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#1

“It's always harder to be the one who's left behind than the one who leaves.”
― tamara ireland stone, Time After Time

tags: life, love, relationship, time-after-time

13 likes

#2

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

tags: ambition, feminism

2324 likes

#3

“If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

tags: clichés, double-standards, empowerment, expectations, false-belief, feminism, gender, hypocrisy, illusions, misconceptions, misogyny, stereotypes, women

601 likes

#4

“Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don’t get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

585 likes

#5

“Woman's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

tags: feminism, men, women

515 likes

#6

“A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

tags: clichés, conversation, double-standards, feminism, fiction, gender, men, misogyny, natural, prejudice, stereotypes, women, women-writers, writing

600 likes

#7

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

tags: anonymous-authorship, dignity, empowerment, feminism, gender, history, misogyny, persecution, social-norms, suppression, witches, women, women-writers, writing

621 likes

#8

“Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

tags: death, fear, feminism, gender, men, rape, sexism, women

442 likes

#9

“No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”
― Simone de Beauvoir , The Second Sex

tags: feminism

526 likes

#10

“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics

tags: equality, feminism, women

539 likes

#11

“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

tags: clichés, dignity, double-standards, empowerment, feminism, gender, hypocrisy, inequality, misogyny, morality, protectiveness, social-norms, stereotypes, womanhood, women

519 likes

#12

“You can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, ‘And are the men doing this, as well?’ If they aren’t, chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total fucking bullshit’.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

tags: anthematic, feminism, i-love-the-word-fuck

273 likes

#13

“As a woman you are better off in life earning your own money. You couldn't prevent your husband from leaving you or taking another wife, but you could have some of your dignity if you didn't have to beg him for financial support.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

tags: feminism, financial-freedom, islam

298 likes

#14

“The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

tags: feminism

298 likes

#15

“I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

tags: female-authors, feminism, writing

248 likes

#16

“..."Fun?" you ask. "Weren't feminists these grim-faced, humorless, antifamily, karate-chopping ninjas who were bitter because they couldn't get a man?" Well, in fact the problem was that all too many of them HAD gotten a man, married him, had his kids, and then discovered that, as mothers, they were never supposed to have their own money, their own identity, their own aspirations, time to pee, or a brain. And yes, some women indeed became bad-tempered as a result. After all, no anger, no social change.”
― Susan J. Douglas

156 likes

#17

“Individual heterosexual women came to the movement from relationships where men were cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts.”
― bell hooks

tags: activism, feminism, justice, liberals, men, sexism, women

166 likes

#18

“Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich

tags: feminism, gender, men, women, women-s-liberation

157 likes

#19

“When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.”
― Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America

tags: feminism, role-of-women, tradition

156 likes

#20

“Whatever is deeply, essentially female--the life in a woman's expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin--is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being recast as a diminution of power. At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not exist on the woman's body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

tags: advertising, aging, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, double-standards, equality, fashion-industry, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, mass-culture, objectification, plastic-surgery, self-esteem, sexuality, society

143 likes

#21

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

tags: beauty, control, diet, fad, feminism, feminist, food, myth, obedience

556 likes

#22

“He cried when I left, which I find to be standard male behavior.”
― Emilie Autumn

tags: feminism, male

164 likes

#23

“Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don't think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children.”
― Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

tags: feminism, inspirational

165 likes

#24

“And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light

tags: authors, feminism, gender-roles, loneliness, writing

140 likes

#25

“There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

136 likes

#26

“For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.”
― Anaïs Nin

tags: fearless, feminism, independent, inspirational, muse

129 likes

#27

“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

tags: creative-work, feminism

142 likes

#28

“A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”
― Gloria Steinem

tags: feminism

194 likes

#29

“When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty.”
― Stevie Nicks

tags: contradictory, equality, feminism, gender-norm, inspirational, social-norm

110 likes

#30

“No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
― Margaret Sanger

tags: feminism, human-rights, motherhood

98 likes

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