Feminism Women In Literature Quotes

It's critical we examine the kind of standards we hold fictional girls to and consider how it reflects in the way we treat real girls and, most important, what kind of emotional impact that has on them. What are we saying to girls when we cannot accept difficult, hurting female characters as being worthy of love because they are difficult and hurting? ~ Courtney Summers

I am a warrior in the time of women warriors; the longing for justice is the sword I carry. ~ Sonia Johnson

But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves
rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children. ~ Caitlin Moran

I draw a line down the middle of a chalkboard, sketching a male symbol on one side and a female symbol on the other. Then I ask just the men: What steps do you guys take, on a daily basis, to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted? At first there is a kind of awkward silence as the men try to figure out if they've been asked a trick question. The silence gives way to a smattering of nervous laughter. Occasionally, a young a guy will raise his hand and say, 'I stay out of prison.' This is typically followed by another moment of laughter, before someone finally raises his hand and soberly states, 'Nothing. I don't think about it.' Then I ask women the same question. What steps do you take on a daily basis to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted? Women throughout the audience immediately start raising their hands. As the men sit in stunned silence, the women recount safety precautions they take as part of their daily routine. Here are some of their answers: Hold my keys as a potential weapon. Look in the back seat of the car before getting in. Carry a cell phone. Don't go jogging at night. Lock all the windows when I sleep, even on hot summer nights. Be careful not to drink too much. Don't put my drink down and come back to it; make sure I see it being poured. Own a big dog. Carry Mace or pepper spray. Have an unlisted phone number. Have a man's voice on my answering machine. Park in well-lit areas. Don't use parking garages. Don't get on elevators with onl ~ Jackson Katz

This [ban bossy] campaign is indicative of one of the main problems with feminism today -- the idea that women are victims in need of more and more special protection. ~ Karin Agness

As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend. ~ Audre Lorde

Remember that when a women gets the job you wanted or dates that bloke you fancied or wears a dress you loved but couldn't afford, she hasn't taken anything from you. There is time and space for you to do it too. One of the cleverest things the patriarchy did was make us believe that there is only one tiny sliver of success cake available; that we all have to fight over it; that a woman who tramples on her competitors to chow it down first is somehow 'ruthless' or to borrow a phrase from Apprentice-ese, 'a natural business mind.' This is a scare-mongering lie. There are so many cakes to eat. And if you can't find the slice you want, try baking one. Cake for everyone! Let them eat cake! I've got lost in the metaphor. ~ Scarlett Curtis

It's no surprise that a generation of women who were brought up being told that they were equal to men, that sexism, and therefore feminism, was dead, are starting to see through this. And while they're pissed off, they're also positive, bubbling with hope. One obvious outcome of being brought up to believe you're equal is that you're both very angry when you encounter misogyny, but also confident in your ability to tackle it. ~ Kira Cochrane

As bell hooks wrote in a 1998 essay, "Naked Without Shame," about black women's bodies and politics, "Marked by shame, projected as inherent and therefore precluding any possibility of innocence, the black female body was beyond redemption." She points out that since the time of U.S. slavery, men have benefited from positioning black women as naturally promiscuous because it absolves them of guilt when they sexually assault and rape women of color. "[I]t was impossible to ruin that which was received as inherently unworthy, tainted, and soiled," hooks wrote.
Women of color, low-income women, immigrant women- these are the women who are not seen as worthy of being placed on a pedestal. It's only our perfect virgins who are valuable, worthy of discourse and worship. ~ Jessica Valenti

Feminism expects a man to be ethical, emotionally present, and accountable to his values in his actions with women - as well as with other men. Feminism loves men enough to expect them to act more honorably and actually believes them capable of doing so. ~ Michael S. Kimmel

But she had learnt, in those solemn hours of thought, that she herself must one day answer for her own life, and what she had done with it; and she tried to settle that most difficult problem, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

But, of course, in real life, in the outside world, women do not have equality. They have been judged inferior to men -Adam's rib, his helpmate- with no soul of their own. This has been so since the beginning of Western civilization. Women may have been potent characters in plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, but in classical Greek life, women were not allowed to leave their houses (except to go to the well or on certain feast days). Their names on all legal documents appear as "the daughter of so and so" or "the wife of so and so", They had almost no rights -"She is my goods, my chattels", as Petruchio says of Kate two thousand years later (Taming of the Shrew,3.2,220). And with the advent of Christianity we began the debate as to whether women had souls in their own right or whether they were an "add-on" to their husbands and fathers. What is clear is that the mother of Jesus had to be both a virgin and totally lacking in sexual desire. And she is the model for all women.
By the time we get to Shakespeare's era, a widow would automatically inherit a third of her husband's possessions if he died (but those possessions became her new husband's if she remarried). Women probably had souls (but it was still being debated), and a woman was a monarch. But in neither classical Greece nor Elizabethan England could a woman portray a woman onstage [...] ~ Tina Packer

