Browse 547 quotes about Women S Rights.
“For women, gender identity theory makes sex that which we cannot flee from and that which we are not permitted to keep.”
Source: On the Meaning of Sex: Thoughts about the New Definition of Woman
“If sex-based oppression really was only a cultural construct, would it perhaps go away if we ceased naming it - is that why other systems of domination, such as racism or homophobia, still insist on naming their oppressed subjects, whereas patriarchy knows it doesn't have to name - women will still be women anyway?”
Source: On the Meaning of Sex: Thoughts about the New Definition of Woman
“Regardless of the structure a society has, certain consequences exist as a result of biological sex. Women's bodies tell them when they are going to be mothers, while men become aware they are going to be fathers when a woman informs them. No mother can doubt her motherhood, while a father can never be fully sure. Men can abandon a foetus by walking out the door, women require a doctor and abortion rights. Men can have hundreds of babies a month, women can have one baby a year. Becoming a mother involves physical pain, becoming a father does not. Being a mother alters one's body, being a father does not. Women can feed babies with their bodies, men cannot. Women bleed every month, men do not. A penis can injure a vagina, a vagina cannot injure a penis.”
Source: On the Meaning of Sex: Thoughts about the New Definition of Woman
“The man is not a provider [...] but a scarecrow for other men.”
Source: 7000 years: ...of patriarchy. Until the radical era
“Radical feminism, the recognition of patriarchy and its abolition is, in fact, the real humanist revolution, which will free all people, but, of course, first of all, women.”
Source: 7000 years: ...of patriarchy. Until the radical era
“Patriarchy is sustained by those co-workers who withhold their valuable support for women colleagues because they see the world as a zero-sum universe: you gain, I lose.”
Source: Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy
“Who is formally categorised as a "skilled worker" and who gets to define what work is "skilled" - together, these are two crucial gears in the machinery of any patriarchal workplace.”
Source: Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy
“On November 10, 2016, British woman stopped working. Or rather, they stopped being paid what they were worth for their work. Feminist economists had calculated that, as a result of the multiple processes that perpetuate unequal pay between women and men, from November 10 to December 31 that year, British women were working for free.”
Source: Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy
“Taking my mother's experiences seriously led to my exploring the militarisation of marriages. It made me alert to what feminist historians have been telling us now for four decades: pay attention to the feminised silences - not just silences due to oppression, but silence flowing from many women's belief that their wartime experiences don't "matter" - that they are merely private, trivial, apolitical. Men wage war; women simply "cope" with wartime. Coping does not make for exciting history.”
Source: Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy
“Women have a unique lose-lose position where they are either respected but rejected, or accepted but not respected. What a choice.”
Source: The Gender Bias: The Barriers That Hold Women Back, And How To Break Them
“Women suffer an immense burden of impression management concerning everyday behaviours, many of which are the same behaviours required for success. Assertive women risk being seen as 'bossy,' whereas assertive men are considered 'decisive.' Women prepared to have a difficult conversation are 'ball breakers,' whereas men are just expected to 'speak the truth.' Women risk being perceived differently to men for displaying the same behaviours, saying the same things, in the same way, in the same context. Women feel the pressure of considering how they will be perceived to avoid being judged less favourably.”
Source: The Gender Bias: The Barriers That Hold Women Back, And How To Break Them
“People who would not ordinarily reach for a sexist stereotype - let alone consciously act on it - find themselves behaving in a way that inadvertently denounces a woman's competence solely because that idea of incompetence is deeply ingrained in a sexist stereotype: an image of women that should be kind and caring and not critical or judgemental. Any deviation sees women being disliked and denigrated, with their competence being brought into question.”
Source: The Gender Bias: The Barriers That Hold Women Back, And How To Break Them
“Women cannot be left to bear the burden of calling out inequality simply because they're the ones experiencing it the most acutely.”
Source: The Gender Bias: The Barriers That Hold Women Back, And How To Break Them
“By denying women the opportunity to fail in the same way afforded to men, by raising the stakes for half of society so significantly, we have yet another socially constructed systemic barrier to women succeeding.”
Source: The Gender Bias: The Barriers That Hold Women Back, And How To Break Them
“Too many women are smeared just for occupying their [male] space. Particularly those whose space involves holding power. For women who venture into governance, the spreading of fake news and disinformation has been particularly pronounced. Research has found that female politicians are targeted far more than their male peers.”
