Quotes About Gender

asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. "They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course," he said. "But what if their husband is their problem?" That possibility hadn't crossed either man's mind.

The old man was appalled by the prospect of women driving. He clapped a bony hand to his heart and gazed heavenward: "I hope I never see it in my lifetime," he said.

Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men." —Ali ibn Abu Taleb, husband of Muhammad's daughter Fatima and founder of the Shiite sect 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.

Such laws can be even more humiliating for older women. A widowed grandmother, for example, may have to rely on the permission of a grandson if he is her closest male relative.

There was something in her that could not, or would not, see the distinctions that the world wished to make between weak and strong, between women and men, laborer and lord.

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.

one in five Muslim girls lives today in a community that sanctions some sort of interference with her genitals.

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

women now share the economic burden of their families, very few Egyptian men are prepared to share the housework. To

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.

Ik voel me vandaag beroerd. Maar laat ons om ons heen zien. Sommige mensen worden reeds bij het begin van hun leven zwaar gestraft: zij worden als vrouw geboren.

Are you sure there's no way of getting the lad's fancies out of his head? There are so many other things a young manwom can take up nowadays. What about hairdressing? Beard-perms and hair-sets are so fashionable at the moment.

As long as one sex held power over the other, they would never be able to find out what differences there really were between the sexes -- psychically - if there were any at all.

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.

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

Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.

Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.

The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.

The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.

Man is jealous because of his amour propre woman is jealous because of her lack of it.

All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.

Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.

There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood what women want and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic.