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Women S History Quotes

Browse 63 quotes about Women S History.

Women S History Quotes

“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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“Strong women are the architects of their destinies, the CEOs of their lives, and the superheroes of their own stories. They don't just break glass ceilings; they shatter them with style. Their sass is their superpower, and their laughter is their battle cry. From juggling responsibilities to sparkling kindness like glitter, they do it all with flair and finesse. So, here's to the strong women; you make the world a better place!”

LeadershipFeminismEmpowermentEqualityWomen S RightsSisterhoodWomen S HistoryWomen S HealthWomen In StemFemale Entrepreneurs
Author:Life is Positive
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“Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. As her law-abiding, conventionally minded daughter, I secretly envied her this. She was not the clinging-vine type, nor one who could coax sugar from a lemon. Hers was the frontal attack with no inhibitions. She told the Nazis you could not trust Hitler, and they let her go. In the days of chaperones, she hitch-hiked a ride on a French destroyer along the coast of Crete; 'All quite proper, I had my cook with me,' she explained.”

FranceSelf DeterminationSelf PreservationNazisVictorian EraWomen S HistoryArchaeologistsCreteHarriet Boyd Hawes
Author:Mary Allsebrook
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“On some level, if not intellectual then animal, there has always been an understanding of the power of women's anger:that as an oppressed majority in the United States, women have long had within them the potential to rise up in fury, to take over a country in which they've never really been offered their fair or representative stake. Perhaps the reason that women's anger is so broadly denigrated--treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational--is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn the very systems that have sought to contain it. What becomes clear, when we look to the past with an eye to the future, is that the discouragement of women's anger--via silencing, erasure, and repression--stems from the correct understanding of those in power that in the fury of women lies the power to change the world.”

PoliticsFeminismWomen S HistoryU S History
Book:Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger
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“Another method to identify misogyny is to picture a well-known politician as belonging to the opposite sex and see where that takes you. For instance, imagine Donald Trump as a woman. Let's call her Donna. During the 2016 presidential election, Donna Trump said the exact same things as her male twin, Donald, did in real life. Orange-faced, sporting a fantastically cantilevered helmet of yellow hair, she hid her weight under baggy, navy-blue pantsuits. Bellowing from the podium, she was angry, boastful. Only SHE could save the country. She called people nasty names, made fun of handicapped reporters and Gold Star Families, and refused to turn over her income tax returns. She lied and/or exaggerated on a daily basis. She had been married three times and cheated on all three husbands. She bragged about grabbing unsuspecting men's penises. Would Donna Trump have been viewed as blunt, honest, and refreshing? Would SHE have won the election?”

