Quotes About Equality

When faced with the myth, the questions to ask are not about women's faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? When someone discusses a woman's appearance to her face, she can ask herself, is it that person's business? Are the power relations equal? Would she feel comfortable making the same personal comments in return?

Some women have become far too proscriptive of other women's pleasures and private arrangements, and the definition of feminism has become ideologically overloaded.

Economist Marvin Harris described women as a 'literate and docile' labor pool, and 'therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries.' The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.

Women will be free of the beauty myth when we can choose to use our faces and clothes and bodies as simply one form of self-expression out of a full range of others. We can dress up for our pleasure, but we must speak up for our rights.

Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens explains how it comes about that individual men's names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and beautiful) stone women.

At the interview luncheon, when boys were asked, "How do you plan to save the world from itself?" a girl was asked, "How do you manage to keep your lovely figure?

The job market refined the beauty myth as a way to legitimize employment discrimination against women.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us.

How can a woman believe in merit in a reality like this? A job market that rewards her indirectly as if she were selling her body is simply perpetuating the traditional main employment options for women—compulsory marriage or prostitution—more politely and for half the pay.

How can woman believe in merit in a reality like this? A job market that rewards her indirectly as if she were selling her body is simply perpetuating the traditional main employment options for women—compulsory marriage or prostitution—more politely and for half the pay.

The idea that a woman's body has boundaries that must not be violated is fairly new. We evidently haven't taken it far enough. Can we extend that idea? Or are women the pliable sex, innately dapted to being shaped, cut, and subjected to physical invasion? Does the female body deserve the same notion of integrity as the male body?

Is beauty really sex? Does a woman's sexuality correspond to what she looks like? Does she have the right to sexual pleasure and self-esteem because she's a person, or must she earn that right through beauty, as she used to through marriage?

If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community. As long as women are asked to bring a self-denying mentality to the communal table, it will never be round, men and women seated together; but the same traditional hierarchical dais, with a folding table for women at the foot.

Are women beautiful or aren't we?

Lad os være skamløse. Grådige. Opsøge fornøjelser. Undgå smerte. Klæde os, spise og drikke, som vi har lyst til. Være tolerante over for andre kvinders valg. Vælge den form for sex, vi har lyst til og kæmpe hårdt mod den form for sex, vi ikke har lyst til. Finde vore egne grunde til at handle, som vi gør.

What women look like is considered important because what we say is not.

Nor has the beauty myth always been this way. Though the pairing of the older rich men with young, "beautiful" women is taken to be somehow inevitable, in the matriarchal Goddess religions that dominated the Mediterranean from about 25,000 B.C.E. to about 700 B.C.E., the situation was reversed:

A man's right to confer judgment on any woman's beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is thought of as God-given.

Of course, men don't age any better physically. They age better only in terms of social status. We misperceive in this way since our eyes are trained to see time as a flaw on women's faces where it is a mark of character on men's.

The Golden Rule means we should do unto others as we would wish them to do unto us if our positions were reversed.

The free schools of America, and the free public libraries, do not impress people because they are free.

There is only one child in the world and the child's name is all children.

The one-eyed mollusc on the sea-bottom, feathered and luminous, is my equal in what he and I know of star clusters not yet found by the best of star-gazers.

It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights," Pearl wrote. "Though the mind has gone away, though he cannot speak or communicate with anyone, the human stuff is there, and he belongs to the human family.