Feminism

"I’ve been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. There are those who say I’m impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing. Whether I’m any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am — and this ought to be made very clear — I am a very serious woman."

"In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation."

"Today is the beginning of the feminine awakening. A new wave has reached Earth today, and new hearths have become alight; for the substance of the rays penetrates deeply. It is joyous to feel the approach of the New Epoch. 138."

"The Mother of the World appears as a symbol of the feminine Origin in the new epoch, and the masculine Origin voluntarily returns the treasure of the World to the feminine Origin. Amazons were the embodiment of the strength of the feminine Principle, and now it is necessary to show the aspect of spiritual perfection of woman... it is time to change conditions in the world. 150."

"Women’s movements have a special significance for the immediate future. These movements should be understood not as an assertion of supremacy, but as the establishment of justice. Much has been said about co-measurement and equilibrium; precisely for the realization of this principle must the full rights of women be strengthened. One should not think that this will benefit only women; it will promote world equilibrium, and thus is necessary for harmonious evolution."

"To all these insanities will be added the most shameful—the intensified competition between male and female. We insist upon equal and full rights for women, but the servants of darkness will expel them from many fields of activity, even where they bring the most benefit. We have spoken about the many maladies in the world, but the renewed struggle between the male and female principles will be the most tragic. It is hard to imagine how disastrous this will be, for it is a struggle against evolution itself! What a high price humanity pays for every such opposition to evolution! In these convulsions the young generations are corrupted. Plato spoke about beautiful thinking, but what kind of beauty is possible when there is hostility between man and woman? Now is the time to think about equal and full rights, but darkness invades the tensed realms."

"Keep in mind that the participation of a woman is particularly helpful... We have already spoken about the desirability of participation by women in scientific experiments. Ancient alchemists understood the full value of the feminine contribution, but today many scientists reject it. Because of this, the participation of women is frequently indirect, rather than direct. Nevertheless, the fundamental nature of things will attract women, and they will leave their mark in new discoveries. For this reason it is essential to change the status of women. The subtlety and refinement of women’s nature must be understood, so that they may achieve equal rights and the desired balance. It would be a sad mistake for women to replace soldiers on the battlefield, or perform heavy labor. When we are aware of the presence of valuable subtle energy we ought to be able to apply it accordingly. Thus, we once again come to the notion of true cooperation."

"We must find the right use for every ability. The era of the Mother of the World is not a return of the age of Amazons. A far greater, loftier, and more refined task is before us. One can observe that machines often function better, and plants can live longer, in the hands of women. Of course, I do not speak of all women, but of those exceptional ones who manifest the subtlest energy. Their abilities glorify the age of the Mother of the World, and relate closely to the realm of healing. And another quality belongs to woman—she manifests the highest degree of devotion. The greatest truths are revealed by her. Reality confirms this. Woman can ensure that new knowledge is properly applied."

"Every appeal for the renewal of life must address the needs of women and the young. Some people think that both of these aspects of life are secure, and are developing successfully, but in reality the position of woman and the education of the young are not at all in a satisfactory condition. Only a small number of women can assume equal rights in the conditions of life, and in most schools the foundations of a sound life are not taught. Evolution cannot proceed successfully when two pillars of support have not yet been made secure. It should not be thought that evolution proceeds under any conditions; it can be obstructed, and much precious energy will be wasted."

"The Thinker said, “O, ye wise men, your efforts will be fruitless if woman does not stretch out her hand to you, and if you do not raise a generation of heroes!”"

"I have feminist bones and when I hear things or see people react to women in certain ways I have very little tolerance."

"We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever."

"If all Men Are born Free, how is it that all women are born Slaves?"

"It should not prejudice my voice that I'm not born a man, if I say something advantageous to the present situation. For I'm taxed too, and as a toll provide men for the nation."

"Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it's the latter, so I sign up."