PoliticsFeminismNonfictionWomen S History
Book:Off With Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power
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“Clans became patrilineal, which inevitably entails male-domination. Naming children for fathers is intrinsically an act of force: it reverses natural mother right. And because it is impossible until recent years to assure paternity, patrilineality requires abuse of women.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Religion, as it is known in the western world in the 19th century, was male religion. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, though they may differed about what sacrament to take when or which day was actually the Sabbath, were in completed agreement on one subject - the status of women. Females were to be regarded as inferior creatures who were divinely intended to be obedient and silent vessels for the production of children and the pleasure and convenience of men. These attitudes not only thrived in the Church but found their way past those great arched doorways to install themselves in a more personal way into the thoughts, feelings and values of every Jewish, Christian or Mohammedan family.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationWomen S HistoryGoddess Worship
Book:When God Was A Woman
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“Considering the hatred the Hebrews felt towards the asherim, a major symbol of the female religion, it would not be too surprising if the symbolism of the tree of forbidden fruit, said to offer the knowledge of good and evil, yet clearly represented in the myth as the provider of sexual consciousness, was included in the creation story to warn that eating the fruit of this tree has caused the downfall of all humanity. Eating of the tree of the Goddess, which stood by each alter, was as dangerously "pagan" as were Her sexual customs and Her oracular serpents. So into the myth of how the world began, the story that the Levites oferred as the explanation of the creation of all existence, they place the advisory serpent and the woman who accepted its counsel, eating of the tree that gave her the understanding of what "only the gods knew" - the secret of sex - how to create life.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationWomen S HistoryGoddess Worship
Book:When God Was A Woman
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“According to Egyptian texts, to eat of this fruit was to eat of the flesh and the fluid of the Goddess, the patroness of sexual pleasure and reproduction. According to the Bible story, the forbidden fruit caused the couple's conscious comprehension of sexuality. Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve became aware of the sexual nature of their own bodies, "And they knew that they were naked." So it was that when the male deity found them, they had modestly covered their genitals with aprons of fig leaves. But it was vitally important to the construction of the Levite myth that they did not both decide to eat the forbidden fruit together, which would have been a more logical turn for the tale to take since the fruit symbolised sexual consciousness. No, the priestly scribes make it exceedingly clear that the woman Eve ate of the fruit first - upon the advice and counsel of the serpent. It can hardly have been chance or coincidence that it was a serpent who offerred Eve the advice. For people at that time knew that the serpent was the symbol, perhaps even the instrument, of divine counsel in the religion of the Goddess. It was surely intended in the Paradise myth, as in the Indo-European serpent and dragon myths, that the serpent, as the familiar counsellor of women, be seen as a source of evil and be placed in such a menacing and villainous role that to listen to the prophetesses of the female deity would be to violate the religion of the male deity in the most dangerous manner. {...} We are told that, by eating the fruit first, women possessed sexual consciousness before man and in turn tempted man to partake the forbidden fruit, that is, to join her sinfully in sexual pleasures. This image of Eve as a sexually tempting but god-defying seductress was surely intended as a warning to all Hebrew men to stay away from the sacred women of the temples, for if they succumb to the temptations of these women, they simultaneously accepted the female deity - Her fruit - Her sexuality and, perhaps most important, the resulting matrilineal identity for any children who might be conceived in this manner. It must also, perhaps even more pointedly, have been directed at Hebrew women, cautioning them not to take part in the ancient religion and its sexual customs, as they appear to have continued to do so, despite the warnings and punishments meted out by the Levite priests.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationWomen S HistoryGoddess Worship
Book:When God Was A Woman
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“The first laws we know about that make females inferior Uruk (Sumer). These laws list a new crime - adultery - that only women could commit. And in Sumer, a knew occupation - prostitution - is devised by the temple priests. The coincidence (in the same culture if not at the same moment) of an assertion of female inferiority, the criminalisation of free sexuality in women, and the use of female sexuality in commercial transactions benefiting men demonstrates the new male vision of women: as sexual objects to be possessed and used by men.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Historians often debate whether women have more rights and capabilities in religious or secular, Catholic or Protestant, capitalist or communist, or militaristic or humanitarian states. Such debates assume that the oppression of women is incidental to another aspect of culture. All early states deprived women of their status as human beings and of the rights men possessed. Religious states like India used religion to justify this constriction; China's guiding secular philosophy, Confucianism, constricted women as much as India's religious laws.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Both men and women collude in their oppression when they accept their societies myths, but many believe the myths and propaganda teaching male superiority. Laws forcing women into marriage by denying them any other avenue of support, or allowing them access to power only through sons, co-opt their loyalty. Women may even accept constrictions if it puts them in the superior group, makes them "ladies" in worlds that despise women.