Not being bothered to exercise your right to vote is a privilege that many women still don't have. Dismissing politicians as all the same is a luxury. Our votes may not seem very important to us, but our lives without them would be immeasurably worse. For we needed universal suffrage to be firmly and unarguably in place before we could demand equal rights. And while it may be tempting for people to mutter that feminism is old-fashioned, boring and a fight already won, we have have to look at the statistics to see that what is true for women is a very long way short of being true for us all.
— Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life
Overall women in our society are forgetting the value and power of sisterhood. Renewed feminist movement must once again raise the banner high to proclaim anew "Sistehood is powerful.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
When a woman walks into a room, her outfit is the first thing she says, before she even opens her mouth. Women are judged on what they wear in a way men would find incomprehensible.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
The reason they don't ask me when they're having kids, of course, is because men can, pretty much, carry on a normal life once they've had a baby.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Strip clubs let everyone down. Men and women approach their very worst here.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
There's no self-expression or joy in these joints-- no springboard to self-discovery, or adventure, like any decent night out involving men, women, alcohol, and taking your clothes off. Why do many people have a gut reaction to strip clubs? Because inside them, no one is having fun.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
In that instance, my body had decided that this baby was not to be and had ended it. This time, it is my mind that has decided that this baby was not to be. I don't believe one's decision is more valid than the other. They both know me. They are both equally capable of deciding what is right.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
We're supposed to speak from the heart in what we wear. We have to find capsule wardrobes.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Women wear heels because they think they make their legs look thinner.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Not one had ever passed judgement on my cheap handbag to my face. But then, this is a reserved country.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
The actual handbag is neither here nor there-- it's what you keep in it that's the most important thing.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Between 60 and 80 percent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Within living memory of this country, men could rape their wives: women were not seen as a separate sexual entity, with the right of refusal.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Amnesty International Survey found that 25 percent of people believe a woman is to blame for being raped if she dresses "provocatively.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Feminism is a movement for change, not a changing of the guard.
— Finn Mackay
For a woman, every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Life is really the only place you can learn the most important lessons about how to get dressed and to be happy.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman