Feminist Inspirational Quotes

To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?" [To the Women of India (Young India, Oct. 4, 1930)]

A woman is human. She is not better, wiser, stronger, more intelligent, more creative, or more responsible than a man. Likewise, she is never less. Equality is a given. A woman is human.

Teach her that the idea of 'gender roles' is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl. 'Because you are a girl' is never reason for anything. Ever.

We don't see people as they are. We see people as we are.

But as the years went on, I realised that what I really want to be, all told, is a human. Just a productive, honest, courteously treated human.

I am a strong and powerful woman. I am proud to be a woman and I celebrate the qualities that I have as a woman. I am not defined by other people’s opinion of who I should be or what I should do as a woman. I determine that, not anyone else. I am not passed up for a position, title, or promotion because I am a woman. I fully deserve all the good things that comes my way. Irrespective of what anyone might think, being a woman places no boundaries or limits on my abilities. I can do anything I set my mind to. I celebrate my womanhood and I am beautiful both inside and out.

I am a woman and a warrior. If you think I can't be both, you've been lied to.

The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy....Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.

No, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don't you see? Don't you SEE?

It is your father who has insisted on calling me a 'witch'. That's is simply a term that men give women who are not afraid of them, women who refuse to do as they are told.

Don't make yourself small. Not for anyone. If someone tells you you're too much... too loud, too sensitive, too fierce, too caring, too intellectual, too optimistic, too realistic, too logical, too emotional... just smile and move on, my friend. Clearly, they aren't enough for you.

Say to yourself, I am perfect, the way I am. Say to yourself, I am beautiful the way I am. Say to yourself, those who do not accept me the way I am, do not deserve me in their life.

...women, brave as stars at dawn

Kill the part of you that believes it can't survive without someone else.

Teach her about difference. Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Teach her not to attach value to difference. And the reason for this is not to be fair or to be nice but merely to be human and practical. Because difference is the reality of our world. And by teaching her about difference, you are equipping her to survive in a diverse world. She must know and understand that people walk different paths in the world and that as long as those paths do no harm to others, they are valid paths that she must respect. Teach her that we do not know – we cannot know – everything about life. Both religion and science have spaces for the things we do not know, and it is enough to make peace with that. Teach her never to universalise her own standards or experiences. Teach her that her standards are for her alone, and not for other people. This is the only necessary form of humility: the realisation that difference is normal.

At some point, while you were roaming the globe, making treaties and dividing the spoils of war, I quietly declared my own independence. I am the sovereign nation of Clio now. And there will be no terms of surrender.

I do not want to know things, I want to understand things. I want to answer every question ever posed me. I want to leave no room for anyone to doubt me.

How dare a person tell a woman, how to dress, how to talk, how to behave! Any being who does that, is no human.

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.

The representation of women in the society, especially through mass media has been the most delusional act ever done on the grounds of human existence.

The rest of us have never embraced your victim mentality; we are not victims. We are people, the same way that men are. We are equal, yet different. We, unlike you, realize that is not mutually exclusive.

Women are no sheep. Women are no fragile showpiece to be placed above the fire-place. Women of the thinking society are the builders of nations. Women of the sentient society are the builders of the world.

All the bloodsheds in human history have been caused by men, not women.

To the rebel girls of the world: Dream bigger Aim higher Fight harder And, when in doubt, remember You are right

The female brain itself is a highly intuitive emotion-processing machine, which when put to practice in the progress of the society, would do much more than any man can with all his analytical perspectives.

You don’t even have to love your job; you can merely love what your job does for you - the confidence and self-fulfillment that come with doing and earning.

You only fix something, when it’s broken. And you - are far from broken.

It is always easier to find your sense of value by demeaning another’s value. It is easier to define yourself as ‘not that,’ rather than do an actual accounting of your own qualities and put them on the scale.

Given the same honor and dignity as men, women can build a much better and more harmonious world.

A society where feminine beauty is defined not by the human self on genuine intellectual and sentimental grounds, but by a computer software on the grounds of economic interest, is more dead than alive. It is a society of human bodies, not human beings.

I am a scientist who studies the human mind, including the sexual differences in mental faculties, and I am telling you, ten female thinkers can teach humanity lessons equivalent to the teachings of a hundred male thinkers of history.

You are not born to follow the society, you are born to inspire it - you are born to teach it - you are born to build it.

When you fear nothing, you have nothing to fear

She is a beautiful, powerful badass woman who sometimes falls apart inside after she drops her bags by the door and tosses her stilettos. Her vulnerability at night helps her to rise stronger in the morning.

Don't stop now. Keep going. The next time someone makes you feel though, winning as you are, perhaps you're getting too big for your britches; say to them silently, "i haven't even started yet.

This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust.

Beauty is an illusion.

Women united can create movements. We can empower entire generations. We can build peace one action at a time. Together we rise. The time is now.

I’ll rescue myself. No one will ever lock me up in a tower.

I live for moments when I dare to be ME in spite of all that I "should" be.

It's as if our girls don't understand that they can be recognized for other things--their goals, their brains. Not just their bodies.

I can’t even believe the world we live in. My parents raised me to work hard, not to ever expect any handouts in life – and to treat people with respect.

I am the sea and nobody owns me.

Any book that spreads weakness in the heart of one gender, and authoritarianism in the other, must be burnt to ashes.

O my Courageous Sister! You have to become the beacon of hope for all women around you and then for the whole society.

They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices. But they were all made out of thin invisible steel.

I’d leave this house the first chance I got, but not by chasing after a boy, including my brother. I’d do it on my own terms, following my dreams, not someone else’s.

Someone said I had smiled. But to my father, it was not a smile, just a small beautiful moment because he had not lost me forever.

There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.

Mythology is all shite anyway,' she says. 'It never has stories about people like us. I'd rather write my own legends, or be the story someone else looks to one day, build a strong foundation for those who follow us.

They can take and steal and break all they want, but there is one thing they have no control over. Our emotions. Our feelings. Our thoughts. None of them will ever be able to control the way we feel. Our minds and our hearts are our own. That is our power.

