Womens Studies Quotes

Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey. ~ Camille Paglia

Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective-women's bank, women's music, women's studies, women's caucus. That adjective did more than change a phrase. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics. ~ Gloria Steinem

It's not enough to have a few women's studies courses. Why is it more important to study Paul Revere's midnight ride than it is Susan B. Anthony's 50-year effort to transform the face of America for women? When you're in school, most of the events you study are about men. Men's activities lauded and repeated over and over. What about us? What about commemorating the decades-long struggle for suffrage? Why don't we hear those stories over and over and over again. It's almost inconceivable for men to understand what it would be like to live without that constant valorization. ~ Judy Chicago

When female stories are muted, we are teaching our kids that their dignity is second class and the historical accounts of their lives [are] less relevant. This lowered value carries over when women face sexual objectification and systemic brutalization from inside and outside the community. ~ Aurin Squire

Many of the white women at Mills who called themselves feminists didn't understand my experiences as a black woman. In women's studies classes, for example, the individual histories and struggles of black women were often ignored...I declared myself a womanist when I realized that white women's feminism really didn't speak to my needs as the daughter of a black, single, domestic worker. I felt that, historically, white women were working hard to liberate themselves from housework and childcare, while women of color got stuck cleaning their kitchens and raising their babies. When I realized that feminism largely liberated white women at the economic and social expense of women of color, I knew I was fundamentally unable to call myself a feminist. ~ Taigi Smith

Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink . It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women. ~ Camille Paglia

For those of you who skipped their women's studies classes, first-wave feminism got women the vote; second-wave got them employed and divorced; third-wave is busy making them porn stars. More or less. ~ Kathleen Parker

In other words, for purposes of sex discrimination law, to be a woman means either to be like a man or like a lady. We have to meet either the male standard for males or the male standard for females. ~ Catharine A. MacKinnon

Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom. ~ Adrienne Rich

The outrageous madonna/whore duality that we mock in Women's Studies 101 has its subtle, and very insidious, expression in the good/bad mother paradigm that we grapple with every day of our lives. ~ Shannon Drury

My mom is like this hard-core, liberal feminist. She's a professor in Boston, and she's been teaching women's studies for 30 years and international politics. ~ Eliza Dushku

University of California, Irvine, Professor of Art and Engineering, Codirector of Arts, Computation, and Engineering (ACE) Program
Kavita Philip University of California, Irvine, Associate Professor of Women's Studies, Anthropology, and Arts, Computation, and Engineering (ACE) Program
Todd Presner University ~ Cathy N. Davidson

When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival. ~ Rory Kennedy

I didn't go to high school, I didn't go to college, I didn't have women's studies. All of my feminist ideals and education have been built around art and my friends and community. And so it's still growing. ~ Kathleen Hanna

Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called "radical" or "progressive" people don't hear enough "buzz" words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings). ~ Krysta Williams

Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, women's studies, and probably casting your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffee house to help cover the rent. ~ Neil Gaiman

There is nothing wrong with "women's studies" that studying the right women can't cure, but feminist literary scholars have a penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics. ~ Florence King

Though Women's Studies was supposed to give a voice to "silenced" women, all too many women who dissent from its orthodoxy have themselves felt silenced by intolerant professors - and students, too. Indeed, while some (generally tenured) older professors like Willingham do dare to challenge Women's Studies dogma, younger initiates, whether students or greenhorn instructors, often act as fierce enforcers of dogma, reiterating it (as did Tholen and Alder at the Beijing +15 session) with all the zeal of fresh converts to a fundamentalist faith and bristling at any violation of Holy Writ. Patai and Koertge quote professors who complain about students being "zombified" by Women's Studies, turned into "ideologically inflamed Stepford Wives" who "utter ... stock phrases" and are plainly "terrified of a thought because if they ever had a serious thought, they might start reflecting on this stuff they're taught to repeat. ~ Bruce Bawer

