c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
At first I thought it was simply that the specter of the crazy bag lady has been branded so simply into the collective female consciousness that we’re stuck with her. Now I realized I was wrong. What is haunting about the bag lady is not only that she is left to wander the streets, cold and hungry, but that she’s living proof of what it means to not be loved. Her apparition will endure as long as women consider the love of a man the most supreme of all social validations.
— Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own
Dear Men Everywhere,Please don't think that being a feminist means we hate you or don't need you. -We absolutely love you and couldn't live without you! ...We are just on a mission to be treated equally and with respect. No hard feelings. With love, Feminists of the World xoxoox P.S. Yes we do shave our legs!
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
We don’t have no say, ‘cause we was an afterthought. He yanked us up out o’ man’s ribs, but He made man out the Earth. He made him out the dirt and the mud and made him out the world, so man is the world. Women…women just a part o’ men.” Elaine snubbed the cigarette out, tapped the dark leather case on the edge of the table and I watched as another slim, white stick slid free.
— Laura A. Lord, History of a Woman
The outrageous madonna/whore duality that we mock in Women’s Studies 101 has its subtle, and very insidious, expression in the good/bad mother paradigm that we grapple with every day of our lives.
— Shannon Drury, The Radical Housewife: Redefining Family Values for the 21st Century
What I am or am not wearing does not correlate with my competency as a professional, a mother, or a feminist role model. My clothes do not define me and nor does my nakedness. I define me.
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.
— Patricia Duncker
What I am or am not wearing does not correlate with my competency as a professional, a mother, or a feminist role model. My clothes don't define me and neither does my nakedness. I define me.
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
Mother, what is a Feminist?""A feminist, my daughter,Is any woman now who caresTo think about her own affairsAs men don't think she oughter.
— Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People? a Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times
When men in Congress come to blows at somemthing someone said,I always notice that it shows their blood is quick and red;But if two women disagree, with very little noise,It proves, and this seems strange to me, that women have no poise.
— Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People? a Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times
Is it true that the English government is calling on women to do work abandoned by men?Yes, it is true.Is not a woman's place the home?No, not when men need her services outside the home.Will she never be told again that her place is the home?Oh, yes, indeed.When?As soon as men want their jobs back again.
— Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People? a Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times
The Mommy Wars, as they stand today, serve as an effective check on the ambitions of the American mother. The phenomenon keeps women in a perpetual state of guilt, shame and inadequacy, and does so without involving anyone but wealthy white women.
— Shannon Drury, The Radical Housewife: Redefining Family Values for the 21st Century
There is a need for promoting women's sexual agency in today's society, because if it wasn't an issue, terms such as 'female sexual empowerment' would be made redundant. The fact that we merely have this vocabulary is indicative of that.
— Miya Yamanouchi
I am everything what u see and I can be anything what I want to be.
— Nandini Sharma
What had she been thinking, suggesting to Alicia, of all people, that a time-travel app was the solution to the problems of women in poverty? 'Are you talking about my community? You didn't even think highly enough of me to let me in on your little scheme, and now you think it will be God's gift to throw a bunch of poor women through a wormhole every day so they can take care of their children and collect their welfare checks at the same time? That's your solution? Time travel is easier than passing affordable child care?	Jennifer said nothing. Alicia, of course, was right. Years ago she had chosen to name the center It Takes a Village because, from the beginning, she had hated the every-person-for-herself attitude that isolated and blame so many of the residents the agency worked with. Yet she had just suggested that the answer to the multiplying burdens face by single mothers, in particular, was not for the village to gather around them, but for these women to multiply themselves instead.	The same answer, she thought, that she had applied to herself when her own burdens had seemed too much to bear.
— Kamy Wicoff, Wishful Thinking
That she was now more tired and forgetful, while able to do three times what she had been able to do when she was somewhat less tired and forgetful but also stressed, guilty, grouchy, and overwhelmed, seemed a small price to pay.
— Kamy Wicoff, Wishful Thinking
It is an extravagant gesture,' she said, turning to the torpedo, 'which is just the sort of gesture I like.
