Quotes About Oppression

Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation.

Le pays latins, comme les pays d'Orient, oppriment la femme par le rigueur des moeurs encore plus que par celle des lois.

All oppression creates a state of war.

If it is said men oppress women, the husband reacts indigntantly; he feels oppressed: he is; but in fact, it is the masculine code, the society developed by males and in their interest, that has defined the feminine condition in a form that is now for both sexes a source of distress.

L'ideologie chrétienne n'a pas peu contribué à l'oppression de la femme.

La raison profonde qui à l'origine de l'histoire voue la femme au travail domestique et lui interdit de prendre part à la construction du monde, c'est son asservissement à la fonction génératrice.

Les coutures, les modes sont souvent apliquées à couper les corps féminin de a transcendance: la Chinoise aux pieds bandés peut à peine marcher, les griffes vernies de la star d'Hollywood la privent de ses mains, les hauts talons, les corsets, les paniers, les vertugadins, les crinolines étaient destinés moins à accentuer la combrure du corps féminin qu'à en augmenter l'impotence.

The Koran treats women with the most absolute contempt.

Men's economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.

el más mediocre de los varones se considera frente a las mujeres un semidiós.

The prostitute is the sum of all types of feminine slavery at once.

the oppressor always attempts to diminish those he oppresses; man intentionally refuses women their chances.

The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history.

It may happen that in a matrilineal system she has a very high position: but—beware—the presence of a woman chief or a queen at the head of a tribe absolutely does not mean that women are sovereign: the reign of Catherine the Great changed nothing in the fate of Russian peasant women; and they lived no less frequently in a state of abjection.

when an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the 'fact' is that he or they 'are' inferior.

Mais même au XIX siècle elles étaient souvent obligées de se cacher; elles n'avaient pas même 'une chambre à elles', c'est-à-dire qu'elles ne jouissaient pas de cette indépendance matérielle qui est une des conditions nécessaires de la liberté intérieure.

They're devouring my life with their mouths, with their eyes.

Em verdade, as mulheres nunca opuseram os valores femininos aos valores masculinos; foram os homens, desejosos de manter as prerrogativas masculinas, que inventaram essa divisão: pretenderam criar um campo de domínio feminino - reinado da vida, da imanência - tão somente para nele encerrar a mulher

The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully. So there is no good reason to believe men when they try to defend privileges whose scope they cannot even fathom.

Ce sont eux [les hommes] qui ont toujours tenu le sort de la femme entre leurs mains; et ils n'en ont pas décidé en fonction de son intérêt; c'est à leurs propres projets, à leurs craintes, à leurs besoins qu'il-ont eu régard.

To reject the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul, or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks, or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned but an inauthentic flight.

Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being.

Resistance put up by the old capitalist paternalism prevents this equality from being concretely achieved: it will be achieved the day this resistance is broken down.

Gerechtigkeit kann innerhalb der Ungerechtigkeit nie geschaffen werden.