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Unlike men, women have not, until the feminist movement had sex based solidarity the isolation is not incidental; solidarity is what men have feared most in women. To prevent its formation, every state we know about separated women from each other, imprisoning them in the home, where they were under the direct surveillance of husbands or kin. When women began to ally with each other and to politic during the French revolution, men barred female assembly. In India today, men suspiciously eye women who gather at wells or pumps. Women are afraid to speak to each other, although no law forbids it. Simply making men central, by making them necessary to survival, is enough to set women against each other.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“In 381 Theodosius I organised the Council of Constantine, which proclaimed the doctrine of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are of the same substance, consubstantial, one person comprising god. The doctrine went even further than Greek myth in eliminating the female from the godhead. The Christian father-god utters the Word, his son, and procreates through language, entirely without a woman. The holy spirit is born from the mutual love of son and father. This creation is not incest because bodies are not involved. The Trinity, understandably called a mystery, lies at the heart of Christianity. It achieves two major goals: it posits a realm that transcends the physical world, in which reality is made by the word. History is filled with rules who claim divinity to justify their superiority, but not until Christianity and the sacralising of the notion that language creates reality does the debate between appearance and reality begin to pervade Western literature and thought. [...] the Trinity procreates without the female - without body, blood, ooze, without nature, and superior to it. Generations of clerical writers, wishing that women did not exist, lament that this sort of procreation was possible only to god. The church defined the divine realm in opposition to the earthly one, celebrating birth through utterance, death as life, the overcoming of sex and body, a realm where nothing changes and power and justice are one.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Everywhere, men base their claim to superiority on a connection with the deity that women lack. During the period of state formation, women lost the right to perform rites of worship. This denial led to the devaluation of female children and the exclusion of women from property rights.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“We have seen that the orders for the destruction of the religion of the Goddess were built into the very canons and laws of the male religions that replaced it. It is clear that the ancient reverence for the female deity did not simply cease to be but that its disappearance was gradually brought about, initially by the Indo-European invaders, later by the Hebrews, eventually by the Christians and even further by the Mohammedans. Along with the ultimate acceptance of the male religions throughout a large part of the world, the precepts of sexual "morality," that is, pre marital virginity and marital fidelity for women, were incorporated into the attitudes and laws of the societies which embraced them.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationWomen S HistoryGoddess Worship
Book:When God Was A Woman
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“We cannot avoid observing the continual emphasis upon female sexuality as acceptable only when women were safely designated as the property of one specific male and that any deviation from that rule was denounced as harlotry or adultery and subject to punishment by death, making the sexual customs of the older religion rather difficult to follow.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationWomen S HistoryGoddess Worship
Book:When God Was A Woman
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“High fashion turns women into works of art, and women have always been willing to sacrifice freedom for the appearance of transcendence. What power is to a man, illusion is to a women. You can count on this: in any society, in any period, whatever style emerges to distinguish the elite from ordinary women will physically constrict.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“In no society have women constricted men within the domestic compound or regularly battered or raped men. In no known culture, no matter how high a woman's status, have women as a caste locked up husbands, limited their bodily freedom, or denied them a voice in group decision. Men in matrilinies do not suffer as women do in patrilinies. Matrilineality is rooted in the bond between mother and child; patrilineality is rooted in dubious assertions of ownership of women and children.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Female maturity is evident in the onset of menstruation; nothing signals male maturity. When a boy becomes capable of erection, he may or may not yet be able to father a child. The ambiguity of male maturity, together with the lack of a given role that it seems to indicate, is precisely the problem male solidarity is intended to counter.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Isolated, confined, allowed only small amounts of certain foods and drink, taught that her body is powerful but contaminated, a girl learns that she has power - to pollute: in such cultures, menstrual blood is a source of horror and fear. Menstruation symbolises female power, considered destructive to men. If female power can destroy men, women are men's enemies, and the condition of the sexes is a state of war.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Rituals were designed to protect men from Earth's retribution, and it has been suggested that after the invention of horticulture, humans began to attribute creation to a deity above nature, rather than within it, to a male God rather than a female Goddess.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Patrilinies are founded on domination. To own children, men must guarantee their paternity, which requires them to guard women's bodies, claiming to own them. This claim turns women into men's possessions. Controlling another requires force, so patrilineality permits or encourages brutality towards women. Such behaviour makes for bad relations between the sexes. Brutality is rare in matrilinies, where women are surrounded by kin; men invented patrilocality to control women.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Myths rarely offer facts, only metaphors for political or social forces, but myths about former female powers would not exist if men had always controlled women. If men always controlled women, their domination would need to explanation or justification, but would seem natural. Myths of once powerful females are amazingly universal.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Once the mechanisms of patrilineality, patrilocality, and exogamy were in place, it was difficult for women to escape. In time, men in some groups raised vying for status to an organising principle, competing to show their importance within the group and generating "Big man" societies. These societies fostered the rise of the state and its sociopolitical form - patriarchy.