— Kamy Wicoff, Wishful Thinking
People are kinder to the unborn than they are to the women themselves, and soon I had my ticket.
— Emily Schultz, The Blondes
I am a woman with thoughts and questions and shit to say. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story — I will. I will speak and share and fuck and love, and I will never apologize to the frightened millions who resent that they never had it in them to do it. I stand here and I am amazing, for you. Not because of you. I am not who I sleep with. I am not my weight. I am not my mother. I am myself. (2014 Gloria Awards and Gala)
— Amy Schumer
I can feel like a hag some days if I want! And I can tell everybody how insecure I am if I want! Or I can be pretty and pretend to think I'm a hag out of fake modesty –- I can do that if I want, too. Because you, Livingston, are not the boss of me and what kind of girl I become.
— E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
If women really choose prostitution, why is it mostly marginalized and disadvantaged women who do? If we want to discuss the issue of choice, let’s look at who is doing the actual choosing in the context of prostitution. Surely the issue is not why women allegedly choose to be in prostitution, but why men choose to buy the bodies of millions of women and children worldwide and call it sex.Philosophically, the response to the choice debate is ‘not’ to deny that women are capable of choosing within contexts of powerlessness, but to question how much real value, worth, and power these so-called choices confer.Politically, the question becomes, should the state sanction the sex industry based on the claim that some women choose prostitution when most women’s choice is actually 'compliance’ to the only options available?When governments idealize women’s alleged choice to be in prostitution by legalizing, decriminalizing, or regulating the sex industry, they endorse a new range of 'conformity’ for women.Increasingly, what is defended as a choice is not a triumph over oppression but another name for it.
— Janice G. Raymond, Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade
A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover -- but will sooner or later find a tyrant.
— George Gordon Byron
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
For her next birthday she'd asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: "Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn't paying attention!" And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe?
— Terry Pratchett
I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?
— Rachel Cusk
In a world where positive expressions of sexual longing connect us we will all be free to choose those sexual practices which affirm and nurture our growth. Those practices may range from choosing promiscuity or celibacy, from embracing one specific sexual identity and preference or choosing a roaming uncharted desire that is kindled only by interaction and engagement with specific individuals with whom we feel the spark of erotic recognition no matter their sex, race, class, or even their sexual preference. Radical feminist dialogues about sexuality must surface so that the movement towards sexual freedom can begin again.
— bell hooks
Women were supposed to be strong, but they weren't really, they weren't allowed to be.
— Carol Shields
In the studies I have directed, and in my international experience speaking with women in prostitution, the majority of women in prostitution come from marginalized groups with a history of sexual abuse, drug and alcohol dependencies, poverty or financial disadvantage, lack of education, and histories of other vulnerabilities. These factors characterize women in both off and on-street locations. A large number of women in prostitution are pimped or drawn into the sex industry at an early age. These are women whose lives will not change for the better if prostitution is decriminalized. Many have entrenched problems that are best addressed not by keeping women indoors but in establishing programs where women can be provided with an exit strategy and the services that they need to regain their lost lives. There is little evidence that decriminalization or legalization of prostitution improves conditions for women in prostitution, on or off the street. It certainly makes things better for the sex industry, which is provided with legal standing, and the government that enjoys increased revenues from accompanying regulation.
— Janice G. Raymond
Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.
— Margaret Atwood
Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed.
— Fay Weldon
Sexism is not confined by border, race, class, sexuality or gender and, to my mind (and Margo Kingston's in Chapter 6), it is inextricably bound up with a mindset of entitlement that also afflicts our relationship with the planet.
— Samantha Trenoweth, Fury: Women write about sex, power and violence
Those four effects described above—shaping a male-dominant view of sexuality, initiating victims, contributing to difficulty in separating sexual fantasy and reality, and providing a training manual for abusers—are at work just as much with men who have not engaged in activities that meet the legal definition of rape. Here we have to let go of a comforting illusion—that there is some clear line between men who rape and men who don't, between the bad guys and the good guys.
— Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity
Our goal should be not to redefine masculinity, but to abolish it.
