Quotes by Activists - Page 62

The backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning. The world has changed profoundly, and it needs to change far more.
Rebecca Solnit
A slut isn’t a person, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or an annoying eyelash. We decide who a girl is based on something she’s done (or even just rumoured to have done) and then brand her with it as if it’s a permanent part of her identity. Guys, on the other hand, get to wear their relationships and ‘conquests’ like medals or badges of honour, which are much easier to take off, and hurt a lot less.
Laura Bates
There are really not many jobs that actually acquire a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.
Gloria Steinem
Go," she whispered. "Go. Show them you spell your name W-O-M-A-N.
Maya Angelou
Thanks to demographics, that conservative push is not going to work-the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again- and because genies don't go back into bottles and queer people are not going back into the closet and women aren't going to surrender. It's a war, but I don't believe we're losing it, even if we won't win it anytime soon either; rather, some battles are won, some are engaged, and some women are doing really well while others suffer. And things continue to change in interesting and sometimes even auspicious ways.
Rebecca Solnit
At the end of the day, feminism is not about what choice you make, it's about having the ability to make a choice.
Jennifer Baumgardner
Frequently, I have been asked how I got to be this way. How did I, born black in a white country, poor in a society where wealth is adored and sought after at all costs, female in an environment where only large ships and some engines are described favourably by using the female pronoun-how did I get to be Maya Angelou?
Maya Angelou
Economist Marvin Harris described women as a "literate and docile" labor pool, and "therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries." The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.
Naomi Wolf
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.' Critic John Berger's well-known quote has been true throughout the history of Western culture, and it is more true now than ever.
Naomi Wolf
Economist Marvin Harris described women as a 'literate and docile' labor pool, and 'therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries.' The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.
Naomi Wolf
Eight or nine out of ten mothers in our society today believe that they have accomplished their duty if their daughters, once married, are not sent home in divorce. -Daughters in Boxes
Kishida Toshiko
Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
Audre Lorde
Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.
Naomi Wolf
If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never know how many other women shared it.
Betty Friedan
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 started to see the bigger picture of things: Islam was not relegated to the tiny, sometimes frustrating and seemingly arbitrary details of practice, but rather entered the larger picture of spirituality and worship that contextualized my womanhood. In order to be able to derive these logical conclusions about my religion, I had to go back to the basics and understand the very fundamental principles upon which it was founded: justice, social equality, racial equality, financial equality, and, possibly most important of all, gender equality. Thus began my lifelong love affair with Islamic feminism.
Amani Al-Khatahtbeh
The theft of brown women's narratives is not only an injustice placed on them, but also one extended to their male counterparts; by insisting they need to be liberated from their 'barbaric' civilization, Laura [Bush] summoned the colonial assertion that brown women need saving from brown men, when, in actuality, brown women have suffered at the hands of white men more than at those of any other oppressor in history.
Amani Al-Khatahtbeh
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together...
Lilla Watson
What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?
Audre Lorde
The Rites of Beauty also seduce women by meeting their current hunger for color and poetry. As they make their way into male public space that is often prosaic and emotionally dead, beauty's sacraments glow brighter than ever. As women are inundated with claims on their time, ritual products give them an alibi to take some private time for themselves. At their best they give women back a taste of mystery and sensuality to compensate them for their days spent in the harsh light of the workplace.
Naomi Wolf
The idea that "femininity is artificial" is also blatantly misogynistic. Just as woman is man's "other", so too is femininity masculinity's "other". Under such circumstances, negative connotations like "artificial", "contrived", and "frivolous" become built into our understanding of femininity - indeed, this is precisely what allows masculinity to always come off as "natural", "practical" and "uncomplicated".
Julia Serano
If a guy is put off by you being a feminist, you need to ask yourself how put off you are by someone who doesn't believe in equality for women.
Laura Bates
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.
Betty Friedan
Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.
Rebecca Solnit
As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaidlabor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, "wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of ies productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist societry cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation - an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives - nor CO the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity. and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, willie profiting from the wageless conclition of the labor involved.
Silvia Federici
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
Betty Friedan
Men weren’t really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
Betty Friedan
Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.
Rebecca Solnit
Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.
Gloria Steinem
She said, 'No, you learned that you have power - power and determination. I love you and I am proud of you. With those two things, you can go anywhere and everywhere.
Maya Angelou
No woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.
Andrea Dworkin
we bwlive that feminism is a transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities
Carol J. Adams
many efforts on bahalf of of animals will qualitatively improve humans' living conditions as well, which is likely to be the case
Carol J. Adams
This is central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as "normal".
Angela Y. Davis
The process of trying to assimilate into an existing category in many ways runs counter to efforts to produce radical or revolutionary results.
Angela Y. Davis
In being everything for everyone, when am I anything for myself?
Malebo Sephodi
To misbehave us to denounce the social norms that limit individuals based on who they are. That to make history is to upset patriarchy, a system that is intent on controlling and marginalising others.
Malebo Sephodi
How do I negotiate my way across life with a system that I find so violent yet it seems so normal to many others?
Malebo Sephodi
In nude protests, the very same body that is objectified and subjected to endless scrutiny and policing is used to reclaim power.
Malebo Sephodi
You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.
Rebecca Solnit
I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.
Rebecca Solnit
...the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.
Rebecca Solnit
Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.
Rebecca Solnit
...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.
Rebecca Solnit
It's the way some med say, "I'm not the problem" or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, "What do they want--a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?
Rebecca Solnit
It's the way some men say, 'I'm not the problem' or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, 'What do they want--a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?
Rebecca Solnit
On top of dealing with the emotional trauma associated with conscious and unconscious recalling, you must deal with the possibility of no one believing you or making you doubt your experiences. When women speak out about their abusers, they have to deal with the police and society not believing them
Malebo Sephodi
Self-love for me means accepting who I am and dealing with the perceived flaws that I live with. It is also accepting that sometimes I struggle with feelings of inadequacy and I do not think that I am enough. The point to all of this, is acknowledging this part about me. When I acknowledge it then it becomes easy for me to seek self-love through managing the moments when I don’t feel like I love myself. I am constantly working towards finding ways that enable me to value myself.
Malebo Sephodi
My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough lovejobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediate wars with other sufferers.
Grace Paley
Society is obsessed with women's bodies and I take my body back by doing whatever it is that I want to do with my body
Malebo Sephodi
This is a battle that we will win. Because women are wittier, brighter, stronger and braver than a misogynistic and patriarchal world has given us credit for.
Laura Bates
I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined ... imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness.
Audre Lorde
Just got called a slag by two guys sitting outside the University of York library. A slag for books?
Laura Bates
Yes, for the love of God young women, come along – learn your limits. Or, rather, know society’s limits. How dare you think you have the right to go out wearing whatever you like – how foolish and ignorant of you to expect not to be assaulted, you brazen hussies! What do you think this is? A free country?
Laura Bates
Tired of cold callers asking to speak to the 'man in the house', now I put them on to my 6-year old son... he sings them 'Sexy and I Know It'.
Laura Bates
Possibilities for women have become so open-ended that they threaten to destabilize the institutions on which a male-dominated culture has depended, and a collective panic reaction on the part of both sexes has forced a demand for counter images.The Beauty Myth
Naomi Wolf
Women of all groups were measurably more likely than their male counterparts to vote for equality, health, and education, and against violence as a way of solving conflict. It wasn't about biology, but experience.
Gloria Steinem
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Audre Lorde
I don't trust the everyday: it is a mask, a sham. It gives the illusion of permanence, of an unshatterable calm, a placid surface; and yet underneath the pot is slowly coming to a boil.
Rebecca Walker
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