"The subjection of women in Western lands is wholly due to Christianity. Among the Teutons women were honoured, and held a noble and dignified place in the tribe; Christianity brought with it the evil Eastern habit of regarding women as intended for the toys and drudges of man, and intensified it with a special spite against them, as the daughters of Eve, who was first "deceived." Strangely different to the *general Eastern feeling and showing a truer and nobler view of life, is the precept of Manu: Where women are honoured, there the deities are pleased; but where they are dishonoured, there all religious acts become fruitless."

"People feel much more comfortable with the 50 Shades of Grey version of women’s liberation: possibly feeling life would be much simpler if the suffragettes hadn’t wanted the vote and just really enjoyed chaining themselves to railings."

"Woman herself, long conscious of complete humanity, today desires only that others shall recognize it and honestly accept the implications of such recognitions....The Word "Feminism", a much maligned word, which has come to stand for many irrelevancies, such as dowdiness and physical abnormality, still adequately expresses her true desire, a desire that might well be summed up in one sentence addressed to mankind: 'Recognize our full humanity, and we will trouble you no more"."

"A women in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. A woman attempting the role of leadership was, to my proud black Brothers, making an alliance with the "counter-revolutionary, man-hating, lesbian, feminist white bitches." It was a violation of some Black Power principle that was left undefined. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of black people."

"... Within a span of thirty-five years, a visionary feminism has managed to challenge, if not transform, world consciousness. Feminist ideals are battling patriarchal institutions and ideology, the world over. For example, rape as a weapon—not a spoil—of war is now viewed as an international human rights violation. Feminists have also mounted brave and determined battles against such local practices as honor killings, dowry burnings, female genital mutilation, against the global trafficking in women as sexual slaves, and, more generally, against rape, incest, domestic violence, and economic inequality. Feminists have also campaigned for women's religious, medical, educational, and legal rights."

"(Women's Liberation) ... is an ontological, spiritual revolution, pointing beyond the idolatries of sexist society and sparking creative action in and toward transcendence. The becoming of women implies universal human becoming. It has everything to do with the search for ultimate meaning and reality which some would call God. p. 6"

"It requires a kick in the imagination, a wrenching of tired words, to realize that feminism is the final and therefore the first cause, and that this movement is movement. Realization of this is already the beginning of a qualitative leap in be-ing. For the philosophers of senescence 'the final cause' is in technical reason; it is the Father's plan, an endless flow of Xerox copies of the past. But the final cause that is movement is in our imaginative-cerebral-emotional-active-creative be-ing. p. 190"

"Several meanings of the word Elemental converge for the conjuring of Elemental feminist philosophy. An 'obsolete' definition is 'material, physical.' The philosophy here unfolded is material/physical as well as spiritual, mending/transcending this deceptive dichotomy. p 11; Women who lust for wisdom become astonished/astonishing, Wondering. As Muses of our own creation, Wonderlusters re-member our Original Powers. Unlike the frozen 'philosophy' that is packaged and stored within academic refrigerators, Wonderlust moves us always. Our vehicles are often Metaphors. Our destinations are Realms of Metabeing. p. 26"

"The symbol, God as Verb, was an essential step in my intellectual process to the Metaphor, Goddess as Verb. Often feminists try to eliminate this step, with the unfortunate result that 'The Goddess' functions as a static symbol, simply replacing the noun God. In writing Beyond God the Father, I also used the expression Power of Be-ing to refer to ultimate/ intimate reality. p. 423"

"Glass ceiling feminism is grounded from the very outset in hierarchies. I mean, how else does that metaphor work? Those who are already high enough to reach the ceiling are probably white, and then if they're not white, they are already affluent. Because they're at the top. All they have to do is push through the ceiling. And as long as I have identified as a feminist, it has been clear to me that any feminism that privileges those that already have privilege is bound to be irrelevant to poor women, working class women, women of color, trans women, trans women of color. If standards for feminism are created by those who have already ascended economic hierarchies and are attempting to make the last climb to the top, how is this relevant to women who are at the very bottom? Revolutionary hope resides precisely among those women who have been abandoned by history and who are now standing up and making their demands heard."

