Quotes About Women

For these women, Hamas's view of women was laughable. And since they couldn't hear the appeal of such views themselves, they were deaf to the appeal they held for their students.

All the women who actually drove were mature professionals who had international drivers' licenses they'd acquired overseas. Many

To the gnarled old imam, sending his daughters out of the home—to walk in the streets, even if veiled, to sit among strangers, even if all girls—was wicked. His

They argued that women of the prophet's era had ridden camels, the main mode of transportation of their day. The

Even the women began to see us as something so foreign to their community that nothing we said could possibly be of any relevance to them. We

With this assertion, many mainstream Muslims wash their hands of the twin brutalities that shape the lives of perhaps a quarter of the women of Islam.

Women of all ages are in-fantilized by the Saudi system. A woman, no matter how old, has to be able to show a signed permission from her husband, son or grandson before she is free to travel, even inside her own country.

The women have been told it's written in the Koran that they must do these things," she said. She could tell them it wasn't but, as an outsider and a woman, her word meant little against the word of the village sheik.

under the surface there is often ambivalence about women at work that makes their position vulnerable.

month—the money gives the women at least a small degree of discretion in spending and the prestige that comes from contributing to the family budget.

The Bedouin was troubled by a familiar bundle of Middle Eastern bogeys: America in general and the CIA in particular; Jews, or if not Jews, then Christians; women's sexuality—both the fear of a "past" and the dread of present emancipation signaled by the absence of a veil.

American women have taken on nontraditional jobs in every war since they made musket balls in the Civil War, and after every war they have gone back home, but as a crane operator observed, "Women were different in World War II: They didn't want to go back home and many of them didn't. And if they did go back home, they never forgot, and they told their daughters, 'You don't have to be just a homemaker. You can be anything you want to be.

perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most "unfeminine" quality of all -- that of intllectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The Hubris of the god makers, the hubris of the male-system builders.

Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel.

Women's history is the primary tool for women's emancipation.

The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining "respectability

Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

As far as cosmetics are used for adornment in a conscious and creative way, they are not emblems of inauthenticity: it is when they are presented as the real thing, covering unsightly blemishes, disguising a repulsive thing so that it is acceptable to the world that their function is deeply suspect. The women who dare not go out without their false eyelashes are in serious psychic trouble.

Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.

Properly speaking, altruism is an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what they never had: a self. The cry of the deserted woman, 'What have I done to deserve this?' reveals at once the false emotional economy that she has been following.

Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women—and has become an option for men—while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character.

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.

If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescapable destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the ay a man might work for the right to have a family, children might grow up without the burden of gratitude for the gift of life which they never asked for.

In 'The Female Fear: The Social Cost of Rape', Margaret T Gordon and Stephanie Riger say that fully one-third of the women in their study reported worrying about rape once a month or more. Others said the the fear of rape is just something lives in the back of their minds at all times, even when it wasn't present in conscious thought. Another third of the participants claimed to never worry about rape but even so they took precautions to guard against it.