Quotes About Equality

Corporate America had tried to get women to behave as badly as men, Faith Frank said, but women did not have to capitulate. They could be strong and powerful, all the while keeping their integrity and decency.

If Jules or Ash needed to see each other, then the two husbands stepped aside. It almost seemed gratifying to the men to step aside in those moments, remembering what women could have together that men rarely could.

Whenever I give a talk at colleges I meet young women who say, 'I'm not a feminist, but . . .' By which they mean, 'I don't call myself a feminist, but I want equal pay, and I want to have equal relationships with men, and of course I want to have an equal right to sexual pleasure. I want to have a fair and good life. I don't want to be held back because I'm a woman.

Or maybe they don't even want babies, some of these women, and life opens out to them in an endless field of work. And once in a while the world responds in a big way, letting them in, giving them a key, a crown. It does happen, it does. But usually it doesn't.

Corporate America had tried to get women to behave as badly as men, Faith Frank said, but women did not have to capitulate.

This was New York, where famous people drank from the same trough you did,...

To live in a world of female power—mutual power—felt like a desirable dream to Zee. Having power meant that the world was like a pasture with the gate left open, and that there was nothing stopping you, and you could run and run.

Why are we so hard on ourselves?" Asked someone with great plaintiveness. Faith thought, it's not that I'm so hard on myself exactly, it's that I've learned to adopt the views of men as if they were my own.

Good girls could go far, but they could rarely go the distance.

Girls weren't weak. They had a softness sometimes, but not all the time.

It's so wonderful that all of you have so much more freedom than I did. But along with that freedom can sometimes come a sense that you don't need other women. And that isn't true.

When a man speaks that way, people say he has authority. When a woman does, everyone resents her and thinks she's his mother. Or their nagging wife.

Because of course everyone was so soft and hard. Skeleton and skin. But women claimed for themselves the province of softness, which men cast off. maybe it was easier to say you liked it in a woman. But really, maybe you wished you had it yourself.

But of course people were different, she remembered; they were allowed to be different.

But what happened to the talented women who lacked sharp cheekbones or an ease in the universe? The ones who had no attachments to powerful men?

There's only a handful of women who get anywhere. Short story writers, mostly, as if maybe women are somehow more acceptable in miniature.

What sort of man would stay with her and not be threatened by her excesses, her rage, her spirit, her skill? Who was he, this phantom, unthreatened husband who was still attractive and strong himself? Maybe he lived under a rock somewhere, sliding out once in a while to celebrate the big ideas of his brilliant wife, before returning to the shadows.

Women were allowed to tell each other what they felt without holding back. Women could now say, "I love you," without any hesitation or discomfort or a sense that there were sexual overtones between them, even if one of them was gay.

there are two aspects to feminism. The first is individualism, which is that I get to shape my own life. That I don't have to fit into a stereotype, doing what my mother tells me, conforming to someone else's idea of what a woman is. But there's a second aspect too, and here I want to use the old-fashioned word 'sisterhood,' which may make you groan a little and head for the exits in a stampede, but I'll just have to take that chance.

are women so much more ferocious in their violence?

It's enraging, recalling a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times in my life a man telling me to relax, be a team player, stop worrying so much, take it easy and roll with the punches. We're all on the same team.

To be outspoken, or different at all, is a problem for women.

All men have the stars, but they are not the same things for different people.

In no country is it more important to cultivate good manners, than in our own," Eliza Farrar wrote, "where we acknowledge no distinctions but what are founded on character and manners." America's