Men,you say you want a strong, intelligent, truly independent woman who wants you rather than needs you, who inspires you, who pushes you towards being yourself, who can stick by you through the hardest times, and who can be your rock through life's obstacles. But you need to know that a truly strong, independent woman does not walk through life with her heart wide open. She has had to put up walls to block toxicity to obtain her strength. She is skeptical and always on alert from a lifetime of defense against predators. She is going to be a bit jaded, a little cynical, and a little scary because those qualities come with the struggle of obtaining that strength that gravitates you. She is going to doubt and question your good intentions because it has become her adaptability instincts that have allowed her to thrive. She is not a ball of sunshine. She has flaws. She has a past. She has her demons. She knows better than to just let down her barriers for you simply because you voice a desire to enter. You have to prove your right of entrance. She will assume the worst of you because the worst has happened. If you want her to see otherwise, prove her wrong.

Remember, for a society to truly progress we don't need woman or man, we need a fully-fledged human - nothing short of that would do.

Any nation that does not learn to place women on the same pedestal of respect and dignity as men, will never in a thousand years attain greatness.

A woman should always know her place, and it's exactly wherever she wants to be.

If one man can destroy everything why can't one girl change it?

If the ultimate goal is lasting love, women are going to have to become comfortable with sacrifice and capitulation. Because those are the underpinnings of a long-term marriage – for both sexes.

A feminist who only fights for the lives of women like herself isn't fighting for everyone, so I'm going to keep going at this feminist thing until all women have the same access to human rights.

The feminism of equality, of toughness, of anti-discrimination, has been overwhelmed by one of victimhood and demands for special treatment....At a certain point, when we demand an equal ratio of men to women in certain fields, what we’re criticizing is not “the system,” but the choices that women themselves are making.....let’s keep our eye on the question of equal opportunity and stop obsessing about equal outcomes, lest we find ourselves trying to cure society, not of sexism, but of free choice.

Some Me of Beauty I took a good long look at myself in a full length mirror Sometimes it’s good to look in a full length mirror And what I saw was not some soul sister poetess of the moment But I saw just a woman Just a woman feeling Just a woman human And what I felt was What I felt was a spiritual revelation And what I felt was a root revival of some love coming on Coming on strong And I knew then, looking in a full length mirror, That many things were over And some me of beauty was about to begin

The world doesn't need a good woman who is meekly obedient to the uncivilized social norms that advocate female inferiority. The world needs those bad women who can think for themselves, to break the primeval norms of the society that consistently drag the human civilization back to the stone-age.

Society doesn't owe us anything. I don't need someone to pay for my female hygiene products to feel empowered. Can we work? Yes. Can we vote? Yes. Do we have the same rights and opportunities as men? Yes. What rights are they [feminists] fighting for? What are they specifically? What don't they have?

Gender equality is not a belief, it is not an idea - it is a key element of the society that will define whether we the humans shall march ahead towards glory and advancement, or sink into the abyss of an existential doom.

At my old school I was vice president of this club called GRIT,” Lucy tells us. “It stood for Girls Respecting and Inspiring Themselves. It was, like, a feminist club.

Funny isn't it? The power of story. It's why I picked up a pen. I slay monsters, too.

Reading is an act of radical empathy: turning the page instead of turning away.

To work for a world where women are treated as people in every aspect of our lives is to work not just for women but for all people to realise their full humanity.

Desire cannot be tamed. That’s what the King told me the first time I was here. Well, King. You should see how untamable love makes you.

I'm so excited to watch the next generation of teenage feminists make their mark on the world because I truly believe they're going to achieve extraordinary things.

They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering Wes and soft fluttery voices. But they were all made out of thin invisible steel.

What feminists refer to as microaggressions, the rest of us sane adults call life....The concept of microaggressions encourages women to think that every single thing in the world is, or should be, about them. It encourages breathless levels of narcissism, solipsism and just plain delusion....Feminism encourages women to believe that they have the same reasoning and coping abilities as toddlers. No thanks.

Glass ceilings can't stop me. Glass slippers don't interest me. Glass mirrors don't define me. I decide who I will or I will not be. And I choose to be unbreakable untakeable unshakeable me.

And yet the idea that women are human beings remains news, a message that requires constant, clear, and artful reinforcement in a world that continues to undermine the confidence and abilities of girls and women. On the day that the intelligence and talents of women are fully honored and employed, the human community and planet itself will benefit in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Listen my dear sister! You only fix something, when it’s broken. And you - are far from broken. Say to yourself, I am perfect, the way I am. Say to yourself, I am beautiful the way I am. Say to yourself, those who do not accept me the way I am, do not deserve me in their life.

For thousands of years, the dumb, uncivilized, stone-age society has reduced women to mere prizes to be won, objects to be shown off, and playthings to be abused and toyed with. Now is the time to stop this primitive madness.

I stepped out of the box because I'm a woman who breaks locks. I break glass ceilings too, the sky knows my flair, boo. Where you see the word 'groundbreaking', know it's me being breathtaking. I'm a woman; I gave birth to all men.

Being Uniquely YOU is the New Perfect.

Speak gently but look out for your rights.

What a hundred caring, courageous and conscientious women can achieve in ten years, would take a thousand men a hundred years.

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep

the housewife is not here. she is running for congress

Women of the thinking society are the builders of nations. Women of the sentient society are the builders of the world. And given the same honor and dignity as men, women can build a much better and more harmonious world. Harmony and conflict-solving run in their veins. Whereas men have evolved into more authoritarian creatures.

A few years back, an American Jewish feminist academic sent me a request for an interview... The professor presented herself as a `gender scholar`, another postmodernist discipline that fails to inspire my intellect. However, I was curious to see what a person who happens to be academically qualified in being a woman might come up with.

A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man!

In all the tales of adventure Clara had ever heard, it was never young girls, who were daring. It was always boys running off to rescue a friend or fetch much-needed medicine or stumble into good fortune. Clara knew girls would be daring if given half the chance. And she intended to take that chance, right from under the pale nose of Mr. Earwood.

There were just four things a woman could be (five at most): daughter, wife, mother, widow, and slut. That was it. There were no other roles for them—no free and independent women, no feminism, no selfsufficiency. If you didn’t like it, you could be branded a witch and executed.

This was her body. She had learned to take pleasure in it, even if no man had ever done the same. It was curved and generous and womanly and strong, and it was formed to do more than decorate a drawing room, or transfer wealth from one gentleman to another. She was made to tempt, labor, inspire, create, sustain. Despite the way Rafe held her bound in his grasp, a sense of power moved through her. For once, she could revel in her femininity and feel it as something other than a disadvantage to be overcome. A quality to be respected, worshiped. Even feared.