"This is a movement against suffering. So, in between the lines, when you hear people say that this is a movement for freedom, for justice, for equality - and all of that is entirely and deeply true - you must remember that we are trying to eliminate suffering too."

"My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit."

"Without anger and without righteous indignation and without the deep, relentless demand for change, my feminism, YOUR feminism, everyone’s feminism will fail. It will be bullshit."

"The best and most authentic reaction against feminism and against every other female aberration should not be aimed at women as such, but at men instead. It should not be expected of women that they return to what they really are and thus reestablish the necessary inner and outer conditions for a reintegration of a superior race, when men themselves retain only the semblance of true virility."

"Feminism must concern itself with radical possibilities for our future, a future in which gender-based violence and harm is abolished, freeing us all to lead more joyful lives."

"Feminism, in truth, has a cyclical momentum all its own. In the historical interpretation we have espoused, feminism is the inevitable female response to the development of a technology capable of freeing women from the tyranny of their sexual-reproductive roles – both the fundamental biological condition itself, and the sexual class system built upon, and reinforcing, this biological condition."

"The goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution. Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle."

"Freudianism and Feminism grew from the same soil. It is no accident that Freud began his work at the height of the early feminist movement. We underestimate today how important feminist ideas were at the time. [...] The culture reflected prevailing attitudes and concerns: feminism was an important literary theme because it was then a vital problem. For writers wrote about what they saw: they described the cultural milieu around them. And in this milieu there was concern for the issues of feminism. The question of the emancipation of women affected every woman, whether she developed through the new ideas or fought them desperately. Old films of the time show the growing solidarity of women, reflecting their unpredictable behaviour, their terrifying and often disastrous testing of sex roles. No one remained untouched by the upheaval. And this was not only in the West: Russia at this time was experimenting at doing away with the family. At the turn of the century, then, in social and political thinking, in literary and artistic culture, there was a tremendous ferment of ideas regarding sexuality, marriage and family, and women’s role. Freudianism was only one of the cultural products of this ferment. Both Freudianism and feminism came as reactions to one of the smuggest periods in Western civilization, the Victorian Era, characterized by its family-centredness, and thus its exaggerated sexual oppression and repression. Both movements signified awakening: but Freud was merely a diagnostician for what feminism purports to cure."

"The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress."

"I am uncompromising in the matter of woman's rights. In my opinion she should labour under no legal disability not suffered by man, I should treat the daughters and sons on a footing of perfect equality."

"To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?"

"Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question; you will not deprive her of that right at least. Tell me, what gives you sovereign empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents?"

"Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The flames of truth has dispersed all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion."

"... My work speaks for the women who came before me but were denied and the girl who will succeed me and thrive ..."

"The so-called granting of equal rights to women, which Marxism demands, in reality does not grant equal rights but constitutes a deprivation of rights, since it draws the woman into an area in which she will necessarily be inferior."

"While the inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist and an Old Feminist, with the motto Equality First."

"My thoughts have been shaped by the conviction that feminism must become a mass based if it is to have a , transformative impact on society."

"Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most by sexist ; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage."

"'Bloody men! sometimes I feel I hate them all.' 'Your God slipped up. She should have created just one sex, women, and arranged for reproduction by cloning.'"

"Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men."

"The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labour. Surely we must free men and women together before we can free women. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands -- the ownership and control of their lives and livelihood -- are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind are ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease. How can women hope to help themselves while we and our brothers are helpless against the powerful organizations which modern parties represent and which contrive to rule the people? They rule the people because they own the means of physical life, land, and tools, and the nourishers of intellectual life, the press, the church, and the school."

"I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist."

"When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women."

"We all grow in a culture in which women's bodies are constantly turned into things, into objects. [...] Of course these affects female self-steem. It also does something even more insidious. It create a climate in which there is wide-spread violence against women. [...] Turning a human being into a thing is the first step towards justified violence against that person."

"I always believed that the time inevitably must come when woman will be judged by the same moral standards applied to man. For it is not her specific virtue that gives her a place of honor in human society, but the worth of the useful mission accomplished by her, the worth of her personality as human being, as citizen, as thinker, as fighter."