— Robert Jensen
The feminist girls she knew at Oberlin, her roommate among them, were the kind of people who made you feel bad for liking what you liked. Sometimes when Emily was tired or blue she liked to watch "When Harry Met Sally", or "Love Actually", or old episodes of "Friends", and at Oberlin she'd had to wait until her roommate had gone out or fallen asleep.
— Brian Morton
How do we reconcile the imperfections of feminism with all the good it can do? In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For wathever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
Feminism is not inherently bourgeois, but bourgeois feminism is the only one given voice in our society. That is why women’s issues discuss glass ceilings rather than dirt floors.
— James Rozoff
I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority ofmen. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn.
— Valentine de Saint-Point
Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a journalist, 'another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita's image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts would appear on her image.' The difference between these online gamers and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organization that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatever standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Antifeminists are the only ones who benefit from their version of working on women's behalf; in reality, they put other women at risk and fail to solve any larger problems.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?. . . they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.
— Virginia Woolf
They’ve been lying from the start. From the first time we read the words ‘once upon a time,’ we’re fed the idea that these girls—these gorgeous, demure, singing-with-the-wildlife girls—get a happy ending. And I get it. Poor thing had to do some chores around the house, fine. But the idea that she needs a magic old lady to come down and skim off the dirt so the prince will see her beauty? That’s ridiculous. Maybe she should have been working on her lockpicking skills instead of serenading squirrels. She could have busted out, hitched a ride to the castle, and impressed the prince with her safe-cracking prowess. Sorry, magic-fairy lady. She didn’t need your help.
— Kelsey Macke, Damsel Distressed
Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even. There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages also fail or how nice or not their bodies are, even the movie-star bodies. They are the gender that commits the great majority of crime, particularly violent crime, and they are the majority of suicides as well. American men are falling behind women in attending college, and have fallen farther in the current economic depression than women, which you'd think would make them interesting subjects of inquiry.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
What other movement has ensured that young women have the rights that they have today? Feminism is responsable not only for the decline in violence against women over the last decade, but also for equal pay and rights legislation, reproductive justice, and the list goes on. So I'm more than a little suspicious of those who see women's advancement as a bad thing.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Number 23 had plenty of redeeming qualities that made falling for him a justifiable accident. But our connection had nothing to do with our similarities, our differences, our aesthetic attractions, or our emotional and physical needs. When we spoke, he was truly with me. Our egos, our personas, expected social cues, the facades that everyone builds around them that are supposed to sculpt the way the world sees us, were stripped with Number 23 and I. He was immediately my best friend, familiar and safe - an epiphany that I had been spending my life alone in crowded rooms. 	Our souls were naked. We initially curled into the warmth of that connection. But once we knew how real it was, we felt exposed, vulnerable, and raw. While his defense was his fearful recoil, mine was dictation.
— Maggie Georgiana Young, Just Another Number
Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organizarion that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatever standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Consider another abstinence product: a gold rose pin handed out in schools or at Christian youth events. The pin is attached to a small card that reads, "You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage is pre-marital sex a previous petal is stripped away. Don't leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain."Do we really want to teach our daughters that without their virginity they're nothing but a "bare stem"?
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.
— Maggie Georgiana Young, Just Another Number
One mustn’t justify day-to-day morality with extraordinary circumstances. Otherwise, we would all feel free to rape and murder at the drop of a cat.
— Courtney Milan, Unclaimed
Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organizarion that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatevel standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
What a queer topsy turvy world it was. It used to be the man who went to the wars, the woman who stayed at home. But here the positions were reversed.
— Agatha Christie, Taken at the Flood
This is the picture of a woman cast in the role of a learner, a pupil, even a rabbinic student. Quite obviously this is a prohibited role for women in those days and in that culture. Yet Jesus affirms Mary in that role. Martha, however, rebukes her. Martha demands that Jesus order Mary to abandon the pupil role for the more acceptable domestic role of assisting with the dinner preparations. Jesus supports Mary and defends her consciousness-raising act by stating that she has elected a higher choice.