That evening, in her apartment, still in Warsaw, Ana takes down a book from her shelf – a rather thick, ordinary paperback. It looks old, because it's worn out and somehow shabby. But it's not ordinary. I can tell by the way she handles it so carefully, like something unique. 'This is the book I told you about,' she says, holding out the Anthology of Feminist Texts, a collection of early American feminist essays, 'the only feminist book translated into the Polish language,' the only such book to turn to when you are sick and tired of reading about man-eater/man-killer feminists from the West, I think, looking at it, imagining how many women have read this one copy. 'Sometimes I feel like I live on Jupiter, among Jupiterians, and then one day, quite by chance, I discover that I belong to another species. And I discover it in this book. Isn't that wonderful. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

Though I did not have the statistics, just observing the number of women on the streets during peak hours dressed for work, it was obvious that a greater percentage of women in Vanni went to work outside the home. There were also more women in civilian clothes riding motorbikes on Vanni roads compared to the rest of the island. Women, both LTTE members as well as civilians, occupied the public space in large numbers. They were very visible on the roads and in the LTTE institutions. This gave Vanni a uniquely pro-woman character, which was absent elsewhere on the island. ...

It was a unique kind of feminism, created by connecting the majority of women living all over Vanni, from all walks of life, for public action regarding women and children in need of help ~ N. Malathy

History is driven, over the long haul, by culture - by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good, and by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature, and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on. ~ George Weigel

A Hillary Clinton presidency would symbolically break the glass ceiling for women in the United States, but it would be unlikely to break through the military-industrial complex that has been keeping our nation in a perpetual state of war--killing people around the world, many of them women and children. ~ Liza Featherstone

It is only when women start to organize in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society in which every human being can be brave, responsible, thinking and diligent in the struggle to live at once freely and unselfishly. Such a democracy would be communism, and is beyond our present imagining. ~ Sheila Rowbotham

Even though men have very little interest in wearing women's clothes, this has not prevented a gigantic industry from arising, dedicated to satisfying women's desires in fashion. Industries which provide makeup, hair styling, nail polish, hair removal, and weight loss services are similarly "biased" in the direction of females: they disproportionately serve women. These phenomena would be very difficult to understand on the feminist model that female wants are ignored or deprecated in the male's favor. ~ Walter Block

By educating women to use all their brains, men will not only be just, but will also ensure the future of a new social order in which women will apply their intelligence and warm feelings to the problems of living. Men are fools to entrust the upbringing of their sons, whom they expect to grow up to love freedom, to women who have never known freedom themselves. ~ Eugenio Maria De Hostos

A lot of people think if they're shouting the loudest, they'll be heard, but most people lose respect for you when you lose your cool. You have to maintain everyone's respect, especially as a woman in a position of power. It's terrible to be at that kind of disadvantage, where if you yell, people will talk about you behind your back more than if you were a man. Because of those social injustices we face as women, you have to make sure that no one can call you a crazy bitch. ~ Taylor Swift

If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender's performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality. ~ Judith Butler

There is nothing novel or comedic or righteous about men using the threat of sexual violence to control non-compliant women. This is how society has always functioned. Stay indoors, women. Stay safe. Stay quiet. Stay in the kitchen. Stay pregnant. Stay our of the world. IF you want to talk about silencing, censorship, placing limits and consequences on speech, this is what it looks like. ~ Lindy West

I stand in my own power now, the questions of permission that I used to choke on for my every meal now dead in a fallen heap, and when they tell me that I will fall, I nod. I will fall, I reply, and

my words are a whisper
my words are a howl

I will fall , I say, and the tumbling will be all my own. The skinned palms and oozing knees are holy wounds, stigmata of my She.