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“The term " Patriarchy" denotes institutionalised male dominance, guaranteed by a set of interlocking structures that perpetuate the power and authority of an elite class of men over all other humans and grant all men power and authority over women of their class. Power is might - physical, psychological, or economic. Animals may dominate other animals by virtue of birth or charisma. But authority - a moral or spiritual right (tactically backed by force) to judge others and coerce behaviour - does not exist among animals. Authority is insidious because we tend to internalise it: we feel guilt at performing acts called wrong by authorities, even if we ourselves do not believe them wrong.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Patriarchies are societies within institutions - hierarchical bodies of government, religion, law, education, commerce, and culture - designed to transcend individual lives, to endure over ages, and to maintain and transmit power from man to man, a practice called "Passing the mantle". All institutions have customs or laws that give men prerogatives or advantages and that exclude or limit the participation of women and certain men. Patriarchies in different states disempower different groups of men, but they all disempower women.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Matriarchy, if it existed, would be identical to patriarchy, with females dominant. Women have wielded great power in the world and have had personal authority over men in their families or communities. But no society has institutionalised female-dominance, a sociopolitical structure giving women authority over men and the right to use force against them. So entrenched is patriarchal thinking, however, that people commonly use the term "Matriarchy" to describe women living free of male authority.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“States are corporations masquerading as peoples. They encompass diverse peoples with varied customs, bloodlines, and languages, and they are ruled by an elite that imposes unity by force and asserts a bond of nationality that supersedes traditional blood or family ties.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“People in simple societies may have killed infants they could not feed in times of scarcity. Female infanticide is an entirely different matter. It occurs in societies with private property in which only males can own property, and it is justified by the need for male heirs. In such societies, men alone can perform religious rituals. Female infanticide is obviously a manifestation of low self esteem for females. Since women's status was traditionally associated with their reproductive capabilities, female infanticide also implies a low value for reproduction. It occurred in most ancient states.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Today, no law or custom forces women to constrict themselves this way. They do it to gain status, to set themselves off from the common herd of a despised species. Elite women always adopt fashions that impede freedom of movement and action, and those who want to appear to be elite always imitate them. Men mock women as slaves to fashion but women's concern with fashion has a sub text. All women know that females are barely known as animals.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Democracies claim that they do not subscribe to the lie of patriarchy but hold everyone equal. A society of equals votes for one man to be held a limited superior for a limited time, in order to govern not as a divine appointee, but as the people's choice. But patriarchal thinking, with its idolisation of power a belief in transcendence, permeates all societies and cannot simply be ignored. Power cliques develop in patriarchies, and soon enough become supreme, even over the elected governor. In our time, these cliques are multinational corporations. Politics cannot change unless patriarchy ceases to be the primary structure of our thought.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Patriarchy insists that some people are better than others because its primary reason for existing is to assert that men are superior to women. But because this claim is a falsehood, it is regularly challenged. States built on lies are insecure and are easily threatened; leaders must endlessly propagandise, insisting their lies are truths.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Patriarchy was conceived as a revolution against female domination; men pulled together against a sex described as inferior in order to usurp women's powers. But they did not really want women's powers: they did not want the responsibility for producing and raising children and the daily work of sustaining men. They wanted symbolic powers - ownership of children and women.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“The assertion of female inferiority prepares the ground for men's subjection, because the principle of superiority ramifies endlessly. If one man can be superior to another, the second man may also be superior to a third, and so on. If men can be superior to women, some men can be superior to other men. Male solidarity attempts to blur that fact, to assert that "down deep" all men are brothers. But this ideal is far from realisation in this world - men are united only when they are opposed to women. Male superiority is a psychological core of patriarchy, but its political and economic purpose is the subjection of other men. Men have regularly rebelled against one ruler or another but have never rebelled against the principle of superiority - the only rebellion that can end the injustice and misery that arises from invidious distinctions - or generic discrimination.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“The shift from female centrality to male domination occurred before the development of writing, so its roots are hidden. In consequence, and men's response over the millennia to all moves by women towards greater autonomy, suggests that it emerged from male hostility towards women and was imposed on them. The destruction of matricentry was the first and most important male war against women.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Men believe that women were nonvolitional beings, bound to their bodies and their instincts. But studies have shown that mothering is learned; is not instinctive. We learn to mother by being mothered, and creatures that are not mothered cannot do it. Taking care creates love, for a baby, a piece of land, an animal. Men devalue this work, attributing it to mere instinct, ignoring the many women who abandon children or raise them cruelly. Taking responsibility is not instinctual in human beings as it is in other mammals. It is a choice.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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