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Feminism Quotes

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Feminism Quotes

“If we train young women to believe their most important asset is their appearance … It is no coincidence that when women say things men don't like, the response is often not a critique of their ideas, but a critique of their appear-ance. This is the logical outcome of seeing women as objects instead of as human beings.”

WomenBeautyFeminism
Book:Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women
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“…the male desire to control women’s sexual activity can be traced to efforts to ensure paternity. This impulse lurks behind even the most extreme or bizarre expressions of religious obsession, misogyny, and sexual repression.”

ReligionWomenFeminismBirthControlMaternityTirannyPaternity
Book:Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
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“When I thought of my ancestors, if I thoughts of them at all, as some sort of vague and amorphous collection of dead people with no solid connection to me or the modern world and certainty no real relevance to either. It was interesting enough to read about the Cro Magnons got up to all those years ago but nothing much to do with me. But once I had realised through genetics that one of my ancestors was actually there taking part is was no longer merely interesting it is overwhelming. DNA is the messenger to luminate that connection, handed down generation to generation, carried, literally, in the bodies of my ancestors. Each message traces a journey through time and space, a journey made by the long lines that springs from the ancestral mothers. We will never know all the details of these journeys over thousands of years and thousands of miles, but we can at least imagine them. I am on a stage. Before me, in the dim light are all who have ever lives are lined up - rank upon rank, stretching far into the distance. They make no sound that I can hear but they are talking to each other. I have in my hand the end of a thread which connects me to my ancestral mother, way at the back. I pull on the thread and one woman's face in every generation, feeling the tug, looks up at me. Their faces stand out from the crowd and they are illuminated by a strange light. These are my ancestors. I recognise my grandmother in the front row, but the faces in the generations behind her are unfamiliar to me. I look down the line. The women do not all look the same. Some are tall, some are short, some are beautiful, some are plain, some look wealthy, others poor. I want to ask them each in turn about their lives, their hopes, their disappointments, their joys and their sacrifices. I speak but they cannot hear. I feel a strong connection. These are all my mothers who passed this precious message from one to another through a thousand births, a thousand screams, a thousand embraces, a thousand new born babies. The thread becomes an umbilical cord. A thousand rows back stands Tara herself, the ancestral mother of my clan. She pulls on the cord. In the great throng, a million ancestors feel the tug in lines that radiate out from her source.”

HumanityWomenFeminismHuman HistoryWomen S LiberationWomen S History
Book:The Daughters of Eve
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“The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination over women. Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dan- gerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different. Some women do this by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites, or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions, no matter how superficial the violations. Some become antagonistic to ethnic groups other than their own or to religious groups other than their own, or they develop a hatred of those political convictions that contradict their own. Women cling to irrational hatreds, focused particularly on the unfamiliar, so that they will not murder their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, the men with whom they are intimate, those who do hurt them and cause them grief. Fear of a greater evil and a need to be protected from it intensify the loyalty of women to men who are, even when dangerous, at least known quantities. Because women so displace their rage, they are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols of danger by designating clearly defined groups of outsiders as sources of danger. The identities of the dangerous outsiders can can change over time to meet changing social circumstances--for example, racism can be encouraged or contained; anti-Semitism can be provoked or kept dormant; homophobia can be aggravated or kept under the surface—but the existence of the dangerous outsider always functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, painkiller, and threat.”

WomenFeminismRacismHomophobiaFar Right
Book:Right-Wing Women
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“गरीब श्रीमंत सगळ्या जातींच्या बायकांना अशा वेळी लक्षात येतं की आपल्या आयुष्याला वेगवेगळ्या वळशांनी बांधून ठेवणाऱ्या दोराची शेवट एकच गाठ असते – बाळंतपण.”

WomenFeminismPregnancy
Book:हिंदू
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“For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted. In courtyard tales, women are the adulterous wives whose treachery begins a husband's descent into murderous madness or the long-suffering mothers who give birth to proper heroes. Biographers polish away the jagged edges of capable, ruthless queens so they may be remembered as saints, and geographers warn believing men away from such and such a place with scandalous tales of lewd local females who cavort in the sea and ravish foreign interlopers. Women are the forgotten spouses and unnamed daughters. Wet nurses and handmaidens; thieves and harlots. Witches. A titillating anecdote to tell your friends back home or a warning.”

WomenFeminismSexism
Author:S A Chakraborty
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“Let's think a little about why, after so many centuries, never ahs a good tragedy, a good poem, a respected history, a good painting, a good book on physical science come from the hands of women? Why should these creatures, whose understanding seems so completely similar to men, seem however to be kept behind the barrier by an invincible power? Tell me if you can.”

ScienceWomenFeminismPrejudiceEqualityGender
Book:Reason, Illusion, and Passion: Philosophical Works
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“Her true skin color was a light beige, like the skin of pencil shavings, and was soft as it was when her mother lotioned her before bed every night. Stephanie did not have the memory of those nights, but they were the reason she subconsciously pumped two servings of shea butter before she sleeps. Mothers lived in a child forever, the way their own mothers lived in them. With one mother’s kiss, a child received a recipe made by a thousand seasoned souls—a generation of love transferred in everything a woman did.”