"The time has come when all human beings will be equally appraised according to their activity and their general human dignity."

"Only the fresh revolutionary storms were strong enough to sweep away hoary prejudices against woman and only the productive-working people is able to effect the complete equalization and liberation of woman by building a new society."

"What! still retaining your Utopian visions of female felicity? To talk of our happiness! — ours, the ill-used and oppressed! You remind me of the ancient tyrant, who, seeing his slaves sink under the weight of their chains, said 'Do look at the indolent repose of those people!'"

"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition."

"Who needs consciousness-raising and equal pay, when you’re an Amazon with an invisible plane?"

"I believe myself that appointing women with their history is the single most important thing we can do to raise feminist consciousness. And feminist consciousness means for women to understand that they have a grievance in this world. That the grievance is not individual, that to change their grievance, they need to ally with other women. They need to define for themselves what their goals are. They need then, to form alliances with men and women to attain their goals, and that when their goal is attained, we will have a better society for all of us. Men and women."

"Feminist consciousness begins with self-consciousness, an awareness of our separate needs as women; then comes the awareness of female collectivity-the reaching out toward other women, first for mutual support and then to improve our condition. Out of the recognition of communality, there emerges feminist group consciousness a set of ideas by which women autonomously define ourselves in a male-dominated world and seek to substitute our vision and values for those of the patriarchy. The two aspects of my own consciousness, that of the citizen and that of the woman scholar, had finally fused: I am a feminist scholar."

"Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society."

"I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are: feminazis. Tom Hazlett, a good friend who is an esteemed and highly regarded professor of economics at the University of California at Davis, coined the term to describe any female who is intolerant of any point of view that challenges militant feminism. … There are not many of them, but they deserve to be called feminazis. A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed."

"The Great Mother archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many traditional cultures today. But this archetype has been violently repressed in the West for at least 5,000 years starting with the Indo-European invasions - reinforced by the anti-Goddess view of Judeo-Christianity, culminating with three centuries of witch hunts - all the way to the Victorian era. In Victorian times - at the apex of the repression of the Great Mother - a Scottish schoolmaster named Adam Smith noticed a lot of greed and scarcity around him and assumed that was how all "civilized" societies worked. Smith... created modern economics, which can be defined as a way of allocating scarce resources through the mechanism of individual, personal greed... If a society is afraid of scarcity, it will actually create an environment in which it manifests well-grounded reasons to live in fear of scarcity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy!"

"The Great Mother... specifically symbolizes planet Earth - fertility, nature, the flow of abundance in all aspects of life. Someone who has assimilated the Great Mother archetype trusts in the abundance of the universe. It's when you lack trust that you want a big bank account. The first guy who accumulated a lot of stuff as protection against future uncertainty automatically had to start defending his pile against everybody else's envy and needs. If a society is afraid of scarcity, it will actually create an environment in which it manifests well-grounded reasons to live in fear of scarcity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy!... We have been living for a long time under the belief that we need to create scarcity to create value. Although that is valid in some material domains, we extrapolate it to other domains where it may not be valid. For example, there's nothing to prevent us from freely distributing information. The marginal cost of information today is practically nil. Nevertheless, we invent copyrights and patents in an attempt to keep it scarce. So fear of scarcity creates greed and hoarding, which in turn creates the scarcity that was feared. Whereas cultures that embody the Great Mother are based on abundance and generosity."

"The emancipation of women is not an act of charity, the result of a humanitarian or compassionate attitude. The liberation of women is a fundamental necessity for the Revolution, the guarantee of its continuity and the preconditions for its victory."

"The only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity."

"There are many excellent feminist speakers and writers in the atheist movement, men and women who bring the same critical eye to sexism that they apply to religion. Most of them, however, are mostly known only within atheist circles."