I didn't want to set up a women's studies program. I thought women should learn to operate in a coeducational atmosphere, because, especially in national security and international affairs, it's male-dominated. ~ Madeleine Albright

We must take the best from the left and the best from the right to devise new strategies for the global twenty-first century. The reluctance of liberal professors to speak out against rampant abuses committed on their side (e.g., suppression of free speech, the excesses of women's studies and French theory) has simply increased the power of the right. ~ Camille Paglia

All the men added together made the solid world
they were the marbles in the jar, and women were whatever sand or water or air claimed the space left between them. That's how I saw things as a young woman, that was my women's studies. Now I've come to know that women are like vodka poured over men, who melt away like ice cubes. ~ Bonnie Jo Campbell

There are a lot of homely women in women's studies. Preaching these anti-male, anti-sex sermons is a way for them to compensate for various heartaches
they're just mad at the beautiful girls. ~ Christina Hoff Sommers

Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organization that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatever standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it. ~ Jessica Valenti

In 1970, Women's Lib preached universal sisterhood and resistance to "patriarchy" anywhere and in any form; today, Women's Studies, like contemporary establishment feminism generally, is meekly multicultural, treating non-Western social practices with deference even when they involve the brutal subjection of females. ~ Bruce Bawer

T IME'S a circumference

Whereof the segment of our station seems

A long straight line from nothing into naught.

Therefore we say " progress, " " infinity " -

Dull words whose object

Hangs in the air of error and delights

Our boyish minds ahunt for butterflies.

For aspiration studies not the sky

But looks for stars; the victories of faith

Are soldiered none the less with certainties,

And all the multitudinous armies decked

With banners blown ahead and flute before

March not to the desert or th' Elysian fields,

But in the track of some discovery,

The grip and cognizance of something true,

Which won resolves a better distribution

Between the dreaming mind and real truth.

I cannot understand you.

'T is because

You lean over my meaning's edge and feel

A dizziness of the things I have not said. ~ Trumbull Stickney

What is the bedrock on which all of our diverse trans populations can build solidarity? The commitment to be the best fighters against each other's oppression. As our activist network grows into marches and rallies of hundreds of thousands, we will hammer out language that demonstrates the sum total of our movement as well as its component communities.

Unity depends on respect for diversity, no matter what tools of language are ultimately used. This is a very early stage for trans peoples with such diverse histories and blends of cultures to form community. Perhaps we don't have to strive to be one community. In reality, there isn't one women's, or lesbian, gay, bi community. What is realistic is the goal to build a coalition between our many strong communities in order to form a movement capable of defending all our lives. ~ Leslie Feinberg

Trump's dictatorial tendencies and mendacity, negative attributes for many voters, poised him perfectly to manipulate the evangelical mind. Like the biblical god evangelicals worship, Trump is a thin-skinned authoritarian with totalitarian tendencies. He craves love and punishes any disloyalty or slight. Evangelicals have been taught to worship and adore that type of being above all others. This strain of religion cultivates a veneration for extreme authority. Studies bear this out: religious fundamentalism and a tendency to submit to authoritarianism are highly correlated. Trump acted like the character evangelicals worship and benefited from their ingrained adulation. Evangelicals were simply seeing in Trump a character they'd been taught to revere. As if to prove the point, Ann Coulter called Trump her "Emperor God". ~ Andrew L. Seidel

The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write. ~ Grace Paley

What did The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Uncle Tom's Cabin and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and all that have to do with our present enthusiasm for women's rights? Not that much, really. Women just got lucky this time. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Studies indicate that most of young adults struggle to grasp even the most basic financial principles that will allow them to manage money and prepare for their future. ~ Ron Lewis

The point of my books is to give voice to otherwise voiceless females from history and myth, to unlock what has been secreted away in women's hearts and minds for millennia. Historically, women have either been reduced to nothing but their sexuality or stripped of it entirely: the Madonna or the whore. ~ Karen Essex

