#feminism

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself. ↗

— Betty Friedan

#feminism #identity #independence #living-vicariously #self-discovery

What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists. ↗

— Rebecca Traister

#feminism #feminists #politics #sarah-palin #women

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#dignity #double-standards #empowerment #feminism #gender

... the effort to discover an authentic self, to strip away layers of alienation and culturally imposed identity and find a soul in a clear, unimpeded communion with the sacred is consonant with spiritual quests throughout the ages. Spiritual feminists, no less than medieval mystics, are searching in the ways made available to them through their culture to separate themselves from everything in their hearts and minds that puts them at odds with the divine plan (and therefore with their own best interests), and to find a true harmony between themselves and the universe. ↗

— Cynthia Eller

#goddess #soul #spirituality #age

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work." (Claiming an Education, 1977) ↗

— Adrienne Rich

#empowerment #feminism #independent-thought #responsibility #self-determination

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. ↗

— Mary Wollstonecraft

#conditioning #feminism #inequality #misogyny #stereotypes

Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt. ↗

— Betty Friedan

#experience

Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply. ↗

— Sena Jeter Naslund

#feminist #women #wife

Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death. ↗

— Gavin de Becker

#fear #feminism #gender #men #rape

Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of women. ↗

— Reynolds Price

#children #even #even now #fathers #feminism