"If atheists believed in the afterlife, they would have to assume that Simone de Beauvoir and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are looking down upon us in horror, wondering how the good name of atheism has been so poisoned by rampant sexism. But since they are no longer around to judge us, it’s up to living atheists to strive to be more than a bunch of people who simply don’t believe in God, but stand up to irrationality in all its forms, including sexism."

"The next 100 years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy- a nation of amazons in the psychological rather than the physical sense. In 500 years there will be a serious sex battle. And in 1000 years women will definitely rule this country."

"A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child's ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary power to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing-love. It's smart to be strong. It's big to be generous. But it's sissified according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving affectionate, and alluring. "Aw, that's girl's stuff!" snorts our young comics reader. "Who wants to be a girl?" And that's the point. Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman."

"As a woman, I completely reject Hillary’s brand of bourgeois feminism because it leaves out millions of immigrant women, poor women, and the women under her bombs around the world."

"Given the dismal failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists were forced to change their agenda: they left behind the class struggle based on the economic system and replaced this with other supposed social conflicts, which are just as harmful to life and to economic growth. The first of these new battles was the ridiculous and unnatural fight between man and woman. Libertarianism already provides for equality of the sexes. The cornerstone of our creed is that all humans are created equal and that we all have the same inalienable rights granted by the Creator, including life, freedom and ownership. All that the radical feminism agenda has led to is greater state intervention to hinder economic process, giving jobs to bureaucrats who have not contributed anything to society. Examples are ministries of women or international organisations devoted to promoting this agenda."

"I hate this waaaah-I'm-a-poor-sensitive-weak-woman-protect-me shit. This kind of stuff generates more contempt for women. So fuck niceness!"

"No one appeared to wonder whether this S-M proliferation was a lesbian copy of a faggot imitation of patriarchal backlash against feminism."

"My notion of woman's role in the state is utterly opposed to feminism. Of course I do not want women to be slaves, but if here in Italy I proposed to give our women votes, they would laugh me to scorn. As far as political life is concerned, they do not count here."

""Women's Problems" are not just women's problems. They are major problems for human beings. They pose issues that both men and women must think about. But men use traditional customs as shields. Relying on a large number of adherents, they brandish overhead the real power they hold over society and suppress the assertions of serious people, jeering at them an relying on unjust cowardly means to get rid of them."

"Feminism is the result of a few ignorant and literal-minded women letting the cat out of the bag about which is the superior sex. Once women made it public that they could do things better than men, they were, of course, forced to do them."

"Feminism is a laudable theory. I like how it raises our awareness of the discrimination against women, and I sanction the equality of men and women, girl and boy that it advocates."

"Feminism, coveting social power, is blind to women’s cosmic sexual power"

"Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses."

"I suppose I am a feminist if I believe that women should be able to do anything they want to. And when I say a feminist, I just mean I don't have to, for myself, get out and carry signs ... I just really feel I can live my femininity and actually show that you can be a woman and you can still do whatever you want to do... It's just that there's a group of people that kind of fit into that category more than me. I just always say I don't really go for titles or this or that. But I'm all for all our gals. I think everybody has the right to be who they are."

"Girls are also human beings, a point often overlooked."

"As the us-versus-them opposition is replicated within the original grouping, policing actions get under way. This is a form of behavior that, in addition to allowing some people to be censorious and aggressive toward others, reflects a presumption of rights and wrongs: We are right. You are wrong. Many feminists have trouble swallowing this. As a political science professor from Texas (who has a bumper sticker on her pickup truck saying FEMINIST REDNECK) wrote to us: "At 50 years of age, I have not thrown off the yoke of one master to have it replaced by another, even if its name is feminism.""

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

"The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you’re making a 'feminist’ story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That’s not feminist, that’s macho. Unfortunately, there are still not that many girls going into science, engineering and technology."

"The mainstream feminist movement is correct in identifying prostitution as a patriarchal institution; they conveniently miss that policing is, too. Attempting to eradicate commercial sex through policing does not tackle patriarchy; instead, it continues to produce harassment, arrest, prosecution, eviction, violence, and poverty for those who sell sex."