Joan was not only an actual human being but a most important one. A FEMINIST ICON WHO PROVED TO THE WORLD THAT WOMEN CAN ROCK EVEN HARDER THAN MEN. An innovator, an architect, a punk rock pioneer so powerful, she inspired generations of young women to pick up guitars and do the same.

Men and boys are constantly portrayed as predatory, sexist, their sense of humour is vilified and their behaviour is regarded as unacceptable. Factor in the constant diet we are fed of men as perpetrators of rape, murder and domestic violence. Boys must wonder whether they will ever be able to do anything right. This must make it painfully difficult for young men and women to build up relations based on honesty, love and trust.

That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary. The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers. The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care. Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

I am no feminist. Even though the term "feminism" is founded upon the basic principle of gender equality, it possesses its own fundamental gender bias, which makes it inclined towards the wellbeing of women, over the wellbeing of the whole society. And if history has shown anything, it is that such fundamental biases in time corrupt even the most glorious ideas and give birth to prejudice, bigotry and differentiation.

We live in a patriarchal world—a system that aids and abets inequality. In this system that has gatekept financial information and tools from marginalized groups, it is an act of protest to be financially independent. It is an act of protest to overcome negative beliefs about money in order to save, pay off debt, invest, and find fulfilling work. It is an act of protest to prioritize rest instead of hustle, abundance rather than scarcity, and generosity in place of stockpiling. In a world that actively works to keep us playing small, it is an act of protest to be stable, content, and powerful.

you grow a bird in a cage and then humiliate it by telling - 'you can't fly'.

Women who are radical feminists are not men-hunters. Sorry, I meant men-haters. Radical Feminists don’t hate men. But you can, if you want to.

A Jewish woman in exile in the 1930s is an antihero.

When you can't find someone to follow, you have to find a way to lead by example.

Breaking through the glass ceiling is only possible if you are stronger than glass.

Whoever said dogs can't speak was never interested in learning another language.

Behind every great woman... is another great woman.

Destiny is not what limits her.

Women have learned to love different parts of their bodies based on what men like…But I wonder which parts of a woman’s body does she like for herself?

She's a classic stuck in a world full of trends.

We can all deliver the final hit needed to break the glass ceiling in order to achieve complete gender liberation.

Your biceps, six-pack abs, and daring attitude are of no use if you cannot protect and respect women!

Authenticity is an act of social justice.

Who made man the exclusive judge, if women partake with him the gift of reason?

I've spent a lifetime in challenge. There's no way in which you can create any meaningful change unless you do that.

Occasionally I’ll be sitting somewhere and I’ll be listening to someone perhaps not saying the kindest things about me. And I’ll look down at my hand and I’ll sort of pinch my skin to make sure it still has the requisite thickness I know Eleanor Roosevelt expects me to have.

I respect you as so much bigger than my own understanding. And me too. I don't have to be available to be eligible for breath. I don't have to be measurable in a market of memes. I don't have to be visible to be viable on my path. I don't have to be shy to be sacred about my time. There are only two things I have to do, my mom taught me, and I can do them in the company of my choosing. The company of myself, my living, my dead, my folks, my dreams. 1. Stay Black. 2. Breathe.

Feminists believe that women should be protected from certain aspects of public life, including speech..... Feminists do not want to engage in aspects of life they disagree with. Instead, they want to silence what they don’t like through censorship and criminalisation. Feminists believe that women need protection from words. Finally, contemporary feminists do not believe that women are independent, free-thinking individuals. Feminists promote a cliquey, sisterhood mentality, but not through a collective and positive sharing of ideas. They’re the kind of group you’d encounter at school who would shun you if you weren’t wearing the right kind of hairband. Today’s feminism is opposed to criticism and nuance, refusing to allow women to form their own opinions or challenge preconceived ideas.

It continues to baffle me that people's main concern about my activities around peace and grassroots activism in a full-on police state at first centred on my clothes - not my ideas, not my message, not my intentions; all those came second to what I was wearing and whether or not 'a girl' could walk that far.

Oh, why did he slap her when she’s a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn’t have a husband to speak for her.

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine", so we suppress it-until it overflows.

I will not tell her that a man's work is only out in the world or that a woman's work is inside the home. If she chooses to stay at home, then we will support her with all our hearts; but we will never teach her that there's only one kind of woman to be.

...women are conditioned to waste hours, days, weeks, months (although, truth be told, it's most likely years) doubting, undermining, and ultimately hating parts, if not all, of themselves based solely on "problems" with their bodies that can be solved by buying products from an industry that invented these problems in the first place. How fucking convenient. And when all is said and done, what is the prize for this self-torture? Fitting neatly within society's destructive narrative about the female body.

Girls, here's the truth about the Ban Bossy campaign: It's being spearheaded by a privileged group of elite feminists who have a very vested interest in stoking victim politics and exacerbating the gender divide. They actually encourage dependency and groupthink while paying lip service to empowerment and self-determination. They traffic in bogus wage disparity statistics, whitewashing the fact that what's actually left of that dwindling pay gap is due to the deliberate, voluntary choices women in the workforce make.

En somme, si on voulait être cohérent, il faudrait soit lever le pied sur l'éducation des filles, soit intégrer à leur formation un sérieux entraînement à la guérilla contre le patriarcat, tout en s'employant activement à faire en sorte que cette situation change.

Why is self confidence arrogant? Why is self-depreciation considered modesty? I worked my ass off to be able to have a high opinion of myself. It took a long time and many, many years, and I’m never going to tell – let anyone tell me that I should think less of myself.

Stop telling me I’m oppressed.....I’m not a victim. I don’t know why feminists are so hellbent on characterizing me as one.....Feminists don’t speak for me. They’re not my voice. They’re not my representation. I owe them nothing, except maybe a shred of sympathy. How miserable must they be to see oppression at every turn?...You DON’T speak for me. You DON’T represent me or my concerns....We’re living proof that the modern day feminist movement is a crock. Feminists are victims of their own delusions, and we’ll never buy what they’re selling.

