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Category: feminism
Quotes of Category: feminism
TOP TAGS :philosphysexual-violencefreemasonrytherewriting-lifepoverty-alleviationletting-goglorifying-god

  1. Erica Jong _ Fear of Fifty: A Midlife

    Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to explore?A publisher...couldn't understand why women were so loath to help each other.... The notion flitted through my mind that somehow, by helping..., I might be hurting my own chances for something or other -- I did not know. If there was room for only one woman poet, another space would be filled....If I still feel I am in competition with other women, how do less well-known women feel? Terrible, I have to assume.I have had to train myself to pay as much attention to women at parties as to men.... I have had to force myself not to be dismissive of other women's creativity. We have been semi-slaves for so long {as Doris Lessing says} that we must cultivate freedom within ourselves. It doesn't come naturally. Not yet.In her writing about the drama of childhood developments, Alice Miller has created, among other things, a theory of freedom. in order to embrace freedom, a child must be sufficiently nurtured, sufficiently loved. Security and abundance are the grounds for freedom. She shows how abusive child-rearing is communicated from one generation to the next and how fascism profits from generations of abused children. Women have been abused for centuries, so it should surprise no one that we are so good at abusing each other. Until we learn how to stop doing that, we cannot make our revolution stick.Many women are damaged in childhood -- unprotected, unrespected, and treated with dishonesty. Is it any wonder that we build up vast defences against other women since the perpetrators of childhood abuse have so often been women? Is it any wonder that we return intimidation with intimidation, or that we reserve our greatest fury for others who remind us of our own weaknesses -- namely other women?Men, on the other hand, however intellectually condescending, clubbish, loutishly lewd, are rarely as calculatingly cruel as women. They tend, rather, to advance us when we are young and cute {and look like darling daughters} and ignore us when we are older and more sure of our opinions {and look like scary mothers}, but they don't really know what they're doing. They are too busy bonding with other men, and creating male pecking orders, to pay attention to us.If we were skilled at compromise and alliance-building, we could transform society. The trouble is: we are not yet good at this. We are still quarrelling among ourselves. This is the crisis feminism faces today.
    book-quotefeminism

  2. Doris Lessing _ The Golden Notebook

    Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
    book-quotefeminismquipeducation

  3. Joe Haldeman _ The Forever War

    I was too old-fashioned male-chauv to allow that; we discussed for a minute and I wound up with the couch
    book-quotefeminismold-fashioned

  4. Kate Elliott _ Cold Magic

    How can it be men would put up with such an arrangement?''Why do some people demand it of women but not of men? It is just another way of doing things. As my father would have said, folk will have their customs according to their nature and their surroundings.
    book-quotefeminismkate-elliottcold-magic

  5. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Complaints and Disorders: The

    A movement that recognizes our biological similarity but denies the diversity of our priorities cannot be a women's health movement, it can only be health movement.
    book-quotefeminism

  6. Sylvia Plath _ The Unabridged Journals of

    Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...
    book-quotefeminismfeminism-woman-submission

  7. Lorrie Moore _ Birds of America

    It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.
    book-quoterelationshipsfeminismgender

  8. Simone de Beauvoir _ The Second Sex

    Misogynists have often reproached intellectual women for 'letting themselves go'; but they also preach to them: if you want to be our equals, stop wearing makeup and polishing your nails. This advice is absurd. Precisely because the idea of femininity is artificially defined by customs and fashion, it is imposed on every woman from the outside{...}. The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will.
    book-quotefeminismsexismgender

  9. Simone de Beauvoir _ The Second Sex

    It is difficult for men to measure the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant form the outside and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature. The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully.
    book-quotefeminismwomensexism

  10. Simone de Beauvoir _ The Second Sex

    The validity of the cook's work is to be found only in the mouths of those at her table; she needs their approbation, demands that they appreciate her dishes and call for second helpings; she is upset if they are not hungry, to the point that one wonders whether the fried potatoes are for her husband or her husband for the fried potatoes.
    book-quotefeminismwomensecond-sex

  11. Simone de Beauvoir _ The Second Sex

    The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice."
    book-quotefeminism

  12. Simone de Beauvoir _ The Second Sex

    It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
    book-quotefeminism
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