#omen

Organizations like the UN do a lot of good, but there are certain basic realities they never seem to grasp ...Maybe the most important truth that eludes these organizations is that it's insulting when outsiders come in and tell a traumatized people what it will take for them to heal. You cannot go to another country and make a plan for it. The cultural context is so different from what you know that you will not understand much of what you see. I would never come to the US and claim to understand what's going on, even in the African American culture. People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they are not stupid. They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked. That includes women. Most especially women ... To outsiders like the UN, these soldiers were a problem to be managed. But they were our children. ↗

— Leymah Gbowee

#culture #liberia #outsiders #war #women

I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#empowerment #flaws #freedom #gender #ideal-woman

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

If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married. ↗

— Elizabeth I Tudor

#british-monarchy #british-royal-family #dignity #empowerment #freedom

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity. ↗

— Wally Lamb

#truth #women #freedom

Old women should not seek to be perfumed. ↗

— Archilochus

#old women #seek #should #women

think think think until you blink ↗