One of many beautiful young girls in traditional hijab came up to me to have her photo signed. Her green eyes glistened as she looked at me directly and asked, “Can you put ‘Women can be heroes, too’?” I met everyday heroines on this trip–ladies with a glow and a sparkle, a determination and a strength in the face of adversity. We did have tremendous fun in the making of Agent Carter, but the positive effect–particularly on young women–is what I hold closest to my heart. I met a girl named Nada at the convention. She said, “Most people think my name means ‘Nothing,’ but in fact it means ‘dewdrop’ and ‘honesty’ in my culture.” Whatever happens in the future for Peggy, and the show, Season One and its small impact on young girls are a drop of positivity in our world. Peggy is an honest girl following her own moral compass in the face of adversity. She makes us strive to be better than we want to be. Thank you, Marvel, for letting me step into her high heels, apply her lipstick, and fight the good fight. For all you little Peggys out there, you are not alone. Go forth and kick ass.

Il serait temps que les femmes - souvent si peu sûres d'elles, de leurs capacités, de la pertinence de ce qu'elles ont à apporter, de leur droit à une vie pour elles-mêmes - apprennent à se défendre face à la culpabilisation et à l'intimidation, qu'elles prennent au sérieux leurs aspirations et qu'elles les préservent avec une inflexibilité totale face aux figures d'autorité masculines qui tentent de détourner leur énergie à leur profit.

The black mother perceives destruction at every door, ruination at each window, and even she herself is not beyond her own suspicion. She questions whether she loves her children enough- or more terribly, does she love them too much? Do her looks cause embarrassment- or even terrifying, is she so attractive her sons begin to desire her and her daughters begin to hate her. If she is unmarried, the challenges are increased. Her singleness indicates she has rejected or has been rejected by her mate. Yet she is raising children who will become mates. Beyond her door, all authority is in the hands of people who do not look or think or act like her children. Teachers, doctors, sales, clerks, policemen, welfare workers who are white and exert control over her family’s moods, conditions and personality, yet within the home, she must display a right to rule which at any moment, by a knock at the door, or a ring in the telephone, can be exposed as false. In the face of this contradictions she must provide a blanket of stability, which warms but does not suffocate, and she must tell her children the truth about the power of white power without suggesting that it cannot be challenged.

the only way we can become more inclusive and ultimately more legitimate and successful at ensuring peace, prosperity and women's rights is by ensuring that all people can see themselves at the table, and that young women in particular have role models, mentors and the necessary support and amplification to ensure that we occupy those spaces. It was the reason I started my own mentorship programme - because, often, we can't be what we can't see.

While I was in hospital having the treatment that would enable me to have sex, I struggled to define my identity as a women, and felt particularly unworthy of feeling feminine in any capacity. My fairy godmother of a nurse advised me to buy some knickers that made me feel empowered - so I did, and it worked.

I am a person. I am not always happy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; sometimes I feel sad, sometimes I feel angry. Sometimes I see brokenness in the world and I feel like I'm dying inside because I want to fix it! I am a person. I am not continuously grateful for everything and everyone 100% of the time. Because sometimes, I don't feel grateful! Sometimes I feel betrayed, other times I feel deceived. Because I am a person. And I am tired of the schools of thought and the judgmental eyes that offer up their plates of useless opinion when I am not 100% floating up there in false pretenses of perfection. I do not want to be false. I want to be a person. And I want to feel and I want to think, and no, not everything in life is something to be grateful for; and no, not everything in the world is something to be happy about. I am a person. My face can do a lot of things aside from smiling. My face can look peaceful, it can look thoughtful, it can look Divine. I can frown and sometimes my eyebrows are scrunched up in the middle; that's because I'm thinking! I am a person. A person that is so much more than what popular opinion expects is the definition of perfection. But I AM perfect. I am perfect the very way that I am. And I would never want to be only what popular thought would expect of me. I am so much more than that.

Sister, if he wants to touch that beautiful and rare diamond between your legs, if he wants to slip into that honey they swarm around, always hungry, always go, then he will take it however you give it to him. And if you want to give it to him hairy, that's how he's going to fucking take it. —Stop trying so hard. Find your own beautiful.

Women’s liberation fought for the right of women to leave the home and become involved in the public sphere; feminists now want to convert this realm into a series of safe spaces and censored zones. If you don’t like what someone says to you on the street, say something back, put your headphones on, or just laugh – it’s really not that bad.

Existia um livro que eu acreditava ter me feito vislumbrar quem seria no futuro: Mulherzinhas, de Louisa May Alcott

Feminism is not a one size fits all kinda thing but anyone can wear it.

If attempting to make the world a civilized one, makes you a bad woman in the eyes of the dumb patriarchal society, then, by all means, be it.

Arise my Sister! Awake my Sister! Start walking in the path of building your own identity!

Women are no sheep.

I think of that insecure and fearful little girl, who was not yet aware of her own power.

No woman should be made to fear she wasn't enough.

Play as big as you dream.

Woman empowered is civilization empowered.

Part of being a feminist is giving other women the freedom to make choices you might not necessarily make yourself.

I believe in the great change that a girl with a big dream can bring to this world. I believe in giving girls a chance to activate their potential without fear.

All women are my sisters.

Being a feminist doesn’t mean I don’t need a man, but it means I don’t need one to define my worth.

She moved like a woman whose body not only provided her with pleasure, but peace and ease. She moved like a fully embodied universe of her own making.

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board of the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

There are so many women in me, So many with names so pretty Some of them are dangerous, Others are just quite hilarious Don't awaken each of them thoughtlessly, Nor create more of them in me...

I asked Hillary why she had chosen Yale Law School over Harvard. She laughed and said, "Harvard didn't want me." I said I was sorry that Harvard turned her down. She replied, "No, I received letters of acceptance from both schools." She explained that a boyfriend had then invited her to the Harvard Law School Christmas Dance, at which several Harvard Law School professors were in attendance. She asked one for advice about which law school to attend. The professor looked at her and said, "We have about as many woen as we need here. You should go to Yale. The teaching there is more suited to women." I asked who the professor was, and she told me she couldn't remember his name but that she thought it started with a B. A few days later, we met the Clintons at a party. I came prepared with yearbook photos of all the professors from that year whose name began with B. She immediately identified the culprit. He was the same professor who had given my A student a D, because she didn't "think like a lawyer." It turned out, of course, that it was this professor -- and not the two (and no doubt more) brilliant women he was prejudiced against - who didn't think like a lawyer. Lawyers are supposed to act on the evidence, rather than on their prejudgments. The sexist professor ultimately became a judge on the International Court of Justice. I told Hillary that it was too bad I wasn't at that Christmas dance, because I would have urged her to come to Harvard. She laughed, turned to her husband, and said, "But then I wouldn't have met him... and he wouldn't have become President.

i have been told many times by family, friends, colleagues and strangers that I, a black African Muslim lesbian, am not included in this vision; that my dreams are a reflection of my upbringing in a decadent, amoral Western society that has corrupted who I really am. But who am I, really? Am I allowed to speak for myself or must my desires form the battleground for causes I do not care about? My answer to that is simple: ‘no one allows anyone anything.’ By rejecting that notion you discover that only you can give yourself permission on how to lead your life, naysayers be damned. In the end something gives way. The earth doesn’t move but something shifts. That shift is change and change is the layman’s lingo for that elusive state that lovers, dreamers, prophets and politicians call ‘freedom’.

