Quotes About Gender

In 1852, of the 11,794 Chinese in California, only seven were women.

Sir, married or unmarried, all women bleed.

If I grew up with the distinct sense that our mother admired the masculine and viewed the feminine as contemptible, my brother tells me he grew up with an equally strong conviction that she viewed masculinity as toxic and dangerous. Both of us are probably right.

On Law & Order and CSI, female cops look svelte and sexy in their uniforms. I look like the Michelin Man, only armed, and less graceful.

Simone de Beauvoir llamaba mujeres pelota a aquellas que, tras triunfar con grandes dificultades en la sociedad machista, se prestaban a ser utilizadas por esa misma sociedad para reforzar la discriminación; y así, su imagen era rebotada contra las demás mujeres con el siguiente mensaje: «¿Veis? Ella ha triunfado porque vale; si vosotras no lo conseguís no es por impedimentos sexistas, sino porque no valéis lo suficiente.»

Sexist language promotes and maintains attitudes that stereotype people according to gender while assuming that the male is the norm—the significant gender. Nonsexist language treats both sexes equally and either does not refer to a person's sex when it is irrelevant or refers to men and women and to girls and boys in symmetrical ways.

To ensure gender-fairness, ask yourself: Would I write the same thing in the same way about a person of the other sex? Would I mind if this were said of me? If you are describing the behavior of children on the playground, to be gender-fair you will refer to girls and boys an approximately equal number of times, and you will carefully observe what the children do, and not just assume

Gender-specific words (councilwoman, businessman, altar girl) are neither good nor bad in themselves, but they sometimes identify and even emphasize a person's sex when it is not necessary (and is sometimes even objectionable) to do so. Male and female versions of a root word are also likely to be weighted quite differently (governor/governess, master/mistress).

One problem with gender-free terms, however, is that they sometimes obscure reality. Battered spouse implies that men and women are equally battered; this is far from true. Parent is too often taken to mean mother and obscures the fact that more and more fathers are involved in parenting;

the story of teachers who took two groups of children to opposite ends of the playground: one group was told they were going to build "snowmen"; they made 11 snowmen and 1 snowwoman. The other group was told they were going to build "snow figures"; that group made 5 snowmen, 3 snowwomen, 2 snow dogs, 1 snow horse, and 1 snow spaceship.

One of the reasons for the failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female behavior was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people's experience of the mutual interdependence of men and women.

Feminism is still a subject which provokes passion and, it has to be said, unreason. 'Are you for it or against it?' is the most question. But such polarization is now unhelpful, obscuring an understanding of what feminism has achieved, what has changed, and what role gender now actually does play.

In short, feminism has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the brave women who fought its first battles. Its future in the new millennium is to face up to the problems of its success, and to see gender as just one possible reason for social and personal conflicts rather than an all-encompassing cause. But if it is going to be capable of making these changes, it will first have to let go of its sacred cows.

Every gain, every success for women is taken to mean that men are being cheated and denigrated. To me it's healthier to turn the question around. While women were straining every muscle, nerve and bone for the last thirty years, while they labored to remake themselves, their lives and the world, what were twentieth-century men doing all this time? And how long will it take them to join in and support us?

In all this flurry of false scientism, the central question went unaddressed: if the possession of a penis and outsize brain were the distinguishing marks of the lords of creation, why was the world not rules by whales?

Every one of the "great" belief systems of the world, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism, insists on women's inferiority as an article of faith. Individual

Individual patriarchs may indeed wriggle off the charge of woman-hating; the key to the gross inflictions laid on women in their names lies in the nature of the system itself. For a monotheism is not merely a religion—it is a relation of power. Any "One God" idea has a built-in notion of primacy and supremacy; that One God is god above all others and his adherents are supreme over all nonbelievers.

women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought.

To women, therefore, the effect was broadly the same, however the message of male supremacy came packaged. All these systems - Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - were presented to them as holy, the result of divine inspiration transmitted from a male power to males empowered for this purpose, thereby enshrining maleness itself as power.

For, as scientists acknowledge, "women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought."1

Because although we have told girls that they're as smart and as competent as boys, they still get conscious and unconscious messages that they need a man to validate their self-worth and that, to get the man in the first place, they have to present themselves in a nonthreatening (read feminine) manner.

The failure of women to have reached positions of leadership has been due in large part to social and professional discrimination.

In Erling Nicolai Rolfsrud's compendium of memorable women and men from North Dakota, "Mustache" Maude Black, for that was the name of my grandparents' benefactress, is described as not un-womanly, though she dressed mannishly, smoked, drank, was a crack shot and a hard-assed camp boss. These

And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don't ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I've done all the things they say. That's not what gets them. What aggravates them is I've never shed one solitary tear. I'm not sorry. That's unnatural. As we all know, a woman is supposed to cry.