#feminism

Like most guys, I had bought into the stereotype that all feminists were white, lesbian, unattractive male bashers who hated all men. But after reading the work of these black feminists, I realized that this was far from the truth. After digging into their work, I came to really respect the intelligence, courage and honesty of these women. Feminists did not hate men. In fact, they loved men. But just as my father had silenced my mother during their arguments to avoid hearing her gripes, men silenced feminists by belittling them in order to dodge hearing the truth about who we are. ↗

— Byron Hurt

#equality #feminism #hurt #pro-feminist #sexism

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead. ↗

— Núria Añó

#feminism #freedom #gender #gender-inequality #hypocrisy

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea. Or the people who found Atlantis. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#courage #feminism #courage

[Ella Baker]'s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership... 'She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge'. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement. ↗

— Gail Collins

#ella-baker #feminism #grassroots-organizing #leadership #naacp

I hate to say it, but all that stuff they try to tell you about women being empowered and how it's fine for a woman to ask a man out, well, it's crap.' I look down at my watch. 'Seven fifty-three p.m.' 'What does that mean?' 'Official time of death of feminism,' I reply, and mom laughs. ↗

— Robin Epstein

#feminism #dating

She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#feminism #wildness #death

Magistrate: May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil! Lysistrata: If that's all that troubles you, here take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tounge. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women's business. ↗

— Aristophanes

#feminism #gender-roles #greek-literature #pacifism #war

Once I accepted my own transexuality, then it became obvious to me that the question "Why do transsexuals exist?" is not a matter of pure curiosity, but rather an act of nonacceptance, as it invariably occurs in the absence of asking the reciprocal question: "Why do cissexuals exist?" The unceasing search to uncover the cause of transexuality is designed to keep transsexual gender identities in a perpetually questionable state, thereby ensuring that cissexual gender identities continue to be unquestionable. ↗

— Julia Serano

#gender #design

By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#inspirational #dreams

What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial... [i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick. ↗

— Betty Friedan

#feminism #dreams