What do you hope girls take away from watching [Agent Carter]? I would hope that young girls can see that they don’t have to sacrifice their femininity to be taken seriously in the workplace. But also they don’t have to rely on their physicality or their appearance; that it’s just as important, if not a lot more so, to be able to use their intelligence, their wit, their humor and their warmth to be able to get where they want to and to achieve their goals in life.

The important impulses of protection and responsibility that have so often inspired men to greatness have been reduced to “toxic masculinity.” The unspoken feminist mantra says, “Men, even though we want to be just like you, you must change.

Today, Medina is simultaneously the archetype of Islamic democracy and the impetus for Islamic militancy. Islamic Modernists like the Egyptian writer and political philosopher Ali Abd ar-Raziq (d. 1966) pointed to Muhammad’s community in Medina as proof that Islam advocated the separation of religious and temporal power, while Muslim extremists in Afghanistan and Iran have used the same community to fashion various models of Islamic theocracy. In their struggle for equal rights, Muslim feminists have consistently drawn inspiration from the legal reforms Muhammad instituted in Medina, while at the same time, Muslim traditionalists have construed those same legal reforms as grounds for maintaining the subjugation of women in Islamic society. For some, Muhammad’s actions in Medina serve as the model for Muslim-Jewish relations; for others, they demonstrate the insurmountable conflict that has always existed, and will always exist, between the two sons of Abraham. Yet regardless of whether one is labeled a Modernist or a Traditionalist, a reformist or a fundamentalist, a feminist or a chauvinist, all Muslims regard Medina as the model of Islamic perfection. Simply put, Medina is what Islam was meant to be.

When the earth is body of Goddess, the radical implications of the image are more fully realized. The female body and the earth, which have been devalued and dominated together, are resacralized. Our understanding of divine power is transformed as it is clearly recognized as present within the finite and changing world. The image of the earth as the body of the Goddess can inspire us to repair the damage that has been done to the earth, to women, and to other beings in dominator cultures.

—Es que las mujeres, Floreana, —dice Elena mientras caminan hacia el pueblo— ya no quieren ser madres de sus hombres… y tampoco quieren ser sus hijas. —¿Y qué quieren ser? —Pares. Aspiran a construir relaciones de igualdad que sean compatibles con el afecto.

I yelled "Revolution girl style now!" before "Double Dare Ya" like I'd been doing live and reassured myself that the session was meant to take a snapshot of our songs, not to make them sound perfect. Maybe being sloppy would inspire other girls to start bands.

Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to have de best places… and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!... I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me - and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much as any man (when I could get it), and bear de lash as well - and ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children and I seen ‘em mos all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s gried, none but Jesus hear - and ain’t I a woman?

I didn’t wake up this morning worrying about what protest color I’d wear, or what the world would do without me because I didn’t wake up feeling like the victimhood narrative was a part of my story. Real women don’t have to remind the world every day that history once slighted them.

A l'opposé, les "apostates du conjugal" ont toujours cultivé une distance critique, voire une défiance totale à l'égard de ces rôles [de la bonne épouse ou de la bonne mère]. Ce sont aussi des femmes créatives, qui lisent beaucoup et qui ont une vie intérieure intense [...]. Elles se conçoivent comme des individus et non comme des représentantes d'archétypes féminins. Loin de l'isolement misérable que les préjugés associent au fait de vivre seule, cet affinement inlassable de leur identité produit un double effet : il leur permet d'apprivoiser et même de savourer cette solitude à laquelle la plupart des gens, mariés ou pas, sont confrontés, au moins par périodes, au cours de leurs vies, mais aussi de nouer des relations particulièrement intenses, car émanant du cœur de leur personnalité plutôt que de rôles sociaux convenus. En ce sens, la connaissance de soi n'est pas un "égoïsme", un repli sur soi, mais une voie royale vers les autres.

Bondmaid. It came back to me then, and I realized that the words most often used to define us were words that describe our function in relation to others. Even the most benign words - maiden, wife, mother - told the world whether we were virgins or not. What was the male equivalent of maiden? I could not think of it. What was the male equivalent of Mrs., of whore, of common scold? I looked out the window towards the scriptorium, the place where the definitions of all these words were being bedded down. Which words would define me? Which would be used to judge or contain? I was no maiden, yet I was no man’s wife. And I had no desire to be.

Even as a six-year-old girl, I had to make sure my princess dress hit the floor because my mother never knew when a passing man would want more. The same problem stands the more I grow, but what’s changed is that my identity is more than something meant to be hidden below ensuring a perfect complexion and burning every imperfection.

Literately’ was used in a novel by Elizabeth Griffiths. While no other examples of use have been forthcoming, it is, in my opinion, an elegant extension of ‘literate’. Dr. Murray agreed I should write an entry for the Dictionary, but I have since been told it is unlikely to be included. It seems our lady author has not proved herself a ‘literata’- an abomination of a word coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that refers to a ‘literary lady’. It too has only one example of use, but its inclusion is assured. This may sound like sour grapes, but I can’t see it catching on. The number of literary ladies in the world is surely so great as to render them ordinary and deserving members of the literati.

As women we really need to move far away from the belief that our superpower is sacrifice and struggle. It is not our superpower to struggle and to sacrifice. Nor to remain silent, mute. There is no glory to be found there. Stop saying you're doing so much, giving so much; and get out of the situation that has you saying that. Nobody saves you but yourself.

In Woman, Church and State (1893), she offered a feminist reading of the witch-hunts: “When for ‘witches’ we read ‘women,’ we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.”42 Gage inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum.

Certaines, cependant, qu'elles vivent avec les hommes ou pas, qu'elles se sentent ou non requises par une vocation, trouvent un autre moyen d'échapper à l'engloutissement dans le rôle de la servante dévouée : ne pas élever d'enfants ; se donner naissance à soi-même, plutôt que transmettre la vie ; inventer une identité féminine qui fasse l'économie de la maternité.