— John Shelby Spong
Southerners have mastered picking, choosing, and rationalizing religious texts to fit their social agenda better than their own mother’s fried chicken recipe.
— Maggie Georgiana Young, Just Another Number
Antifeminists are the only ones who benefit from their version of working on women's behalf; in reality, they put other women at risk and fail to solce any larger problems.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Males were expected to be ready to fuck any hole they could slip their dicks into. Boys weren’t considered men unless they were influenced by their carnal instincts to spread their seed.
— Maggie Georgiana Young, Just Another Number
I've thought often about why - why?! - anyone, especially other women, would try to disrupt feminist work that combats violence. What in the world could be the point of that? The only reason I've come up with, and I think it makes sense, is fear of becoming that "impure" woman.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
It wasn’t really a loud-mouthed, hyperactive little pig-tailed blonde that made Carl cringe. It was what I represented. While his upbringing was battered humiliation, I was spoiled, doted on, and spoon-fed by the world. I don’t think he was even aware of his intentions to reduce that child to his own state of self-loathing, but he was truly brilliant at it.
— Maggie Georgiana Young, Just Another Number
[Robert] Jensen calls for an end to our current understanding of masculinity. He says, "We men can settle for being men, or we can strive to be human beings." What's funny is that that statement essentially echoes the same hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves, and encourage men to see us, as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize foot-binding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures.
— Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
In a world where money, security, children, money, temptation, sex, money, passion and more money is all that women expect of men, that is what men begin to offer. Anyone who has anything different to offer is dismissed, if reluctantly. Men, in their eternal wooing dance, tend to cultivate those qualities which the desired sex expects. What's more, women who gave birth to them and later on rehearse them for their role MAKE them that way, with the help of sisters, mistresses or wives. Those who are too strong or too weak to be thus moulded are cast aside as rejects, socio-sexual-matrimonial drop-outs. The price is paid by humanity as a whole in terms of values. You cannot denigrate a part without diminishing the whole. Women, by relegating man to the status of a working slave, becomes a slave herself. Is diminished morally even if she does remain physically and intellectually superior. Granted that her responsibility for the propagation and survival of the species necessitates her adopting the master role -- she has to have safety, security and comfort, as much as humanly possible, to ensure the continuation of the human race -- it still remains a morally untenable stance.
— Adam Zameenzad, Thirteenth House
When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men.
— Rebecca Solnit
Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a slave.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Few female characters get to be “the Chosen One” in science fiction and fantasy. Leia is as much the child of Darth Vader as Luke is, but only Luke gets to use the force, be recruited by his dad and ultimately save the day. We don’t get impossibly clever female sleuths or the sexy spies with the awesome gadgets. And on the rare occasions that we do get those characters, they’re denigrated as unrealistic Mary Sues.
— Rhiannon Thomas
A man must claim responsibility for his own temptation, and not pin it on the woman who arouses him. It’s a gown, Sir Mark. Not even one of my more daring ones.
— Courtney Milan, Unclaimed
Dancing falls into the same category as poetry for a woman – it equals dreaming, which may inspire thoughts about such banned topics as love and desire.
— Jenny Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul
I hated you,” she continued, “because you have done nothing more than abide by rules that every gentlewoman follows every day of her life. Yet for this prosaic feat, you are feted and cosseted as if you were a hero.” She felt nothing as she spoke, but still her voice shook. Her hands were trembling, too. “I hate that if a woman missteps once, she is condemned forever, and yet the men who follow you can tie a simple ribbon to their hats after years of debauchery, and pass themselves off as upright pillars of society.
— Courtney Milan, Unclaimed
So she did not replay, but played the strategist. She retained more power by withholding an answer.
— E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
It's more that they think about sexism in the same way people in London must think about bad weather: It's an omnipresent and unpleasant fact of life, but it shouldn't keep you from going about your business.
— Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
Marriage is a core component of the patriarchal system. According to Gerda Lerner's research on ancient societies, a woman could achieve at least some status, and with that, better treatment and privileges, through preserving her only capital – her virginity – and eventually offering it to just one man.
— Jenny Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul
Men touch their horses to calm them,” she said distantly. “They caress their falcons to remind them that they are bound. Touch smacks of ownership, and I am weary of being a possession.
— Courtney Milan, Unclaimed
But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
He says he'd like to kiss the ground you walk on-reminds me, did you wash them yesterday?- and after that you're his skivvy.
— Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
The responsibility for men's behavior, indeed for civilization itself rests entirely with women here, and in how they dress and behave. Men's animalistic impulses are presumed to be overwhelming and uncontrollable. And as men are brutal, brainless savages, women must hide their bodies to avoid being assaulted. In most societies, a respectable woman, to varying degrees, is expected to cover up. If she doesn't she is inviting assault.
— Jenny Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul
There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for some absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance towards a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning though a dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial. While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if the attempt is not continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked within its own particularism.
— Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World
The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women.
— Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression
What would one do if one were forced to choose between saving an innocent child’s life or engaging in unchaste behavior? This is, after all, the choice that some unfortunate women are put to—sell their bodies, or see their children starve.
— Courtney Milan, Unclaimed
It was common for my father to sit my sisters down and tell them things like, "I saw a girl working in the bank in town, and she was a girl just like you." My parents had never completed primary school. They couldn't speak English or even read that well. My parents only knew the language of numbers, buying and selling, but they wanted more for their kids. That's why my father had scraped the money together and kept Annie in school, despite the famine and other troubles.
— William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
In the 20th century- an age in thrall to the new- women turn out to be the newest thing of all; still packed up in cellophane, still folded up in the box, having played dead for the length of history. But now we are the new species!We are the tulip- America- the Hula Hoop- the moon shot- cocaine! Everything we do is going to be, implicitly,amazing.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
The greatest form of abortion is not letting the man put it there in the first place!
— Onuoha Adanma
My attitude toward men who mess around is simple: If you find 'em, kill 'em.
— Loretta Lynn
I like being a woman in a man's world. After all, men can't wear dresses, but we can wear the pants.
— Whitney Houston
We must stand together and resist all such incursion! We must come together in brotherhood and toss out those like you—women who take a man’s job, who rob a man of the ability to feed his family."“Who is ‘we’?” Jessica peered at the empty green hedge behind him. “You appear to be alone.”“I speak for all working men!
— Courtney Cole
Our culture is getting better and better at encouraging women to speak, but it’s not doing enough to listen to what they say when they do.
— Lilit Marcus
At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
We are now dealing with a bizarre new morality where a woman cannot simply say, in one way or another, "I'm on the pill because I like dick.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and evolved as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such. For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons. 79 Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to inform the women’s prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts.
— Angela Y. Davis
Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowlegde of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper; outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of proptiety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.
— Mary Wollstonecraft
Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.
— Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights
You can be any sex you like provided you act male. There's no men and women in the Watch, just a bunch of lads.
— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
The picture to my left, that’s me. My name is Stephanie M. Wytovich, and yes, I am a female horror writer. But am I? No, of course not. I mean, if you want to bring my vagina into the conversation, then yes, I guess that’s technically true, but seeing that I don’t write with it, I’m not sure why that would be appropriate.
— Stephanie M. Wytovich
I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance".
— bell hooks
It is difficult to process the sacred masculine when your closest example has been a man smacking you around, verbally degrading you, lording over you, or otherwise proving a poor demonstration of the use of strength.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
Having ascended to some spiritual strength by focusing on the power of the feminine, it is no doubt tempting to wield this strength against that which triggers memories of having once been weaker.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
There is a theory that men do not need Paganism because they have endless avenues of societal power available. Why use spells when one can get a bank loan with little trouble? The world already bends over backward to accommodate men, so why perfect the art of magickally shaping it?
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
The way I figure it, here in New Earth, men's power has won out over women's power, just like it's done on Mainground. But men still fear women's power. No one ever forgets their mother's power to give them nourishment or withhold it. And men specially don't forget it, because they never grow into women themselves, and never lose a child's craving for the comfort of women's bodies.
