Women's Euro Quotes

I would rather carry around a plastic bag with five thousand Euro inside, than carry around a Louis Vuitton/Gucci/Prada bag with only one hundred Euro inside!

In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around. "The entire EU is short on coins." And I say, "Really?" because there are plenty of them in Germany. I'm never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they're not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don't mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like "We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.

What undercuts the power of women’s anger in the end is not the melancholy that Butler charts, but material realities — economics, not psychology. While Em fantasizes about the possibility of Afro- and Euro-Jamaican women building partnerships to work for each other, she seems to understand that she has no concrete possibilities for realizing this fantasy in 1920s Jamaica.

Finnish women are dominant,' Roman Schatz enthused. 'Traditionally, on Finnish farms the woman was chief of everything under the roof, including the males, and the men were there to take care of everything outside. No Finnish man would ever decide anything without consulting his wife. Men do the dishes. We don't have housewives in Finland - no one can afford to live from one salary. Women don't stay at home and breast-feed, they have their own careers and bank accounts. It's great - my divorce only cost me a hundred euro.

when the United States and Britain denied their non-propertied classes and their female citizens suffrage, or when the US operated a colonial system of slavery, genocide, and racial apartheid, no culturalist arguments were advanced to explain this grave democratic deficit among white Euro-American property-owning Protestant Christian men either (the only exception was the use by antebellum Northern white abolitionists of culturalist arguments against Southern whites as sexually excessive and libertine—on account of having learned such traits from their Black slaves and from living in a warmer climate—and confining of women, but no arguments were offered to explain the racism of Northern whites against Blacks and Native Americans, let alone Northern intolerance of Catholics and Mormons or discrimination against women).

Luana Ross's study of Native American women incarcerated in the Women's Correctional Center in Montana argues that "prisons, as employed by the Euro-American system, operate to keep Native Americans in a colonial situation/'87 She points out that Native people are vastly overrepresented in the country's federal and state prisons. In Montana, where she did her research, they constitute 6 percent of the general population, but 17.3 percent of the imprisoned population. Native women are even more disproportionately present in Montana's prison system. They constitute 25 percent of all women imprisoned by the state.

They say that democracy cannot be adopted; it has to be adapted to the African way of thinking. What does that mean? That the all-powerful and corrupt political leaders should stay in power? That Teodoro Obiang, the President of Equatorial Guinea, should appropriate all the country’s money for himself, a country with income per capita of more than 20,000 euros thanks to oil but where people suffer hunger and poverty? Or that women should not have any rights?

The labor of enslaved women and men was crucial to the Five Tribes’ economic and social success in Indian Territory... Preserved through family lines and nourished by increasing dividends, Black chattel slavery had bene an element of life in the Five Tribes for decades by the time of the Civil War.” Pg 23 “The Five Tribes, to varying degrees, adapted the institution of slavery to suit their own needs beginning in the late 1700s and intensifying in the early 1800s. Along with the institution of slavery the Five Tribes also adopted other parts of American ‘civilization,’ such as Euro-American clothing, agriculture, political language, religion….while retaining aspects of their own culture. As in the United States, the majority of people in the Five Tribes did not own slaves. Yet, Indian elites created an economy and culture that highly valued and regulated slavery and the rights of slave owners…In 1860, about thirty years after their removal to Indian Territory from their respective homes in the Southeast, Cherokee Nation members owned 2,511 slaves (15 percent of their total population), Choctaw members owned 2,349 slaves (14 percent of their total population, and Creek members owned 975 slaves, which amounted to 18 percent of their total population, a proportion equivalent to that of white slave owners in Tennessee, a former neighbor of the Chickasaw Nation. Slave labor allowed wealthy Indians to rebuild the infrastructure of their lives even bigger and better than before. John Ross, a Cherokee chief, lived in a log cabin directly after Removal. After a few years, he replaced this dwelling with a yellow mansion, complete with a columned porch.

If the history of modern democracy in the Euro-American world has also been the history of the genocide of indigenous populations and of their “dreams” (according to Black Elk’s powerful description), of slavery and its institutional prolongations, of imperialism and colonization, of the subjugation of women and the persistence of the patriarchy, of xenophobia and the oppression of immigrants, of the exclusion of the disabled, of heteronormativity and queer- and transphobia, and of the vast and various damaging effects of capitalism including the unbridled destruction of the biosphere, then why draw the conclusion that this is the best form of government, or even the sole and unique historical possibility? If one replies, very rightly, that movements proclaiming themselves to be democratic have fought body and soul against such practices and have often won, one is still forced to admit that the reverse is equally true and that this concept in struggle has frequently been pulled in the other direction, as we shall see. It is therefore necessary to ask why, when references are made to the numerous stains on this history, one so often responds by invoking progress toward an idea of something to come, toward an immaculate notion standing above the effective history of actually existing democracy. And most of the time this happens without inquiring into the possibility of a deep complicity between this idea and the numerous forms of oppression at work in real democracy. What are the affects, so powerful yet so under-studied, that bind us implacably to this Idea, and from whence do they come?