The iron lady took you on a wild ride Filled with courage, ambition, and passion Her inner compass served as her guide So being classy became a timeless fashion “The Iron Lady” is dedicated to the 50,000 Bosniak women that were raped during the Bosnian Genocide. A special thank you to Bosnian activists Nusreta Sivac and Bakira Hasečić for inspiring me to be a fierce feminist.

The more self-awareness a woman or man possesses, the less s/ he is possessed by the unconscious dimension of the archetype. A healthy expression of the Lilith energy is a sense of personal power and authenticity that disregards or challenges societal judgment and demonstrates capacities that stretch the status quo of gender definitions. The feminist movement in general is inspired by Lilith.

Feminist silence about love reflects a collective sorrow about our powerlessness to free all men from the hold patriarchy has on their minds and hearts. It reflects our shock at male betrayal. It has not been that difficult to show women the ways in which their continued allegiance to patriarchal thinking hurts them and other women. It has been hard to inspire them to give up that allegiance when it provides them common ground on which to meet and bond with men.

The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).

It inspired Scottish immigrant Frances Wright—feminist, abolitionist, and advocate of free public education—to write, “What is it to be an American? Is it to have drawn the first breath in Maine, in Pennsylvania, in Florida, or in Missouri? Pshaw! Hence with such paltry, pettifogging calculations of nativities! They are Americans who have complied with the constitutional regulations of the United States…wed the principles of America’s declaration to their hearts and render the duties of American citizens practically to their lives.

Ginsburg argued that if the Supreme Court in 1973 had simply struck down the Texas law at issue in the case and had resisted the temptation to impose a national framework for abortion, the case might have inspired less of a backlash, allowing a growing number of state legislatures to recognize a right to reproductive choice on their own. What her feminist critics in the 1990s failed to appreciate was that Ginsburg was laying the groundwork for a firmer constitutional foundation for reproductive choice, one rooted in women’s equality rather than the right to privacy.

Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (2004), the female-led clan councils set the agenda of the League—“men could not consider a matter not sent to them by the women.” Women, who held title to all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better off than their counterparts in Europe that nineteenth-century U.S. feminists like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, all of whom lived in Haudenosaunee country, drew inspiration from their lot.

El espíritu de la paz descendió como una nube de los cielos, porque si el espíritu de la paz mora en alguna parte es en los patios y céspedes de Oxbridge en una bella mañana de octubre. Paseando despacio por aquellos colegios, por delante de aquellas salas antiguas, la aspereza del presente parecía suavizarse, desaparecer; el cuerpo parecía contenido en un milagroso armario de cristal que no dejara penetrar ningún sonido, y la mente, liberada de todo contacto con los hechos (a menos que uno volviera a pisar el césped), se hallaba disponible para cualquier meditación que estuviera en armonía con el momento.

Girl. Such a simple title. One I've been labeled all my life. But nowhere was I called it more than at the Hidden Palace: spat from the beaked mouth of Madam Himura, hissed with contemp by Naja, thrown with derision by General Yu. But in the Cloud Palace, with the magnificent Lady Dunya before me and her bold, fierce daughters, I feel for one of the first times the hidden power contained within its single modest syllable. Because this is what I am. Not a Paper Girl anymore, just "girl." Almost, as I told Lady Dunya, a caste of its own. An oppressed caste, yes, but one braver and bolder and capable of more brilliance than any other in this world.

There are some feminist-inspired commentators who have charted society from the point of view of gender, often brilliantly, but there are many more clinging on to the old concepts, especially in politics, social policy and academia. There has been a collective reluctance to submit the whole area to scrutiny, and a widespread refusal to see this talk of crisis as anything other than sexist fearmongering. Instead of accepting that the old 'truths' of feminism are due for an overhaul, numerous attempts are made to breathe life into the old concepts and politics. This is somewhat worrying since women who think like this now have more influence than ever before in many western governments.

Here’s another example that some overworked mothers might find inspiring. We saw in Chapter 2 that being the one who produces the sperm doesn’t dictate, by universal principle, that parenting is out of the portfolio. However, in the case of the rat (as with most mammals), the balance of trade-offs make it more adaptive for males to leave parenting to the mothers. This might tempt us to take it for granted that males, by virtue of their sex, therefore lack the capacity to care for pups. We might well assume that, through sexual selection, they lost or never acquired the biological capacity to parent: that it isn’t “in” their genes, hormones, or neural circuits. That it isn’t in their male nature. But bear in mind that one reliable feature of a male rat’s developmental system is a female rat that does the child care. So what happens when a scientist, under controlled laboratory conditions, simulates a first-wave feminist rodent movement by placing males in cages with pups but no females? Before too long you will see the male “mothering” the infant, in much the same way that females do. Feminism: 1. Sexual selection: nil.

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

In the logic of ableism, anyone who can handle such an (allegedly) horrible life must be strong; a lesser man would have given up in despair years ago. Indeed, Reeve's refusal to “give up” is precisely why the FBL selected Reeve for their model of strength; in the “billboard backstories” section of their website, they praise Reeve for trying to “beat paralysis and the spinal cord injuries” rather than “giv[ing] up.” Asserting that Goldberg is successful because of her hard work suggests that other people with dyslexia and learning disabilities who have not met with similar success have simply failed to engage in hard work; unlike Whoopi Goldberg, they are apparently unwilling to devote themselves to success. Similarly, by positioning Weihenmayer's ascent of Everest as a matter of vision, the FBL implies that most blind people, who have not ascended Everest or accomplished equivalently astounding feats, are lacking not only eyesight but vision. The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).

