Nasty Women Quotes

“One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses. "No advanced step take by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public," Susan B. Anthony said in 1900. "For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized." Or as Mary Beard put it last year, "We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America

“Systemic racism isn’t something you can opt out of; it’s only something you can consciously resist.”
― Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America

“They didn't just want Bernie to win; they wanted Clinton to lose to Bernie. And if she wouldn't lose to Bernie, or let him win, they wanted her to lose everything. They wanted to prove that she deserved to lose.

Why did this take me by surprise?... I think it was denial. It was a couple of decades of post-feminism telling us we'd come far enough. It allowed me to forget there's no more despised figure on earth than a woman who seeks power. In the United States, it's fine for a woman to claim equality, as long as she cheerfully opts out of it.”
― Carina Chocano, Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America

“What does a woman running for president have to do to be likable?

Not run for president.”
― Carina Chocano, Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America

“As it turned out, nearly everything strange and disquieting about Trump – his punitive response to even mile criticism, his viscerally personal insults disguised as ‘jokes,’ his willingness to spread wild rumors about his targets in order to discredit or shame them, his inability to stop lashing out or degrading certain women years after they’d left his life – was also a commonly reported behavior of domestic abusers.
Sady Doyle, “The Pathology of Donald Trump”
― Sady Doyle, Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America

“That hidden economy, which still exists today, is one of love. There is self-interest, certainly, in all of these women's endeavors; for their trouble, they get shelter and food. But you don't do any of that - the mind-numbing care of small children, the endless repetition of cooking and laundry, the indignity of having a mind as fine as any man's and no opportunity to exercise it - without love. Either love for the owners of the dirty underwear and the sticky little hands, or love for people whose survival depends on the pittance you make for doing it.

Almost three hundred years after Dam Smith was born, women still dominate the "caring professions" - teaching, nursing, social work - and are scarce in positions of financial or political power. Married women who work full-time still do substantially more cleaning, food preparation, and child-engagement tasks than their male partners. And when professional women's work becomes too time consuming, the care of children and the household isn't shared more equally with male partners, but outsourced to other women, frequently poor women of color. It is men who are raised to participate in a strict economy of self-interest. Most women could never afford that.”
― Kate Harding, Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America

“What I meant when I said that Hillary Clinton had made the world ready for Hillary Clinton is that I recognized her as a woman who had whacked the weeds to blaze her own trail, who had always stood up again after she was told to sit down, who had persisted, and persisted, and persisted, nevertheless. What I meant is that a woman like this was finally going to win. Someday she will.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America