Studies show that organically grown crops produce more of the things (ascorbic acid, lycopenes, resveratrol, flavonols in general, etc) that our bodies need and also have less toxic residue. Science is still catching up with this. J. Agric. Food. Chem. Vol. 51, no. 5, 2003. ~ Michael Pollan

When the owner fired me, he said he was sorry, since he admired what I was trying to do. Really? What was it, exactly, that I was trying to do? Oh right. Something about equality. ~ JoeAnn Hart

I know that what had happened with my father - his insults, his criticism, the way he made me feel that I was defective and deformed - had hurt me. I'd encountered enough of those self-help articles in women's magazines to know that you don't go through that kind of cruelty unscathed. With every man I met, I'd watch myself carefully.
Did I really like that editor, I'd wonder, or am I just searching for Daddy? Do I love this guy, I'd ask myself, or do I just think he'd never leave me, the way my father did? ~ Jennifer Weiner

The Second World War created the need for a new generation of female heroes. Where could these women look for role models? The women of the previous war had by this time been largely forgotten. Although efforts had been made during the 1920s to memorialize the war's heroes, both men and women, with monuments, books, and films, most Europeans, impatient to forget the war, also forgot its heroes.

But now the memory of their courage was needed and eagerly recalled... ~ Kathryn J. Atwood

I don't recommend surgery at all. Women's bodies are beautiful as they are, and I've had a love/hate relationship with my breasts my whole life. ~ Pamela Anderson

All womens not alike, Tobias, she say. Believe it or not.
Oh, I believe it, he say. Just can't prove it to the world. ~ Alice Walker

But it was there, and studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor. ~ J.D. Vance

Happiness was an evasive emotion that could not be fabricated, duplicated, or happened upon. It was something that was only handed out to a select few, but just like his mother, Ethan realized that he was never meant to have it. ~ Belinda G. Buchanan

When I finish reading People, I always feel that I have just spent four days in Los Angeles. Women's Wear Daily at least makes me feel dirty; People makes me feel that I haven't read or learned or seen anything at all. ~ Nora Ephron

We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. ~ Gene Wolfe

Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves. ~ J.G. Ballard

Put aside any notion you might have that low-income people live lives of ease and pleasure and that it is high-income people who suffer angst and anxiety. Studies of happiness show that people who experience less power on a daily basis, or who are in low-power positions within a social group, or who live in poorer neighborhoods, are less happy than those with more power. These findings are true of adults as well as of children. ~ Dacher Keltner

So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way - not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen.
This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you'll just open your heart and join in. ~ Nicholas D. Kristof

The so-called women's question is a whole-people question. ~ Sheila Rowbotham

A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought. ~ George Eliot

Nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world. ~ James Jeans

When women's true history shall have been written, her part in the upbuilding of this nation will astound the world. ~ Abigail Scott Duniway

Recent studies have shown that our creativity is increased by 60% when we're walking. I encourage my workshop participants to write at their desks but think on their feet. ~ Kate Klise

A wise woman has already a rite
Where she knows right from left.
She usually writes when she's right
And always leaves before she's left. ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

The years that a woman subtracts from her age are not lost. They are added to other women's. ~ Diane De Poitiers

It is the world that shapes people's minds. It is men who have shaped the world. So women's minds are shaped by men. From earliest childhood, the world they see is made by men. Now the women lie to themselves and there is confusion and unhappiness everywhere. ~ Ian McEwan

Religious people are forced to perform mental gymnastics to reconcile real life with their delusions. When Christianity, Islam and the rest of the world religions finally have gone the way of Zeus, they will leave behind a legacy of case studies for students of abnormal psychology. ~ Al Stefanelli