— Chris Beckett
People say to me, 'Has being a woman helped or hindered your career?' And the answer is yes.
— Sallie Krawcheck
When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that "having it all" is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of "choice," we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult.
— Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity
I see no reason that a man should have any issue with worshiping a goddess any more than a woman would in worshiping a male deity. It is undeniable that women, particularly in the Abrahamic faiths, have been doing just that for thousands of years, though they do like to sneak in the divine feminine under the cloak of the Virgin Mary.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
With the way a lot of men function, I'd say "single" womyn are a threat to society. In fact, I'd go as single womyn are a threat to the system. As a womyn, if you aren't spending all your time looking for what you were socialized to, you're doing something productive. I'd say that scares a hell of a lot of people.
— Nocturnus Libertus
Women are seen as imperfect or unclean, because of a myth of a tempting apple, because they bleed monthly, because they lack equivalent upper body strength.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
It's not the nineteenth century
—  I'm not meant to be judged on how good a housekeeper I am. Getting down on the floor with a lemon and a bucket of vinegar does not make me a better person.
The prank is entitled "Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm".
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is
— Doris Lessing
Women are complicated and messy and we are certainly not perfect, but we are funny and challenging and kind, and I wouldn't change a thing
— Melissa McCarthy
When female stories are muted, we are teaching our kids that their dignity is second class and the historical accounts of their lives [are] less relevant. This lowered value carries over when women face sexual objectification and systemic brutalization from inside and outside the community.
— Aurin Squire
Prostitution is not a profession, it is the result of sexism and gender oppression.
— Nocturnus Libertus
Now let's make Virginia Heffernan a man. Can you imagine the same kind of spittle-flecked rage directed at a busy working father who admits to feeding his kids Annie's Organic Mac & Cheese?
— Emily Matchar
In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Among the beliefs I held about the world was that being beautiful should not matter to a woman, because it was one of those things that would go away--your beauty would go away, and there wouldn't be anything you could do to bring it back.
— Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
When you can't find someone to follow, find a way to lead by example.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
American culture at large has failed working mothers.
— Emily Matchar
The problem is that the media rarely discusses the real reasons behind why women leave their jobs. We hear a lot about the desire to be closer to the children, the love of crafting and gardening, and making food from scratch. But reasons like lack of maternity leave, lack of affordable day care, lack of job training, and unhappiness with the 24/7 work culture-well, those aren't getting very much airtime.
— Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity
Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or be oppressed. Black men may be victimized by racism, but sexism allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of women. White women may be victimized by sexism, but racism enables them to act as exploiters and oppressors of black people. Both groups have led liberation movements that favor their interests and support the continued oppression of other groups. Black male sexism has undermined struggles to eradicate racism just as white female racism undermines feminist struggle. As long as these two groups or any group defines liberation as gaining social equality with ruling class white men, they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others.
— bell hooks
You’re going to have people who are going to say ‘Oh, you know like, she just writes songs about her ex-boyfriends’ and I think frankly that’s a very sexist angle to take. No one says that about Ed Sheeran. No one says it about Bruno Mars. They’re all writing songs about their exes, their current girlfriends, their love-life, and no one raises a red flag there.
— Taylor Swift
The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. I obeyed his commands, sure that I could fulfill this role while still protecting the sacred place inside of me that I knew deserved more. Different. Better.But that isn't how it works.
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Better is not good enough, and it's a shame that anyone would be willing to settle for so little.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
Often, when I read the news, I have to make sure I am not, in face, reading The Onion. We continue to have national and state debates about abortion, birth control, and reproductive freedom, and men, mostly, are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
I understand feminism to be a social savior because it liberates everyone without exclusion, whereas masculinism damns itself by measuring a man's health by the amount of sexual gratification he receives.
— Morrissey
An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The victim is always morally superior to the master
—  that is the victim's ambivalent triumph. That is why there have been so few notoriously wicked women in comparison to the number of notoriously wicked men
The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all woman. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others.
— Germaine Greer