Feminist Leadership Quotes

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.

The lack of women among the twelve disciples isn't prescriptive or a precedent for exclusion of women any more than the choice of twelve Jewish men excludes Gentile men from leadership.

I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as Deborah, instead of silenced as Jezebel.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Beauty is an illusion.

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.

Often when a woman exhibits leadership, she’s accused of having that Jezebel spirit. I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as a Deborah, instead of silenced as a Jezebel.

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.

If you want people to trust you, you will need to be a person who keeps her word. No matter what your role. No matter what your industry. Do what you say you will.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There are two types of people in this world: those who keep their word and those who don’t. Who do you want to be?

Women have more to offer the church than mad decorating skills or craft nights. I look around: I see women who can offer strategic leadership, wisdom, counsel, and teaching.

In response to [the Philistine] threat [in the ninth century B.C.], the Hebrews could no longer rely on the leadership of 'judges,' ad hoc military leaders (some of them, peculiarly, women; perhaps reflecting as feminists claim, and earlier matriarchal society).

When we do not fully and equally represent the masculine and the feminine in church and civic leadership, we cannot represent the human experience or Jesus.

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!

If women can birth the world, women can run the world.

I think you have a great women's ministry when the women of your community fall wildly in love with Jesus. Church ladies like this are the overflow of women who are empowered to lead, to challenge, to seek justice and love mercy, to follow Jesus to the ends of the earth like our church mothers and fathers of the past. You have a great women's ministry when there is room for everyone. You have a great women's ministry when you have detoxed from the world's views and unattainable standards for women and begun to celebrate the everyday women of valor, sitting next to you, and when you encourage, affirm, and welcome the diversity of women—their lives, their voices, their experiences—to the community. You have a great women's ministry when your women are ministering—to the world, to the church, to one another—pouring out freely the grace they have received, however God has gifted them, including cooking and crafts, strategy and leadership.

White/Western feminism's attempt at erasing the political context of Palestinian women's oppression was evident yet again around the 2017 Women's March on Washington, when liberal feminists objected to the leadership of Palestinian American organizer Linda Sarsour, and the newly minted "Zionesses" complained of "antisemitism" because Palestinian women's circumstances were on the platform, as part of a broader discussion of US President Donald Trump's Muslim ban and the overall Islamophobia he pandered to.

Such invocations of fin-de-siècle manliness are so ubiquitous in the correspondence and memoranda of these years that it is difficult to localize their impact. Yet they surely reflect a very particular moment in the history of European masculinity. Historians of gender have suggested that around the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century, a relatively expansive form of patriarchal identity centred on the satisfaction of appetites (food, sex, commodities) made way for something slimmer, harder and more abstinent. At the same time, competition from subordinate and marginalized masculinities – proletarian and non-white, for example – accentuated the expression of ‘true masculinity’ within the elites. Among specifically military leadership groups, stamina, toughness, duty and unstinting service gradually displaced an older emphasis on elevated social origin, now perceived as effeminate.160 ‘To be masculine [. . .] as masculine as possible [. . .] is the true distinction in [men’s] eyes,’ wrote the Viennese feminist and freethinker Rosa Mayreder in 1905. ‘They are insensitive to the brutality of defeat or the sheer wrongness of an act if it only coincides with the traditional canon of masculinity.

Be known for taking the high road.

Some people think 'ambition' is a dirty word. I’m here to tell you healthy ambition is a gorgeous sight to behold.

I ask you to reclaim the word 'ambition.' Face the world with a healthy, sparkling dose of it. Come from a why-not-me mentality. You can make a difference to your team. To your workplace. To your neighborhood. The world needs you to bring it. We’re counting on it.

You have that special spark. The spark that shows your boss that you love what you are doing and are driven to take on more responsibility. It’s an undeniable, beautiful spark. I want you to boldly and fearlessly show that ambitious spark. To everyone. To the universe.

Be bravely ambitious.

The need for women to be in positions of leadership at levels equal to men has never been more urgent.

In response to contemporary changes in American culture influenced by the feminist movement, and as a result of the growing number of prominent Christian women contributing to these conversations conservative evangelical gender ideologies were in flux at the very moment that the politics of "family values" were being defined around a purportedly unchanging ideal of traditional family roles.

I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as a Deborah, instead of silenced as a Jezebel.

