#feminism

By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women’s status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty

I have seen enormous changes. I have not seen enough change. I, too, can hardly wait. ↗

— Kay Mills

#journalism #women #change

For underlying all is our struggle with gender. Woman hatred is fear of her who has the power of birthing, for with birth, comes death, and fear of death is hatred of life. ↗

— Joan Dobbie

#death

Philosophy is the toil which can never tire persons engaged in it. All ways are strewn with roses, and the farther you go, the more enchanting objects appear before you and invite you on. ↗

— Mary Wortley Montagu

#feminism #learning #philosophy #education

The feminist challenge was sweeping: it embraced education and occupation, together with legal, political, and social status. It even dared broach the subject of equality in personal, and especially matrimonial, relationships. Such assertiveness was more unsettling than the racial threat because it was more intimate and immediate: few white men lived with blacks, but most lived with women. ↗

— Cynthia Russett

#women #education

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#gender-equality #women #equality

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#wisdom #women #manifestation

...One of the reasons so many women say "I'm not a feminist but..." (and then put forward a feminist position), is that in addition to being stereotyped as man-hating Amazons, feminists have also been cast as antifamily and antimotherhood. ↗

— Susan J. Douglas

#motherhood #stereotypes

Feminist effort to end patriarchal domination should be of primary concern precisely because it insists on the eradication of exploitation and oppression in the family context and in all other intimate relationships. It is that political movement which most radically addresses the person – the personal – citing the need for the transformation of self, of relationships, so that we might be better able to act in a revolutionary manner, challenging and resisting domination, transforming the world outside the self. ↗

— Bell Hooks

#family

In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools. ↗

— Helen Brown

#family #feminism #housewife #mother #family