Source: The Gender Bias: The Barriers That Hold Women Back, And How To Break Them
“All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labor and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges and possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Women have always fought not just for survival, but for the meaning of the struggle - now, they are organizing, grouping and pushing forward, not merely for new definitions, but for the right to define.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“The atmosphere of uncertainty, dissatisfaction and fear, though caused by larger crisis, becomes associated with the fact that women now have jobs or are no longer in the home as a warm and welcoming presence. Identified then with the bad feelings of change, women came to be seen as the cause of the badness. And not only to men - but to women too, these strains and dissatisfactions, and being made to take responsibility for being the cause of them, often seems too high a price to pay for their new freedoms.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“For women, the life choices (which by in large are made for them by their societies) come down to one of two evils - either the overloaded worker / wife / mother with her double burden, or the underoccupied housewife / drone with her half-life of deprivation and despair.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Now knowledge became the high road to control, and for women the pen had one major advantage over the sword; it fitted neatly into a female fist of any size, age, creed or country in the word.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“While there was work to be done, women did it, and behind the vivid foreground activities of popes and kings, wars and discoveries, tyranny and defeat, working women wove the real fabric of the kind of history that has yet to receive its due.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“The feminist rejection of the low view of women that Christianity had imposed upon so many nations had an important consequence for another of the key issues of the women's rights campaign: the demands for education. The ignorance of women had been bound in with Christian dogma - Eve's sin consisted of reaching out for the tree of knowledge, so her punishment was to be forever deprived of it. Unchallenged for centuries, this attitude produced generations of women doomed to be brought up in mental darkness and then condemned as stupid: "We are educated to the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason," complained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu bitterly in the eighteenth century.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“The rights that women had won through the long century and more of struggle were essentially rights of men. Women had had no option but to batter their way into the age-old fortress of male privilege, and storm the citadel where masculine supremacy still held out.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Women have had to learn, often painfully and always with reluctance, that their freedom will not simply come of its own accord.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“This pelvic preoccupation with women's rampant innards had more of a comic effect, however. Since women were seen as reproductive beings, any and every disorder they experienced was treated by treatment of the reproductive organs.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“As this shows, under the topsy-tervy conditions of revolution, women found themselves once again serving as soldiers in the front line. The last known female regular soldier had been abolished in Ireland in the seventh century A.D., but the tradition, stretching all the way back to the old matriarchies, had never entirely disappeared.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“If God was male and woman was not male, then whatever God was, woman was not.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Since women are not inferior, they had to be bombarded with a massive literature of religious, social, biological and, more recently, psychological ideology to explain, insist, that women are secondary to men. And to make women believe that they are inferior what better subject for this literature of religious teaching, cautionary folk tales, jokes and customs, than the female body?”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“In terms of understanding the patriarchal struggle for control of women's bodies, the issue of blood is a major preoccupation. For not only did women bleed every month, from girlhood for all over their adult lives; every stage of their journey as women, every passage from one state to the next (menarche, defloration, childbirth) was also marked by the flow of blood with its frighteningly ambivalent signal of both life and death. The greater the danger the stronger the taboo. All these "courses" of women's lives have triggered an intricate and often savage set of myths, beliefs and customs in which the containment of cultural fears overrode any personal concern for the female who was ostensibly the cause and center of it all.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Domination was not absolute, systems were imperfect, there was still too much room to maneuver - control could not be based on an organ that men could not control. There had to be more - an idea of imminent, eternal maleness that was not physical, visible, fallible; one that was greater than all women because greater than man; whose power was omnipotent and unquestionable - one god, God the father, who man now invented in his own image.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Achieving power, man reached out for the secret of control; and as he began to look beyond the end of his penis, he found a stronger lord, a greater master - God.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“To women, therefore, the effect was broadly the same, however the message of male supremacy came packaged. All these systems - Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - were presented to them as holy, the result of divine inspiration transmitted from a male power to males empowered for this purpose, thereby enshrining maleness itself as power.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“All patriarchies, in fact, only succeeded by colonizing, indeed cannibalizing the forms, emblems and sacred objects of the Goddess they were purporting to root out. Much recent theological scholarship has been devoted to recovering what in ages past every schoolgirl knew: that the Great Goddess in her threefold incarnation (maiden, mother and wisewoman) lies behind the Christian trinity, that her immature aspect of moon maiden became the Virgin Mary, and so on.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“For whatever needs were answered by the new patriarchies as they grew, throve and put on beef, they were bot the deeper needs of the female sex. Of course, there were attractions - there had to be, for women to swallow the ideological bait without perceiving either the hook or the poisonous lead weighing it down. None of these systems could have been imposed on women against their will. There had to be consent from the women members of each tribe, township or race proselytized by the zealots of the new gods, at some level. Which of them, though, presented with the first appealing package of function and freedom, could have known what she was consenting to for herself and all her female descendants for the next 2,000 years?”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Each in its own way, the five major belief systems of Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam by their nature insisted on the inferiority of women and demanded their subjection to values and imperatives devised to promote the supremacy of men.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Under patriarchal monotheism, womanhood was a life sentence of second-order existence.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Virginity came in with a vengeance as every budding patriarch suddenly realized his divine right to a vacuum-sealed, factory-fresh vagina with built-in hymenal gift-wrapping and purity guarantee.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“All so-called "laws of God" express in reality the will of man.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“The attack on women's bodies that was one of the most marked consequences of the imposition of patriarchal monotheism has no convenient onset or conclusion - but it was a principle determining factor of every woman's history over an extended period of time. It signaled, precipitated even, the decline of women into their long night of feudal oppression and grotesque persecution.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“For woman was an "intractable animal" and she displayed her brute unreason nowhere more clearly than in her refusable to acquiesce in her own subjection.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“For women were dangerous in every part of their anatomy, from top to toe. Luxuriant hair could excite lust accordingly the Jewish Talmud from A.D. 600 onward allowed a man to divorce a wife who appeared in public with her hair uncovered. While St Paul went so far as to instruct Christians that a woman who came bare headed to church had better have her head shaved. The female face was another Venus's flytrap for helpless males - in a bizarre piece of theology dated from the 3rd Century A.D., the early Christian father Tertullian held that "the blume of virgins" was responsible for the fall of the angels: "so perilous a face, then, ought to be kept shaded when it has cast stumbling stones even so far as heaven.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Within the face, woman concealed one of her most potent and treacherous weapons, her tongue.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Patriarchy changed all that. With a genuine belief in the one God came the inescapable duty to enforce it upon others; with the claim to the patent on truth came for the first-time ideas of orthodoxy, habits of bigotry and the practice of persecution.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“I am a black woman. Don't look beyond me. Don't see through me. Look me in the eye. Hold my gaze. Listen to my heart. See my soul. See me for who I am, not what you would like me to be. Accept or reject but don't hide from my truth.”