Among book publishers, the largest number of evangelical feminist books are being published by InterVarsity Press4 and Baker Books. Among popular journals, both Charisma magazine under the editorship of J. Lee Grady and Christianity Today under the leadership of David Neff clearly favor an evangelical feminist position (though Christianity Today has made some attempts to represent both sides fairly). Among parachurch ministries, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is strongly committed to an evangelical feminist position, as is Youth With A Mission.

Often when a woman exhibits leadership, she’s accused of having that Jezebel spirit. I look forward to the day when women with leadership and insight, gifts and talents, callings and prophetic leanings are called out and celebrated as a Deborah, instead of silenced as a Jezebel. I

When I learn that in 1913, mass women's marches were held in South Africa which caused the rescinding of entry permit laws; that in 1956, 20,000 women assmesbled in Pretoria to protest pass laws for women, that resistance to these laws was carried out in remote country villages and punished bu shootings, beatings, and burnings; that in 1959, 2,000women demonstrated in Durban against laws which provided beerhalls for African men and criminalized women's traditional home brewing; that at one and the same time, African women have played a majow role alongside men in resisting apartheid, I have to ask myself why it took me so long to learn these chapters of women's history, why the leadership and strategies of African women have been son unrecognized as theory in action by white Western feminist thought. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location

her imperative to “think dialectically”—a maxim drawn from her study of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Because reality is constantly changing, we must constantly detect and analyze the emerging contradictions that are driving this change. And if reality is changing around us, we cannot expect good ideas to hatch within an ivory tower. They instead emerge and develop through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities, and through trial and error within multiple contexts. Grace often attributes her “having been born female and Chinese” to her sense of being an outsider to mainstream society. Over the past decade she has sharpened this analysis considerably. Reflecting on the limits of her prior encounters with radicalism, Grace fully embraces the feminist critique not only of gender discrimination and inequality but also of the masculinist tendencies that too often come to define a certain brand of movement organizing—one driven by militant posturing, a charismatic form of hierarchical leadership, and a static notion of power seen as a scarce commodity to be acquired and possessed. Grace has struck up a whole new dialogue and built relationships with Asian American activists and intellectuals since the 1998 release of her autobiography, Living for Change. Her reflections on these encounters have reinforced her repeated observation that marginalization serves as a form of liberation. Thus, she has come away impressed with the particular ability of movement-oriented Asian Americans to dissect U.S. society in new ways that transcend the mind-sets of blacks and whites, to draw on their transnational experiences to rethink the nature of the global order, and to enact new propositions free of the constraints and baggage weighing down those embedded in the status quo. Still, Grace’s practical connection to a constantly changing reality for most of her adult life has stemmed from an intimate relationship with the African American community—so much so that informants from the Cointelpro days surmised she was probably Afro-Chinese.3 This connection to black America (and to a lesser degree the pan-African world) has made her a source of intrigue for younger generations grappling with the rising complexities of race and diversity. It has been sustained through both political commitments and personal relationships. Living in Detroit for more than a half century, Grace has developed a stature as one of Motown’s most cherished citizens: penning a weekly column for the city’s largest-circulation black community newspaper; regularly profiled in the mainstream and independent media; frequently receiving awards and honors through no solicitation of her own; constantly visited by students, intellectuals, and activists from around the world; and even speaking on behalf of her friend Rosa Parks after the civil rights icon became too frail for public appearances.

In general, according to theologian Carolyn Custis James, egalitarians “believe that leadership is not determined by gender but by the gifting and calling of the Holy Spirit, and that God calls all believers to submit to one another.” In contrast, complementarians “believe the Bible establishes male authority over women, making male leadership the biblical standard.”5 Both sides can treat the Bible like a weapon. On both sides, there are extremists and dogmatists. We attempt to outdo each other with proof texts and apologetics, and I’ve heard it said that there is no more hateful person than a Christian who thinks you’ve got your theology wrong. In our hunger to be right, we memorize arguments, ready to spit them out at a moment’s notice. Sadly, we reduce each other, brothers and sisters, to straw men arguments, and brand each other “enemies of the gospel.

Women are no sheep.

We need feminine and feminist climate leadership, which is wide open to people of any gender.

Female empowerment doesn't need any special training, it only requires we act, do it with conviction, and do it often.

