Quotes About Women

When women could vote, suddenly their lives became more important, and enfranchising women ended up providing a huge and unanticipated boost to women's health.

Numbers are difficult to calculate in part because sex workers can't be divided neatly into categories of those working voluntarily and those working involuntarily. Some commentators look at prostitutes and see only sex slaves; others see only entrepreneurs. But in reality there are some in each category and many other women who inhabit a gray zone between freedom and slavery.

In almost every conflict, mortality is disproportionately male. But whereas men are the normal victims of war, women have become a weapon of war—meant to be disfigured or tortured to terrorize the rest of the population.

Maternal mortality is an injustice that is tolerated only because its victims are poor, rural women. The best argument to stop it, however, isn't economic but ethical. What was horrifying about Prudence's death was not that the hospital allocated its resources poorly, but that it neglected a human being in its care.

Women's empowerment helps raise economic productivity and reduce infant mortality. It contributes to improved health and nutrition. It increases the chances of education for the next generation.

Another Western aid group, trying to improve the hygiene and health of Afghan women, issued them bars of soap—nearly causing a riot. In Afghanistan, washing with soap is often associated with post-coital activity, so the group was thought to be implying that the women were promiscuous.

As for wife beating, one survey found support for it from 62 percent of Indian village women themselves. And no group systematically abuses young women more cruelly than mothers-in-law, who serve as household matriarchs in much of the world and take charge of disciplining the younger women.

In Australia, they had never seen a single case of fistula; in Ethiopia, they encountered fistulas constantly. These are the women most to be pitied in the world. They're alone in the world, ashamed of their injuries. For lepers or AIDS victims, there are organizations that help. But nobody knows about these women or helps them.

A politically incorrect point must be noted here. Of the countries where women are held back and subjected to systematic abuses such as honor killings and genital cutting, a very large proportion are predominately Muslim. Most Muslims worldwide don't believe in such practices...but the fact remains that the countries where girls are cut, killer for honor, or kept out of school or the workplace typically have large Muslim populations.

We believe an international women's movement needs to focus less on holding conventions or lobbying for new laws, and more time in places like rural Zimbabwe, listening to communities and helping them get their girls into school.

Capitalism, it turns out, can achieve what charity and good intentions sometimes cannot. Microfinance has done more to bolster the status of women, and to protect them from abuse, than any laws could accomplish.

I think that men know how to romance a woman and most do it well, at least for a time, otherwise women wouldn't marry them. The problem is that most of them begin to rest on their laurels.

Mom says it's because she has PMS. Do you even know what that means? "I'm not a little kid anymore. It means pissed-at- men syndrome

I'm overreacting, probably," Sophie says. "I just get a little bored with the abused-women-equals-art thing. It just all seems a bit eighties to me. Do you know what I mean?

It is not only in academia and on the remnants of the Left that you encounter the argument that to prefer democracy to tyranny in other cultures, or the rights of women to the demands of misogynist clerics, is to announce yourself as insensitive brute or interfering imperialist.

There were many things. I'm what I call a 'moving on' kind of girl. There's a song on our new album about it. Rather than deal with problems in relationships, I've always moved on. That's why I'm one of the very few survivors as a woman, you know. Women tend to be more into men usually but I wasn't." 1980

I sipped the coffee. It was delicious, perfectly prepared, as I imagine anything prepared by Annie Miclasz would be. One of those formidable women who felt they had to hide their efficiency behind a soft, caring front; who hid for so long that the front became real; one of the women who kept the world turning; one of the women it paid to never, ever cross.

Women, in short, have been trained to believe that they're not allowed to be angry." "Trained," Katherine said loudly. "You're always talking about training, like we're dogs or something." "It's not polite to raise your voice," I said, and she immediately hunched and blushed. Suze frowned. "Don't frown," I said to her, "you'll get wrinkles." Silence.

The women called to one another, shouted at the stupid beasts that milled in confusion, cursed when one enterprising animal made a run for the open plain. Uaithne's braids burned in the sun like rivers of hot Irish gold as she chased it and brought it down in a tangle of legs.

I was walking, enjoying the beer, taking the pulse of the audience because there is always an audience. Of the women at the small tables surrounding the pool area, some were talking, drinking and watching, but some were just drinking and watching.

As the sun went down and left candlelight wavering over brow and throat, wrist and mouth, it seemed for a moment that they could be almost the same age: two women enjoying a conversation.

She longed for the sound of girls' voices or a woman singing as she fed chickens.

Violence against women is an appalling human rights violation. But it is not inevitable. We can put a stop to this.

There is no war on women. Women are doing well. But women are thoughtful. And what we in the Republican Party and across the country, Republican, Independents and Democrat women say is we're more thoughtful than a label. We care about jobs and the economy and healthcare and education. We care about a lot of different things.