Feminism Gender Gender Quotes

Female is real, and it's sex, and femininity is unreal, and it's gender. ~ Germaine Greer

All men are 'real men', whether they wear KingGees or a pink tutu. ~ Miya Yamanouchi

Our laws as we support them now are slow, wasteful, cumbrous systems, which require a special caste to interpret and another to enforce; wherein the average citizen knows nothing of the law, and cares only to evade it when he can, obey it when he must. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

When a woman shows anger in institutional, political, and professional settings, she automatically violates gender norms. ~ Soraya Chemaly

The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained. ~ Betty Friedan

My father might not have held my hand or expressed his love openly, but he taught Callie and me that we had inherent values, that we were fully formed human beings without a boy by our side. ~ Amy Engel

A man hits me--I hit the man a little harder--then he won't do it again.' Unfortunately he did do it again--a little harder still. The effort to hit harder carried on the action and reaction till society, hitting hardest of all, set up a system of legal punishment, of unlimited severity. It imprisoned, it mutilated, it tortured, it killed; it destroyed whole families, and razed contumelious cities to the ground. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The rest of us have never embraced your victim mentality; we are not victims. We are people, the same way that men are. We are equal, yet different. We, unlike you, realize that is not mutually exclusive. ~ Lori Ziganto

Women accept [man-made] conventions, repeat them, enforce them upon their daughters; but they originate with men. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Gender identity is our internal response to a social construction that attempts to make a connection between a person's biological makeup and their eventual role in society. ~ Sam Killermann

Misogyny was born of fear of women. ~ Sarah B. Pomeroy

In exact proportion as women grow independent, educated, wise and free, do they become less submissive to men-made fashions. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Society' consists mostly of women. Women carry on most of its processes, therefore women are its makers and masters, they are responsible for it, that is the general belief.

We might as well hold women responsible for harems--or prisoners for jails. To be helplessly confined to a given place or condition does not prove that one has chosen it; much less made it.

No; in an androcentric culture "society," like every other social relation, is dominated by the male and arranged for his convenience. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The connection between our archaic system of punishment and our androcentric culture is two-fold. The impulse of resistance, while, as we have seen, of the deepest natural origin, is expressed more strongly in the male than in the female. The tendency to hit back and hit harder has been fostered in him by sex-combat till it has become of great intensity. The habit of authority too, as old as our history; and the cumulative weight of all the religions and systems of law and government, have furthermore built up and intensified the spirit of retaliation and vengeance.

They have even deified this concept, in ancient religions, crediting to God the evil passions of men. As the small boy recited; 'Vengeance. A mean desire to get even with your enemies: 'Vengeance is mine saith the Lord'--'I will repay. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Maybe men who still have the cave-man expectations of women should be sent back into caves. A lot of women will readily volunteer to build such caves free of charge. ~ Dauglas Dauglas

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

A society that does not respect women's anger is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens. ~ Soraya Chemaly

Democratic government is no longer an exercise of arbitrary authority from one above, but is an organization for public service of the people themselves--or will be when it is really attained.

In this change government ceases to be compulsion, and becomes agreement; law ceases to be authority and becomes co-ordination. When we learn the rules of whist or chess we do not obey them because we fear to be punished if we don't, but because we want to play the game. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

...While many who have debated the image of female sexuality have put "explicit" and "self-objectifying" on one side and "respectable" and "covered-up" on the other, I find this a flawed means of categorization. [...] There is a creative possibility for liberatory explicitness because it may expand the confines of what women are allowed to say and do. We just need to refer to the history of blues music - one full of raunchy, irreverent, and transgressive women artists - for examples. Yet the overwhelming prevalence of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in American culture means that any woman who uses explicit language or images in her creative expression is in danger of being symbolically cast into the role of whore regardless of what liberatory intentions she may have. ~ Imani Perry

Misogynists have often reproached intellectual women for 'letting themselves go'; but they also preach to them: if you want to be our equals, stop wearing makeup and polishing your nails. This advice is absurd. Precisely because the idea of femininity is artificially defined by customs and fashion, it is imposed on every woman from the outside[...]. The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour. ~ Judith Butler

It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed. ~ Lorrie Moore

Misogyny was born of fear of women. It spawned the ideology of male superiority. But this was ideology, not statement of fact; as such, it could not be confirmed, but was open to constant doubt. Male status was not immutable. Myths of matriarchies and Amazons societies showed female dominance. Three of the eleven extant comedies of Aristophanes show women in successful opposition to men. ... These were the nightmares of victors: that someday the vanquished would arise and treat their ex-masters as they themselves had been treated. ~ Sarah B. Ponderous

[Christianity] is a religion for slaves and women!' said the warrior of old. (Slaves and women were largely the same thing.) 'It is a religion for slaves and women' says the advocate of the Superman.