Wilhelm Reich in The Sexual Revolution summarized the specific objective reasons for the failure of the Russian communes in the best analysis to date: 1) Confusion of the leadership and evasion of the problem. 2) The laborious task of reconstruction in general given the cultural backwardness of Old Russia, the war, and famine. 3) Lack of theory. The Russian Revolution was the first of its kind. No attempt had been made to deal with emotional-sexual-familial problems in the formulation of basic revolutionary theory. (Or, in our terms, there had been a lack of “consciousness raising” about female/ child oppression and a lack of radical feminist analysis prior to the revolution itself.) 4) The sex-negative psychological structure of the individual, created and reinforced throughout history by the family, hindered the individual's liberation from this very structure. As Reich puts it: It must be remembered that human beings have a tremendous fear of just that kind of life for which they long so much but which is at variance with their own structure. 5) The explosive concrete complexities of sexuality. In the picture that Reich draws of the time, one senses the immense frustration of people trying to liberate themselves without having a well-thought-out ideology to guide them. In the end, that they attempted so much without an adequate preparation made their failure even more extreme: To destroy the balance of sexual polarization without entirely eliminating it was worse than nothing at all.

Until recently, career women were frowned upon, and those who stayed at home were respected - now the situation has gotten reversed - not better mark you, just reversed. Now career women are respected, and those who give up their career, or step down to a less demanding position, in order to raise a family, are object of ridicule. This is not progress, it’s recurring regress. Substituting one authoritarian cruelty with another is not progress, it’s recurring regress.

Until recently, career women were frowned upon, and those who stayed at home were respected - now the situation has gotten reversed - not better mark you, just reversed. Now career women are respected, and those who give up their career, or step down to a less demanding position, in order to raise a family, are object of ridicule. This is not progress, it’s recurring regress. Substituting one authoritarian cruelty with another is not progress, it’s recurring regress - which is also the case when you ban hijab in the name of freedom.

In our own time, the thought leaders have often been deployed to help us see problems in precisely the opposite way. They are taking on issues that can easily be regarded as political and systematic—injustice, layoffs, unaccountable leadership, inequality, the abdication of community, the engineered precariousness of ever more human lives—but using the power of their thoughts to cause us to zoom in and think smaller. The feminists wanted us to look at a vagina and zoom out to see Congress. The thought leaders want us to look at a laid-off employee and zoom in to see the beauty of his feeling his vulnerability because at least he is alive. They want us to focus on his vulnerability, not his wage.

But, if gods are all-knowing, why do they rely on imperfect messengers to unpack and “screw up” interpretations of their doctrines across the centuries? If they are all powerful why do they allow predators and thieves to infest the leadership of every major religious denomination on the planet?

The lack of women among the twelve disciples isn't prescriptive or a precedent for exclusion of women any more than the choice of twelve Jewish men excludes Gentile men from leadership.

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)

Chapter 11: Working Together Toward Equality For a long time, the focus has been on making sure women have the choice of working outside the home or in the home. The fact that women have this right is celebrated. The question now is, are we so focused upon the issue of personal choice that we’re failing to encourage women to go for positions of senior leadership? Men and women both need to support each other. Women have not always been there supporting each other, and many times women have actually done the opposite. When Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo, she was in her third trimester of pregnancy. She announced that her maternity leave would be a few weeks long, and she would be working throughout it. Many feminists were upset with her, arguing that Marissa was “hurting the cause by setting up unreasonable expectations.” Whatever women decided for themselves as far as leave should be fully supported. Sometimes women who are already in power become obstacles to more women gaining power. This was especially true in the days of tokenism, when women would look around and see that only one woman would be allowed to climb the ladder into the senior management. Women can view other women as rivals and treat them with hostility, or undermine them, ignore them, or even sabotage them.

Critical and feminist theorists show that most leadership research, including studies of transformational leadership, continue to present prescriptions - heroic or post-heroic - as if they were gender neutral. The critics argue that, although there is a search for a different kind of leader- a 'post-heroic hero' who displays characteristics different from the traditional model - even this leader continues 'to enjoy the same godlike reverence for individualism associated with traditional models'.

As the feminist author Kate Manne wrote in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, “When a woman competes for unprecedented high positions of male-dominated leadership or authority, particularly at the expense of an actual male rival, people tend to be biased in his favor, toward him. That is, there will be a general tendency, all else being equal, to be on his side, willing him to power, and this in turn predictably leads to biases against her. So when she speaks against or over him, by disagreeing with him, interrupting him, laughing at his expense, or declaring victory over him—it would be natural for her voice to be heard as grating, raspy, shrill, or otherwise painful sounding. We do not want to hear her say a word against him, so she becomes hard to listen to.