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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #norms
When you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women. ... And I don't quite know how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in women brings only shame? ↗
[I]f a woman is given a bad reputation -- however contrary to the facts -- any man will be loath to marry her, as one sees all the time. Yet take a man who has slept with a hundred women and may be the vilest lecher on earth, and there is still no delay in a wife being found for him, whether he is knight, baron, or whatever, so long as he's rich. The girl can be absolutely virginal and innocent, her spouse as corrupt as you like. What logic can anyone see in this? ↗
If it is as evil to do lechery as the Bible and the Lord Himself tell us, then who is the more blameworthy: the one who instigates it, or the one who doesn't so much do it as suffer what men do to her? You know very well that it is the male who does it, and whoever says otherwise is wrong and is lying through his teeth, unless he has no teeth -- and would to God he hadn't. ↗
Let louts learn [their] lesson and stifle their malicious talk! When they are enjoying themselves on the pub bench, with a jug and a glass and a barman there to serve up, then their chatter and their fun is to pass judmgent on some innocent girl -- would to God they'd drown in a beer barrel for it! ↗
#gender #inequality #men #misogyny #morality
She sang, as requested. There was much about love in the ballad: faithful love that refused to abandon its object; love that disaster could not shake; love that, in calamity, waxed fonder, in poverty clung closer. The words were set to a fine old air -- in themselves they were simple and sweet: perhaps, when read, they wanted force; when well sung, they wanted nothing. Shirley sang them well: she breathed into the feeling, softness, she poured round the passion, force: her voice was fine that evening; its expression dramatic: she impressed all, and charmed one. On leaving the instrument, she went to the fire, and sat down on a seat -- semi-stool, semi-cushion: the ladies were round her -- none of them spoke. The Misses Sympson and the Misses Nunnely looked upon her, as quiet poultry might look on an egret, an ibis, or any other strange fowl. What made her sing so? They never sang so. Was it proper to sing with such expression, with such originality -- so unlike a school girl? Decidedly not: it was strange, it was unusual. What was strange must be wrong; what was unusual must be improper. Shirley was judged. ↗
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ↗
It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners. ↗
I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. ↗