Recipe for a Perfect Wife, the Novel INGREDIENTS 3 cups editors extraordinaire: Maya Ziv, Lara Hinchberger, Helen Smith 2 cups agent-I-couldn’t-do-this-without: Carolyn Forde (and the Transatlantic Literary Agency) 1½ cup highly skilled publishing teams: Dutton US, Penguin Random House Canada (Viking) 1 cup PR and marketing wizards: Kathleen Carter (Kathleen Carter Communications), Ruta Liormonas, Elina Vaysbeyn, Maria Whelan, Claire Zaya 1 cup women of writing coven: Marissa Stapley, Jennifer Robson, Kate Hilton, Chantel Guertin, Kerry Clare, Liz Renzetti ½ cup author-friends-who-keep-me-sane: Mary Kubica, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Amy E. Reichert, Colleen Oakley, Rachel Goodman, Hannah Mary McKinnon, Rosey Lim ½ cup friends-with-talents-I-do-not-have: Dr. Kendra Newell, Claire Tansey ¼ cup original creators of the Karma Brown Fan Club: my family and friends, including my late grandmother Miriam Christie, who inspired Miriam Claussen; my mom, who is a spectacular cook and mother; and my dad, for being the wonderful feminist he is 1 tablespoon of the inner circle: Adam and Addison, the loves of my life ½ tablespoon book bloggers, bookstagrammers, authors, and readers: including Andrea Katz, Jenny O’Regan, Pamela Klinger-Horn, Melissa Amster, Susan Peterson, Kristy Barrett, Lisa Steinke, Liz Fenton 1 teaspoon vintage cookbooks: particularly the Purity Cookbook, for the spark of inspiration 1 teaspoon loyal Labradoodle: Fred Licorice Brown, furry writing companion Dash of Google: so I could visit the 1950s without a time machine METHOD: Combine all ingredients into a Scrivener file, making sure to hit Save after each addition.

The God of Exodus and the prophets is a warrior God. My rejection of this God as a liberating image for feminist theology is based on my understanding of the symbolic function of a warrior God in cultures where warfare is glorified as a symbol of manhood and power. My primary concern here is with the function of symbolism, not with the historical truth of the Exodus stories, with questions of how many slaves may or may not have been freed, nor by what means, nor with questions of the different traditions that may have been woven together to shape the biblical stories. Since liberation theology is fundamentally concerned with the use of biblical symbolism in shaping contemporary reality and the understanding of the divine ground, this method is appropriate here. In a world threatened by total nuclear annihilation, we cannot afford a warlike image of God. The image of Yahweh as liberator of the oppressed in the exodus and as concerned for social justice in the prophets cannot be extricated from the image of Yahweh as warrior. In Exodus Yahweh is imaged as concerned for the oppressed Israelites. Exodus 3:7-8 is a good example. ‘Then Yahweh said, ‘I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters: I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians.’ People in oppressed circumstances and liberation theologians find passages like this inspiring. I too have been profoundly moved by the image of a God who takes compassion on suffering, but this passage has a conclusion I cannot accept. The passage continues ‘and to bring them up out of the land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.’ Here Yahweh promises ‘his people’ a land that is inhabited by other peoples. In order to justify this action by Yahweh, the inhabitants of the land are portrayed in other parts of the Bible as evil or idolators (a term that itself bears further examination). More recently liberation theologians have portrayed these other peoples as ruling-class opponents of the poor peasant and working-class Hebrews. However that may be, the clear implication of the passage is that Yahweh intends to dispose the peoples from the lands they inhabit.

Driscoll preached a sermon called “Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon,” which he followed up with a sermon series and an e-book, Porn-again Christian (2008). For Driscoll, the “good bits” amounted to a veritable sex manual. Translating from the Hebrew, he discovered that the woman in the passage was asking for manual stimulation of her clitoris. He assured women that if they thought they were “being dirty,” chances are their husbands were pretty happy. He issued the pronouncement that “all men are breast men. . . . It’s biblical,” as was a wife performing oral sex on her husband. Hearing an “Amen” from the men in his audience, he urged the ladies present to serve their husbands, to “love them well,” with oral sex. He advised one woman to go home and perform oral sex on her husband in Jesus’ name to get him to come to church. Handing out religious tracts was one thing, but there was a better way to bring about Christian revival. 13 Driscoll reveled in his ability to shock people, but it was a series of anonymous blog posts on his church’s online discussion board that laid bare the extent of his misogyny. In 2006, inspired by Braveheart, Driscoll adopted the pseudonym “William Wallace II” to express his unfiltered views. “I love to fight. It’s good to fight. Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified,” before America became a “pussified nation.” In that vein, he offered a scathing critique of the earlier iteration of the evangelical men’s movement, of the “pussified James Dobson knock-off crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship . . .” where men hugged and cried “like damn junior high girls watching Dawson’s Creek.” Real men should steer clear. 14 For Driscoll, the problem went all the way back to the biblical Adam, a man who plunged humanity headlong into “hell/ feminism” by listening to his wife, “who thought Satan was a good theologian.” Failing to exercise “his delegated authority as king of the planet,” Adam was cursed, and “every man since has been pussified.” The result was a nation of men raised “by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.” Women served certain purposes, and not others. In one of his more infamous missives, Driscoll talked of God creating women to serve as penis “homes” for lonely penises. When a woman posted on the church’s discussion board, his response was swift: “I . . . do not answer to women. So, your questions will be ignored.” 15

Needless to say, what whites now think and say about race has undergone a revolution. In fact, it would be hard to find other opinions broadly held by Americans that have changed so radically. What whites are now expected to think about race can be summarized as follows: Race is an insignificant matter and not a valid criterion for any purpose—except perhaps for redressing wrongs done to non-whites. The races are equal in every respect and are therefore interchangeable. It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States. These are matters on which there is little ground for disagreement; anyone who holds differing views is not merely mistaken but morally suspect. By these standards, of course, most of the great men of America’s past are morally suspect, and many Americans are embarrassed to discover what our traditional heroes actually said. Some people deliberately conceal this part of our history. For example, the Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.” The Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1942. A more contemporary approach to the past is to bring out all the facts and then repudiate historical figures. This is what author Conor Cruise O’Brien did in a 1996 cover story for The Atlantic Monthly. After detailing Jefferson’s views, he concluded: “It follows that there can be no room for a cult of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of an effectively multiracial America . . . . Once the facts are known, Jefferson is of necessity abhorrent to people who would not be in America at all if he could have had his way.” Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial “stone by stone.” It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washington owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history. This, in effect, is what some people wish to do. American colonists and Victorian Englishmen saw the expansion of their race as an inspiring triumph. Now it is cause for shame. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote Susan Sontag. The wealth of America used to be attributed to courage, hard work, and even divine providence. Now, it is common to describe it as stolen property. Robin Morgan, a former child actor and feminist, has written, “My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony.

Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?" This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded: Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?)

Who should be like thorns? The one who grows flowers amidst predators!