"Rush Limbaugh has made feminazi a household word. Right-wing politicians like Ollie North say they are running against "an army of feminists" who are destroying family values, and those messages get widespread coverage."

"Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

"Could the terrors and crimes of today be possible if both Origins had been balanced? In the hands of woman lies the salvation of humanity and of our planet. Woman must realize her significance... she should be prepared to take responsibility for the destiny of humanity. Mother, the life-giver, has every right to direct the destiny of her children. The voice of woman, the mother, should be heard amongst the leaders of humanity. The mother suggests the first conscious thoughts to her child. She gives direction and quality to all his aspirations and abilities. But the mother who possesses no thought of culture can suggest only the lower expressions of human nature. But in her striving toward education, woman must remember that all educational systems are only the means for the development of a higher knowledge and culture. The true culture of thought is developed by the culture of spirit and heart. Only such a combination gives that great synthesis without which it is impossible to realize the real grandeur, diversity, and complexity of human life in its cosmic evolution. Therefore, while striving to knowledge, may woman remember the Source of Light and the Leaders of Spirit—those great Minds who, verily, created the consciousness of humanity. In approaching this Source, this leading Principle of Synthesis, humanity will find the way to real evolution."

"It is also said: "As the Teacher creates through his disciples, even so woman creates through the masculine principle. Therefore woman uplifts man." Hence, woman must raise herself to such a degree, spiritually, morally and intellectually, that it will enable her to carry man with her. Remember the painting by N. K., "She who Leads." Thus woman must occupy the place destined for her. She must become not only an equal cooperator in the management of the whole life, but also an inspirer. The greatest task is to spiritualize and to restore the health of humanity by filling it with aspiration toward great deeds and beauty. But woman must first of all change herself! Therefore, the call to woman must be primarily the call to self-perfection, for the realization of her dignity and her great destiny and to lay the foundation of Beness and for the awakening of the impulse toward creativeness and beauty. It is said: "The Equilibrium of the world cannot be established without true understanding of the First Causes. . . . Therefore, let us be affirmed in consciousness upon the power of Equilibrium, as the stimulus of Existence, of the First Causes, and of Beauty. Hence it is so indispensable to affirm in the spirit the Feminine Principle." (Fiery World III)"

"The great decisive Battle between the Forces of Light and darkness... was predicted in all the ancient scriptures, and the name, "Armageddon" as well as the description of it, can be found in the Apocalypse.... It is interesting to note that these calculations are also found in the pyramid of Cheops. Thus, today we find ourselves in the midst of this Battle, which will increase... As it is said, "The hostile elements of the race refuse to submit to destiny. The departing race seeks to destroy the chosen successors, but we must save them.... Yes, the New Epoch requires spiritual cognition. The New Epoch must manifest due respect to the Mother of the World, to the Feminine Element. “The bird of the spirit of Humanity cannot fly with only one wing” —these are words of Vivekananda, who meant to affirm the great significance of the Feminine Principle. Man does not willingly give full rights to woman. However, this opposition but intensifies the forces; and woman, fighting for her cosmic rights, will acquire the knowledge of her power. (LHR I, p 325) (10 September 1934)"

"The most ancient Teachings always highly regarded the Feminine Principle, and even female divinities were considered by them to be the most sacred. We can now find traces of these most ancient cults among the American Indians, whose priesthood is headed by women; women also head the clan, and the whole line of inheritance is considered as coming from the woman's side. Likewise, there is no distinction between the two Origins in the Teaching of Buddha, and woman, as well as man, can reach the state of Arhatship. And even now in India, in spite of the fact that the later Brahmins humiliated woman because of greed and self-interest, the cult of the Goddess Kali is nevertheless spread most widely. The last of the known sages of India, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, were worshippers of the Divine Origin in its aspect of the Mother of the World. Indeed, it is the ignorant and avaricious distortion of the cosmic law that has placed woman in a subjugated position. Certainly it would be wrong to blame the Masculine Principle alone for the situation created; woman, too, is at fault. Many women welcomed being constantly in custody as wards, and precisely this weakened their strength and dulled their abilities. Therefore, nowadays a reverse order is necessary. Woman must accept the struggle against life's obstacles in order to temper her strength and manifest her true nature."