Well? Who did the work of all the ancient world? Who raised the food and garnered it and cooked it and served it? Who built the houses, the temples, the aqueducts, the city wall? Who made the furniture, the tools, the weapons, the utensils, the ornaments--made them strong and beautiful and useful? Who kept the human race going, somehow, in spite of the constant hideous waste of war, and slowly built up the real industrial civilization behind that gory show?--Why just the slaves and women. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is the old masculine spirit of government as authority which is so slow in adapting itself to the democratic idea of government as service. That it should be a representative government they grasp, but representative of what? of the common will, they say; the will of the majority;--never thinking that it is the common good, the common welfare, that government should represent. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The story of women in antiquity should be told now, not only because it is a legitimate aspect of social history, but because the past illuminates contemporary problems in relationships between men and women. ... It is most significant to note the consistency with which some attitudes toward women and the roles women play in Western society have endured through the centuries. ~ Sarah B. Pomeroy

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel: they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid and restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer ~ Charlotte Bronte

For every woman who burned a bra, there's a man burning to wear one. ~ Miss Vera

We need to become more open minded to the idea that many of us exist on a spectrum - a continuum - of gender. That for some of us the choice isn't just one or the other - completely male or completely female - but often a combination of both. In fact, it seems there are three different lines on the sexuality spectrum: how you self identify, who you're attracted to, and what you look like. And it seems the dial can be at any place on any of those three lines. ~ Eddie Izzard

I don't think there is a need of the categorization 'woman writing'. I think in some sense writers lost their gender when they walk into the world of words; I believe that writers ought to be able to slip under the skins of both men and women. Only then will the writing and the characters have credibility and strength. ~ Anita Nair

I love my gay brothers. I love my lesbian sisters. I love my transvestite, my gender-bending folk. For me, it's a matter of embracing their humanity, allowing them to choose in such a way that they are in the driver's seat regarding their lives. ~ Cornel West

Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What's on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I move from loathing to loving my own skin? What fruits would that particular liberation bear?
We don't know-as a culture, as a gender, as individuals, you and I. The fact that we don't know is feminism's one true failure. We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority, we gathered the accolades, but we never stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Speaking up for rights and equality doesn't require any specific sexuality or gender, all it requires is that you are human. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Lucy is not one or the other, pure or dirty. Lucy
is Lucy. She could swim in a sewer, have sex with every single person in the world, and she would still never be dirty. I hate him for trying to tell her she
could be. ~ Katie Henry

And in most queer communities, regardless of one's sex or identity, people who are more masculine in gender expression are almost always viewed as more valid and attractive than their feminine counterparts. ~ Julia Serano

Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Never forget the gender of mother earth. This planet is a body through which arterial tides pulse and surge, and within this fluid murk stir serpents, inchoate monstrosities of the amniotic id. ~ Robert Dunbar

Most critics of gender division are women, and they're worried about girls and the roles presented for them by gendered entertainments. They are quite right to be. Telling girls that the cars and the guns are beyond their domain of expertise, and that they should content themselves with clothes and friendships, is limiting. ~ Russell Smith

The power of the work comes through this alchemical process in which the darkness is transmuted into light, and the energy that was trapped in maintaining rigid social structures and unhealthy cultural conditioning becomes freed up and released. ~ William Keepin

Because when an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she's actually having to assert is the breadth and depth of her own humanity. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Although some people think women are inferior to men, I think it's a privilege to be a woman. There are so many fun things afforded to the female gender such as adornment of self, the freedom to communicate with gestures, and the freedom to express one's emotions.
I don't know what I'd do without my red backpack purse, and I am attached to my PDA with the pink monogrammed leather case. I've developed favorites among the many items in my wardrobe, and I like experimenting with accessories like hats, scarves, watches and belts.
I've become fairly proficient at applying make-up, and I now know the importance of a good facial cleanser and moisturizer. ~ Jessica Angelina Birch

Christian feminists insist that patriarchal Christianity's denial of women's humanity, its disrespect for their human rights, and its idealizing of women's powerlessness is far from accidental. This system of male control naturalizes dominant-subordinate relationships for the purpose of legitimating male supremacy. Its continuation depends, to a great extent, on the compliance of women and men to its norms and ideological assumptions about gender. When gender conformity and compliance to racist patriarchal norms break down, patriarchy turns violent, especially when women display autonomous self-direction and "when we women live and act as full and adequate persons in our own right." As [Beverly] Harrison explains: It is never the mere presence of a women nor the image of women, nor fear of 'femininity,' that is the heart of misogyny. The core of misogyny, which has yet to be broken or even touched, is the reaction that occurs when women's concrete power is manifest. ~ Marvin M. Ellison

Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can't bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

As American universities, British playwrights, and Australian judges once understood, the 'safe space' is where cultures go to die. ~ Mark Steyn

Mortars and artillery don't discriminate against gender. ~ Lynsey Addario

Emer was troubled at how all interpretation now devolved in matters of race or gender or religion. There was no art anymore, even in children's stories. Why wasn't the crow female? Why was The Creator a He? Wasn't Bald Eagle insensitive to men with hair loss? This is how we spend our time now. ~ David Duchovny

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful. ~ Michael Cunningham

I don't think about being male or female, I just behave naturally. I think in terms of excellence in science, not gender. ~ May-Britt Moser

In our current society, it is considered a weakness to be female and a treason to protest this. Highlighting inequality results in aggressive insults and threats, all of which are propped up by the repeated narrative now that women are 'playing the gender card'. And this is the final insult. That of all the unfair things associated with women - the violence and insults, the financial oppression, the very undermining of our worth as human beings - it is the acknowledgement of these inequalities that gives us some kind of unfair advantage over the men who benefit from them. ~ Clementine Ford

People who "don't consider race or gender" sure seem to end up hiring almost all white guys, almost as if they're absolutely considering race and gender. ~ Hank Green

There is nothing mixed up about a woman who loves women, who wants to have sex with them, or who identifies as a lesbian. It is society that is mixed up because it punishes people for not conforming to its gender stereotypes. ~ Edward Stein

Home Economics & Civics
What ever happened to the two courses that were cornerstone programs of public education? For one, convenience foods made learning how to cook seem irrelevant. Home Economics was also gender driven and seemed to stratify women, even though most well paid chefs are men. Also, being considered a dead-end high school program, in a world that promotes continuing education, it has waned in popularity. With both partners in a marriage working, out of necessity or choice, career-minded couples would rather go to a restaurant or simply micro-burn a frozen pre-prepared food packet. Almost anybody that enjoys the preparation of food can make a career of it by going to a specialty school such as the Culinary Institute of America along the Hudson River in Hyde Park, New York. Also, many colleges now have programs that are directed to those that are interested in cooking as a career. However, what about those that are looking to other career paths but still have a need to effectively run a household? Who among us is still concerned with this mundane but necessary avocation that so many of us are involved with? Public Schools should be aware that the basic requirements to being successful in life include how to balance and budget a checking and a savings account. We should all be able to prepare a wholesome, nutritious and delicious meal, make a bed and clean up behind one's self, not to mention taking care of children that may become a part of the family ~ Hank Bracker

When it comes to dividing Americans on the basis of their gender, I know a little something about the subject. ~ Kay Bailey Hutchison

There is no "true Islam," just different interpretations. ~ Shirin Ebadi

If love wasn't conditional, every single first encounter with individuals of your 'preferred' gender would result in *love at first sight.* ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. ~ Judith Butler

Homelessness is not a race thing. It's not a gender thing. It's not a religious thing. It's not a gay or straight thing. It's not a political thing. It's not a thing, it's people. ~ Nellie Cake

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. ~ Virginia Woolf

So the aim for the press was a mixture of things: to publish under-represented writing, which is an intersection of original language, style, content, and often its author's gender. To publish it properly, in a way that makes it clear that this is art, not anthropology. To spotlight the importance of translation in making cultures less dully homogenous. ~ Deborah Smith

Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is. ~ Bell Hooks

who are you
really?

you are not a name
or a height, or a weight
or a gender
you are not an age
and you are not where you are from

you are your favorite books
and the songs stuck in your head
you are your thoughts
and what you eat for breakfast
on Saturday mornings

you are a thousand things
but everyone chooses
to see the million things
you are not

you are not
where you are from
you are
where you are going
and i'd like
to go there
too ~ M.k

Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds. ~ Edmund Morgan

Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature's coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet's nest of aggression and overkill. This is the chthonian black magic with which we are infected as sexual beings; this is the daemonic identity that Christianity so inadequately defines as original sin and thinks it can cleanse us of. Procreative woman is the most troublesome obstacle to Christianity's claim to catholicity, testified by its wishful doctrines of Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth. The procreativeness of chthonian nature is an obstacle to all of western metaphysics and to each man in his quest for identity against his mother. Nature is the seething excess of being. ~ Camille Paglia

I would like to believe that most people don't get married anticipating divorce. When I reached that crossroad, I felt like such a failure. After years of therapy together, I realized that staying together was emotionally destructive. ~ Regina King

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men. ~ Pat Conroy

The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

We in the Jewish community are comparatively lucky. All of traditions have anti-gay pieces but the Jewish tradition doesn't have as many anti-sexuality and anti-body teachings. It's a lot easier to fit affirmation of sexuality and gender. ~ Jay Michaelson