Source: The Heart and Soul of Black Women: Poems of Love, Struggle and Resilience
“The message is clearly that any right-thinking woman should understand her inherent, natural deficiencies and immediately set off on a lifelong journey of self-discovery and inevitable self-improvement, and probably forgo external things such as the world, life, and work.”
Source: Nothing But the Truth
“We women are never quite right. A little too much of this, not enough of that. Perpetually in need of tweaking. If we could just tone down, speak up, be more assertive, know our place, be slightly less ambitious or shrill, dress less provocatively, look more feminine, be thinner, heavier, we would be perfect!”
Source: Nothing But the Truth
“Women’s rights remain a continuous battle around the globe; where education as a basic right is nothing but a dream and where possession of their own bodies is a debatable matter.”
“In a short essay called ‘Liberating Life: Women’s Revolution’, Öcalan (2013) outlines the core tenets of his sociological/historico-philosophical writings. Öcalan’s fundamental claim is that ‘mainstream civilisation’, commences with the enslavement of ‘Woman’, through what he calls ‘Housewifisation’ (2013). As such, it is only through a ‘struggle against the foundations of this ruling system’ (2013), that not only women, but also men can achieve freedom, and slavery can be destroyed. Any liberation of life, for Öcalan, can only be achieved through a Woman’s revolution. In his own words: ‘If I am to be a freedom fighter, I cannot just ignore this: woman’s revolution is a revolution within a revolution’ (2013).
For Öcalan, the Neolithic era is crucial, as the heyday of the matricentric social order. The figure of the Woman is quite interesting, and is not just female gender, but rather a condensation of all that is ‘equal’ and ‘natural’ and ‘social’, and its true significance is seen as a mode of social governance, which is non-hierarchical, non-statist, and not premised upon accumulation (2013). This can only be fully seen, through the critique of ‘civilisation’ which is equally gendered and equated with the rise of what he calls the ‘dominant male’ and hegemonic sexuality. These forms of power as coercive are embodied in the institution of masculine civilisation. And power in the matriarchal structures are understood more as authority, they are natural/organic. What further characterised the Neolithic era is the ways through which society was based upon solidarity and sharing – no surplus in production, and a respect for nature. In such a social order, Öcalan finds through his archaeology of ‘sociality’ the traces of an ecological ontology, in which nature is ‘alive and animated’, and thus no different from the people themselves.
The ways in which Öcalan figures ‘Woman’, serves as metaphor for the Kurdish nation-as-people (not nation-state). In short, if one manages to liberate woman, from the hegemonic ‘civilisation’ of ‘the dominant male’, one manages to liberate, not only the Kurds, but the world. It is only on this basis that the conditions of possibility for a genuine global democratic confederalism, and a solution to the conflicts of the Middle East can be thinkable. Once it is thinkable, then we can imagine a freedom to organise, to be free from any conception of ownership (of property, persons, or the self), a freedom to show solidarity, to restore balance to life, nature, and other humans through ‘love’, not power.
In Rojava, The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, Öcalan’s political thoughts are being implemented, negotiated and practised. Such a radical experiment, which connects theory with practice has not been seen on this scale, ever before, and although the Rojava administration, the Democratic Union Party, is different from the PKK, they share the same political leader, Öcalan. Central to this experiment are commitments to feminism, ecology and justice.”
“Teresa said that until men gave birth and put up with husbands, as women do, they should not have an opinion - let alone decide on - abortion and divorce. She didn't believe that men had the right to an opinion, much less to pass laws on the female body, since they'd never know the exhaustion of gestation, the pain of labor, and the eternal bondage of motherhood.”
Source: Violeta
“Woman is too volatile and spiritual, a being to be kept down by mere brute force," she [Elizabeth Packard] wrote. "You can cage a bird and thus keep her down on a level with her serpent-mate, but just give her the use of her powers, its freedom, and she will rise.”