"The famous philosophers' stone cannot be discovered or created without the participation of woman... The first task which faces women is to insist in all countries upon full rights and equal education with men; to try with all their might to develop their thinking faculties, and, above all, to learn to stand on their own feet without leaning altogether upon men. In the West there are many fields which are now available to women, and one must admit that they are quite successful in all of them. It is necessary to awaken in woman herself a great respect for her own Origin; she should realize her great destiny as a bearer of the higher energy. Indeed, it is woman's intuition which should again, as in the better periods of history, lead humanity on the path of progress..."

"The combinations of the luminaries are favorable for the awakening of women, and I believe that the new influx of psychic energy will be utilized by women for lofty tasks and in search of new achievements for the good of humanity. Let the fire of achievement in the name of great service be truly kindled in woman. The quality of self-sacrifice is fundamental in woman, but she should learn not to limit her self-sacrifice to the narrow concept of home life, which is often nothing more than encouragement of the family's egotism—she should apply it on a world scale. I believe that woman should be even more educated and cultured than man, for indeed it is she who instills in her family the first concepts of knowledge, culture, and understanding of statesmanship."

"In all domains of science, art, social work, and government, woman has proved to be capable of reaching the greatest heights when circumstances were favorable... And the many other talented women—actresses, painters, poets, among all nationalities! So many wise leaders, warriors, and great saints among women! The image of St. Theresa, the Spaniard, is not less than that of St Francis of Assisi... It would be well to also remember the slandered image of Aspasia. Socrates used to call her his teacher, and the great Plato mentioned her reverently in his writings. Also, through her many useful reforms the reign of the woman-Pharaoh, Hatsepsut, far surpassed that of many Pharaohs. And was she not the one who, by her wise rule, paved the way for the latter victories of Tethmosis III?"

"According to the Sacred Teaching, the fall of humanity began from the time of the abasement of the Feminine Principle. Therefore, with the beginning of the Epoch of the Mother of the World woman should realize that she herself contains all forces, and the moment she shakes of the age-old hypnosis of her seemingly lawful subjugation and mental inferiority and occupies herself with a manifold education, she will create in collaboration with man a new and better world. Indeed, it is essential that woman herself refute the unworthy and profoundly ignorant assertion about her passive receptivity and therefore her inability to create independently. But in the entire Cosmos there is no passive element. In the chain of creation each manifestation in its turn becomes relatively passive or active, giving or receiving."

"Cosmos affirms the greatness of woman's creative principle. Woman is a personification of nature, and it is nature that teaches man, not man nature. Therefore, may all women realize the grandeur of their origin, and may they strive for knowledge. Where there is knowledge, there is power. Ancient legends actually attribute to woman the role of the guardian of sacred-knowledge. Therefore, may she now also remember her defamed ancestress, Eve, and again harken to the voice of her intuition in not only eating of but also planting as many tree, bearing the fruits of the knowledge of good and evil as possible. And as before, when she deprived Adam of his dull, senseless bliss, so let her now lead him on to a still broader vista and into the majestic battle with the chaos of ignorance for her divine rights."

"Women must without delay begin to perfect themselves in all fields, and this is not done at a moment's notice. First of all, we women have so much to outlive. Let us develop primarily a sense of our own dignity and learn to lean courageously on our own strength and knowledge, in order to join in, as well as accept, responsibility for the great structure of General Good."

"Let us also recall the ancient times when, in spite of the fact that masculine egoism always attempted to suppress the achievements of women, there were always some illumined minds that did not submit to this shameful weakness."

"With the demeaning of woman the coarsening and degeneration of humanity was unavoidable. There exists a most ancient saying, "Where women are revered and safeguarded, prosperity reigns and the gods rejoice." The New Epoch... will bring the renaissance of woman. The Epoch of Maitreya is the Epoch of the Mother of the World."