I, as you may have discovered, regard the whole idea of marriage with abhorrence. I hold that, as things now stand in this civilization of ours, a woman's one absolute right is her right to herself. She is her own inalienable possession. Why should she give herself up to a man; becoming his chattel, to do with as he pleases? Why should she lose all right over her own person, her own property, her own liberty of action and regulation of circumstance? Why should she change her very name for his? If the two could stand on a platform of absolute independence and equality, the thing might be bearable—for some. It would still be intolerable to me! But, as the law and social usage now stand, marriage is—to the woman—practically slavery; and, therefore, an unspeakable degradation!

Join me on a writing journey that expands through, beyond, and toward powerful creative expressions with rich perspectives centered on inspiring work. I delve into the socio-political dynamics at the intersection of culture, pop culture, news and media, social issues, politics, faith, and everything in between.

Dreams don't come with a gender tag.

friendships with women have never been overtly sexual, but a good many of them have been what bell hooks in her book Communion: The Female Search for Love called romantic, in the soul-inspiring way that someone being thoughtful about loving you and showing up for you is romantic.

What is life if not bitter of arguments, you know? Partially plastic and partly fake, I know! I couldn’t cry over spoiled milk. Their habits upon cultivation improved theory, theory of dichotomy in leadership.(Great, Katheline, pp. 217- 230)

Magic is happiness and happiness is vast quantities of quality hemp oil. It's good for the mind, the body, the skin, and the sex drive. Happiness is hemp oil and Reece's Pieces ice-cream drizzled with melted Nutella followed by so much masturbation that you pass out pronto.

Wees een compleet mens. Moederschap is een prachtig geschenk, maar laat moederschap niet je enige kwaliteit zijn. Wees een compleet mens. Daar zal je kind van profiteren.

A SHE woman is someone who is strong, heroic, and empowered.

Social and religious circumstances pushed them down. Their strength and will pushed them forward- and perhaps in these ways they were more similar to the mothers and grandmothers of Western feminists then is often acknowledged." Another one loaded with so much knowledge and wisdom, I don't even know where to start or the words to use. I just lived this little excerpt so much!

But we [women] are only at the beginning [of revamping feminism]. And our strictures on each other prove this. Our enforcement of thinness, of non-sexuality, of 'good' feminism versus 'bad' feminism, are proofs of our being at the beginning, not the end of a process. That younger feminists are embracing their sexuality is a sign of hope -- a sign that women's lives will some day be less constricted, less fearful of the dark side of creativity (to which Eros provides the key). If that happens, we will at least have the full gamut of inspiration so long denied us. We will have access to all parts of ourselves -- all the animals within us, from wolf to lamb. When we learn to love all the animals within us, we will know how to make men love them too.

When you can't find someone to follow, find a way to lead by example.

It wouldn’t be very ladylike to punch a guy in the balls, but it isn’t very manlike to harass a woman because she has different parts and a sweet face.

I am done wearing clothes to make other people feel comfortable at the expense of my womanhood.

In order to justify your nonsense, you continue to fight battles won long ago. You rage against threats that exist only in your mind....You focus on the colour of schoolbags, sexist pronouns, pink toys in Kinder Surprises and the sharing of dish-washing duties in relationships. All the while completely ignoring what it is that really threatens the freedom of women....Your aversion towards the patriarchy, manifested in the form of straight white males, has led you you to become bedfellows of all the other minorities who share that aversion.

Professor Paglia attended a presentation and lecture by a "feminist theorist from a large Ivy League university who had set out to 'decode' the subliminal sexual oppressiveness . . . [and] to expose the violent sexism . . . in fashion photography". The presentation featured slides of cosmetic ads. One was a Revlon ad of a woman standing in a pool in water up to her chin. "Decapitation!" the feminist theorist shouted. "She showed a picture of a black woman who was wearing aviator goggles and had the collar of her turtleneck sweater pulled up. "Strangulation!" she shouted. "Bondage!". When the "lecture" was over, Professor Paglia, "who considers herself a feminist, stood up and made an impassioned speech. She declared that the fashion photography of the past 40 years is great art, that instead of decapitation she saw the birth of Venus, instead of strangulation she saw references to King Tut". After Professor Paglia finished, "she was greeted, she says, 'with gasps of horror and angry murmuring. It's a form of psychosis, this slogan-filled machinery. The radical feminists have contempt for values other than their own, and they're inspiring in students a resentful attitude toward the world (New York Magazine, 21 January 1991, p. 38).

To be a woman is to be a fighter! A woman has to be strong and has to fight every moment of her life - against a society that believes in patriarchy, chauvinism and male privilege!

I am a feminist because in every woman I can see reflection of my mother.

However, even though I find much of this anti-essentialist-inspired analysis compelling, I nonetheless hope to illuminate two problems that arise when this form of criticism is uncritically wielded in the context of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for recognition and self-determination. First, using recent feminist and deliberative democratic critiques of Indigenous recognition politics as a backdrop, I demonstrate how normative appropriations of social constructivism can undercut the liberatory aspirations of anti-essentialist criticism by failing to adequately address the complexity of interlocking social relations that serve to exasperate the types of exclusionary cultural practices that critics of essentialism find so disconcerting. Second, and perhaps more problematically, I show that when constructivist views of culture are posited as a universal feature of social life and then used as a means to evaluate the legitimacy of Indigenous claims for cultural recognition against the uncontested authority of the colonial state, it can serve to sanction the very forms of domination and inequality that anti-essentialist criticism ought to mitigate.

As a child, I ate up the image Carl strived to portray: An inspirational rags-to-riches tale of a go-getter emerging the hell of his sulfur-scented, Podunk Texas upbringing. With a community college dropout education, Carl managed to reach six figures as a mobile home lot manager when the trailer park industry boomed in the early nineties. He decorated his accomplishments with a large house, yachts, and weekly morale shindigs for his salesmen bursting with open bars and filet mignon. However, my mother was by far his prettiest accessory.

Don't compete with other girls, complete goals.

Don’t you get it? Nobody belongs.” She leaned toward me, her green eyes thoughtful now, her fingers pulling at the hem of her nightshirt. “We like to think we do. We set ourselves up in families and communities and clubs and castes, and we think that’s going to make us feel less lonely. But it doesn’t. Because nobody on this earth is going to truly understand you. You’ll never belong anywhere. The only person you belong to is God. And the only place you will belong is heaven. And until you realize that, Meryn, you won’t be happy anywhere.