Unlike old-fashioned Britain, where Tony Blair recruited Lord Levy to encourage his 'Friends of Israel' to donate their money to a party that was just about to launch a criminal war, in America Alan Greenspan provided his president with an astonishing economic boom. It seems that the prosperous conditions at home divert the attention from the disastrous war in Iraq.
Greenspan is not an amateur economist, he knew what he was doing. He knew very well that as long as Americans were doing well, buying and selling homes, his President would be able to continue implementing the 'Wolfowitz doctrine' and PNAC philosophy, destroying the 'bad Arabs' in the name of 'democracy', 'liberalism', 'ethics', and even 'women's rights'. ~ Gilad Atzmon

The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies. ~ Neil Postman

What terrifies me? When I read about plots of evil taking over the world and obliterating women's hard-won rights. ~ Julie Carmen

Why is the integrity of the literary canon everywhere articulated in terms of its imagined integration to a nation-state as well as a racialized civilization? What would it mean to seek justification for literary studies on the basis of aesthetic value rather than the contestable presumption that literary canons function as the preeminent repositories of national cultures and/or racialized civilizations? ~ David Lloyd

In the women's movement, women needed men to stand up and say, 'This isn't right.' In the civil rights of the '60s, it took people of all color to demand equal rights. ~ Pauley Perrette

I wonder if my mother knew that her own grandmother died of an abortion after bearing nine children, back in Russia, during the First World War, or if her mother kept that family secret from her as she kept her secret from me. Women's lives are different now - so much so we're in danger of forgetting how they used to be. Legalizing abortion didn't just save women from death and injury and fear of arrest, it didn't just make it possible for women to commit to education and work and free them from shotgun marriages and too many kids. ~ Katha Pollitt

The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature. ~ Isaac D'Israeli

Women artists need to break barriers in order for women's experience to be valuable. ~ Liz Phair

Women's fashion is a subtle form of bondage. It's men's way of binding them. We put them in these tight, high-heeled shoes, we make them wear these tight clothes and we say they look sexy. But they're actually tied up. ~ David Duchovny

I wrote "Bootylicious" because, at the time, I'd gained some weight and the pressure that people put you under, the pressure to be thin, is unbelievable. I was just 18 and you shouldn't be thinking about that.You should be thinking about building up your character and having fun, and the song was just telling everyone to forget what people are saying, you're bootylicious. That's all. It's a celebration of curves and a celebration of women's bodies. ~ Beyonce Knowles

Women in my country take their rights for granted and completely dissociate themselves from the women's rights movement and feminism. But I think anything's possible. If I don't help the women in Afghanistan, they won't be around to help me. ~ Cheryl Benard Quoting Lorrie

Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totality? Do history, philosophy, cosmology, science, and literature each claim to constitute the totality, an unexpandable horizon beyond which we cannot think? Could a strong discipline be defined as one that has a vision of totality and claims to encompass all the rest? And are they all wrong to do so? ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

My father left me with his love of Jewish studies and cultural life. To this very day, along with several physicians and scientist colleagues, I take regular periodical lessons taught by a Rabbinical scholar on how the Jewish law views moral and ethical problems related to modern medicine and science. ~ Aaron Ciechanover

Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as "misogynous." In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies ... there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women's actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men. ~ Camille Paglia

It is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. ~ Virginia Woolf

Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He "gives his opinion and then rests upon it"; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much. ~ Marianne Moore

I am part man, and I notice women's breasts and thighs with the calculation of a man choosing a mistress ... but that is the artist and the analytical attitude toward the female body ... for I am more a woman; even as I long for full breasts and a beautiful body, so do I abhor the sensuousness which they bring ... I desire the things which will destroy me in the end... ~ Sylvia Plath

I have encountered riotous mobs and have been hung in effigy, but my motto is: Men's rights are nothing more. Women's rights are nothing less. ~ Susan B. Anthony

There are cultural and societal prejudices that make it hard for us to write. It has been my experience that for some men, the struggle to write involves the prejudice that it is not "manly" to reveal the inner life, the secrets of the heart and of the imagination. For many women, the struggle to write is at base a struggle against the idea that women's lives are not of interest as literature. I have a friend whose husband once said after her first book had been published, "You sit there writing as if your life had some significance. ~ Pat Schneider