ChildrenWomenGriefFamilyFeminismDaughterMotherhoodMissing SomeoneAncestryDaughters
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“Olivia had to pretend. Life moved very fast to her. She was so often approached by men, who saw a full body that looked even better trying to hide. Boys in school said one thing to her, then another, and soon the wolves swayed the girl toward their dens. She had to pretend she was in control, that she had a choice, rather than reveal that ever since her body volumized, she had no idea what was going on or who she was. It was the curse of a body that grows faster than the girl inside it.”

WomenBeautyGrowing UpFeminismIdentityTeenagerCursePubertyFemales
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“My sisters don’t be afraid of the words “old maid,” for it is in your power to make this a term of honor, not reproach. It is not necessary to be a sour, spiteful spinster, with nothing to do but brew tear, talk scandal and tend a pocket handkerchief. No, the world is full of work, needing all the heads, hearts, and hands we can bring to do it. Never was there so splendid an opportunity for women to enjoy their liberty and prove that they deserve it by using it wisely. If love comes as it should come, accept it in God’s name and be worthy of His best blessing. If it never comes, then in God’s name, reject the shadow of it, for that can never satisfy a hungry heart. Do not be ashamed to own the truth—do not be daunted by the fear of ridicule and loneliness, nor saddened by the loss of a woman’s tenderest ties. Be true to yourself; cherish whatever talent you possess, and in using it faithfully for the good of others, you will most assuredly find happiness for yourself, and make of life no failure, but a beautiful success.”

WomenFeminismSingle LifeLittle Women
Author:Louisa May Alcott
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“I won’t play the game—I don’t bake cupcakes and make cooing noises over pictures of everyone’s kids. If a man doesn’t bake cupcakes and make cooing noises, you know what they call him? Senior Partner. Ben hasn’t made cupcakes once. But men expect you to be more thoughtful than they are—softer, more accommodating. And when you are paid less than your peers, or assaulted on a date, or lose a promotion, they’ll tell you it was your fault—you were too soft, too accommodating.”

MenSexWomenWorkFeminismFemaleFeministGenderSexismWorkplace
Book:The Devil You Know
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“My sisters don’t be afraid of the words “old maid,” for it is in your power to make this a term of honor, not reproach. It is not necessary to be a sour, spiteful spinster, with nothing to do but brew tear, talk scandal and tend a pocket handkerchief. No, the world is full of work, needing all the heads, hearts, and hands we can bring to do it. Never was there so splendid an opportunity for women to enjoy their liberty and prove that they deserve it by using it wisely. 4 minutes ago Heidi M If love comes as it should come, accept it in God’s name and be worthy of His best blessing. If it never comes, then in God’s name, reject the shadow of it, for that can never satisfy a hungry heart. 4 minutes ago Do not be ashamed to own the truth—do not be daunted by the fear of ridicule and loneliness, nor saddened by the loss of a woman’s tenderest ties. Be true to yourself; cherish whatever talent you possess, and in using it faithfully for the good of others, you will most assuredly find happiness for yourself, and make of life no failure, but a beautiful success.”

WomenFeminismSingle LifeLittle Women
Author:Louisa May Alcott
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“[I]n most human societies, men tend to try, and usually succeed, to monopolize the most exciting, dramatic kinds of work—they'll set the fires that burn down the forest on which they plant their fields, for example, and, if they can, relegate to women the more monotonous and time-consuming tasks, such as weeding. One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during.”

MenWomenWorkFeminismEquality
Book:Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
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“In my humble, probably wrong, select-all-delete opinion, we womenfolk today are faced with a decision: Salem or Barbie. We can either rip off the internal trapdoor that your Alanis Plath of Arc has been suffocating under or cement over it and instead luxuriate in a Hello Kitty porny Instagram-filtered cell where the validation is better than heroin and the thoughts are shorter than Mickey Rooney. (HEY-YO!)”

WomenFeminismFeministObjectification
Book:All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns
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“Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything that we do, but women's pain is a backdrop - a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting the story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.”

WomenFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S Liberation
Book:Sex Object: A Memoir
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“The transfiguration of anger is a movement from rage to outrage. Rage implies an internalized emotion, a tempest within, Rage, or what might be called untrasnfigured anger, can become a calcified bitterness. What rage wants and needs is to move outward toward positive social purpose, to become a creative force or energy… Outrage is love’s wild and unacknowledged sister.”

SpiritualWomenHealingFeminismEmotionsRaptureWildnessDivinefeminine
Book:The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine
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“Privileged women continue the tradition of compensating for their authority to men through affectations of disablement – from dieting and other disorders to substance abuse, institutionalised detachment from their children, and so on.”

WomenFeminismAuthorityPrivilegeAttachmentPatriarchyDetachmentElitePatriarchalStatus Anxiety
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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