I will catch my own spilled blood, and not a drop will be wasted. ~ Beth Morey

Why do you consult [women's] words when it is not their mouths that speak? Consult their eyes, their colour, their breathing, their timid manner, their slight resistance, that is the language nature gave them for your answer. The lips always say 'No,' and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie. Has not a woman the same needs as a man, but without the same right to make them known? Her fate would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not. ~ Steven Pinker

I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women. ~ Hilary Mantel

Feminist efforts to grant women social equality with men of their class neatly coincided with white supremacist capitalist patriarchal fears that white power would diminish if nonwhite people gained equal access to economic power and privilege. Supporting what in effect became white power reformist feminism enabled the mainstream white supremacist patriarchy to bolster its power while simultaneously undermining the radical politics of feminism. ~ Bell Hooks

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

The only chance for much intellectual improvement in the female sex, was to be found in the families of the educated class and in occasional intercourse with the learned. ~ Abigail Adams

We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn't take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. 'I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn't tell him to stop . . .' My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, 'No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?' And I didn't have any answer for that. ~ Louise O'Neill

Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they're short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It's defeatist and demoralising. ~ Christina Hoff Sommers

Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her. Ask the politicians who exude delight when they advocate for the so-called traditional family how many women are beaten and children raped when there is no man in the family. Zero is such a perfect and encouraging number, but who, among politicians in male-supremacist cultures, can count that high? ~ Andrea Dworkin

We (women) are a powerful force, but it is not our fists that propel us, it is our minds and wiles. ~ Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

The fear of rape puts many women in their place - indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors... I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me - all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behavior rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them - but it had not in me. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to their sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

He began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind.. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Women were expected to sit in the pews, receiving messages from men in the pulpit. Their role was to recognize God in their pastor, not to expect or demand that he recognize God in them. ~ Melissa V. Harris-Perry

If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings. ~ Melinda Gates

Just so long as all our literature is pervaded with the thought that women are inferior, so long will our sex be held in a low estimate. ~ Lillie Devereux Blake

We live in a world of self-deprecation, and while it's healthy to make fun of ourselves from time to time, it bothers me when I see women of all ages belittling their accomplishments because they don't want to appear boastful or overconfident. You don't see a lot of guys out there underplaying their strengths or making light of what they're good at, so why should women? While I get that there's a fine line between owning your accomplishments and reciting every line of your résumé, there is absolutely no shame in being proud of what you've managed to achieve! Own it! ~ Lea Michele

Unfortunately, every era needs to demonize feminist. The Feminazi was the 1990s version. The term was coined by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh to describe women who support abortion rights. It was taken up by ultra-right-wing conservatives everywhere and came to refer feminists in general. (…) A Feminazi is a strident, controlling bitch who –Oh, horrible crime!– insists on equal right for women. She doesn't agree with the right-wing construct that the man is the ruler of the home. Her goal in life is to turn men into whimpering slaves who take care of the kids and share the housecleaning, something men must resist at all costs or American society will crumple even more. The Guerrilla Girls are still waiting for the day when everyone will think of the Feminist as a positive stereotype. Don't let us wait too long. ~ Guerrilla Girls

I wanted the kind of life my father had had, not the one I saw my mother struggling to get away from. I thought I was peculiar in this desire, but, as things have turned out, it seems such secret ambition burning in young female breasts were not so uncommon. ~ Jane Caro

I didn't realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn't like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn't want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew now to be not only a man in the right way, but also a woman. ~ Elena Ferrante

To be a woman, no matter your background, is to have to fight for your territory in a way that men don't have to. ~ Jane Caro

And the differences thence arising [between the constitution of men and women] are no ways sufficient to argue more natural strength in the one than in the other, to qualify them more for military labours. Are not the Women of different degrees of strength, like the Men? Are there not strong and weak of both sexes? Men educated in sloth and softness are weaker than Women; and Women, become harden'd by necessity, are often more robust than Men. (...) Woman may be enured to all the hardships of a campaign, and to meet all the terrors of it, as well as the bravest of the opposite sex. ~ Sophia Fermor

She smiled, and as she hugged me, the scent of lavender intensified. It was intoxicating; it wrapped its long, soft arms around my head, and whispered tales in my ear. Tales of elegant women living in houses with large gardens where peacocks could wander. Tales of women who lived exactly as they wanted. Tales of women who did as they pleased. Tales of women who loved how and whom they wanted. Tales that could become reality.
Yes, the lavender smelled of freedom. At that moment I understood: this was what I wanted. To live as I pleased, not as I was supposed to. ~ Petra Pavlíková

it is only in social relations that we are human...to be human women must share in the totality of humanity's common life. Women, forced to lead restricted lives, retard all human progress. Growth of organism, the individual or social body requires use of all of our powers in four areas: physical, intellectual, spiritual and social ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It had been communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of women that a female's nose must never shine. In war, in famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick without the requisite face powder. … I was taunted by the problem: how could someone write something like the 'Symposium' and make sure her nose did not shine at the same time? It didn't matter to me that I was reading a translation. I'd read Plato's brilliant, dense prose and not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose. It didn't hurt, it didn't make noise, it didn't incapacitate in any way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one. ~ Andrea Dworkin