"I hasten to fulfill your request and to give my opinion regarding the Call to the Women of the Whole World. I do not see why you cannot put this thought into practice. Each reminder about woman's dignity and the importance of women in constructing new forms of life is highly useful and timely. The advancement of women in governmental circles and their successful execution of various public duties in many countries have so strongly affirmed the recognition of their equal abilities that only very backward consciousnesses can raise objections in principle to this statement and to the admittance of women to the most responsible positions. Your young country, now living in its springtime and aspiring toward the welfare and renascence of its people, of course can but harken to the steps of evolution; therefore it should rejoice at the possibility of strengthening its spiritual and intellectual power by elevating the level of consciousness and dignity of its women. "It is not possible for the bird of humanity to fly on only one wing.""

"If feminist psychology is correct, the very concept of scientific "objectivity" as a disciplined withdrawal of sympathy by the knower from the known, is a male separation anxiety writ large. Written, in fact, upon the entire universe."

"We're living through the most misogynistic period I've experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world's long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of grabbing them by the pussy, to the incel ("involuntarily celibate") movement that rages against women who won't give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else."

"There is no limit test for identifying a "feminist." Internationally and in the United States, feminism is a multifaceted social movement in the process of change and self creation."

"Rikke Schubart coined the term “High Trash Heroine” to describe low-budget postfeminist action films from the early 2000s, which highlight their heroines’ bodies over everything else (291). One such film she discusses is Charlie's Angels (McG, 2000), featuring superstars Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu, and more importantly, their perfectly made-up and fit bodies. The angels wear skin-tight clothing to perform action, dress up as Swiss mountain girls, racecar drivers, and even strippers to complete their mission, jiggle their butts for the camera, and comment on their bodies’ appearance, effectively fulfilling straight male viewers’ desires. Women’s narratives in the postfeminist era, even in the action genre, focused heavily on the heroine’s bodies and her individual goals. Action heroines born out of the second-wave feminist movement, however, often use their powers/abilities to help others or create meaningful change. For example, Sarah Connor of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991) uses her ultra-fit hardbody to prevent global nuclear annihilation. By contrast, postfeminist action heroine The Bride of Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2 (Tarantino, 2003 & 2004) uses her abilities as the world’s greatest samurai to hunt down and kill five people who have personally wronged her."

"I’m an open and vocal feminist on the internet, so I’m no stranger to some level of sexist backlash."

"Feminism, or full and complete personhood for women, is an idea. And each human being has to do the work to explore it, build a relationship to it, and understand what their own changes must be in order to be part of it."

"And though she be but little, she is fierce."

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."

"I have repeatedly stressed that the rape of the Earth and rape of women are intimately linked - both metaphorically, in shaping world-views, and materially, in shaping women’s everyday lives. The deepening economic vulnerability of women makes them more vulnerable to all forms of violence,including sexual assault, as we found out during a series of public hearings on the impact of economic reforms on women organized by the National Commission on Women and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology."

"When Maria Mies and I wrote Ecofeminism two decades ago, we were addressing the emerging challenges of our times. Every threat we identified has grown deeper. And with it has grown the relevance of an alternative to capitalist patriarchy if humanity and the diverse species with which we share the planet are to survive. Ecofeminism was first published one year after the Earth Summit, where two important treaties were signed by the governments of the world: the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. There was no World Trade Organization. However, two years after Ecofeminism, the WTO was established, privileging corporate rights, commerce and profits, and further undermining the rights of the Earth, the rights of women and the rights of future generations. We wrote about what globalization implied for nature and women. Every crisis we mentioned is deeper; every expression of violence more brutal."

"When we wrote Ecofeminism we raised the issue of reductionist, mechanistic science and the attitude of mastery over and conquest of nature as an expression of capitalist patriarchy. Today the contest between an ecological and feminist world-view and a worldview shaped by capitalist patriarchy is more intense than ever. This contest is particularly intense in the area of food. GMOs embody the vision of capitalist patriarchy."

"The national accounting systems which are used for calculating growth in terms of GDP are based on the assumption that if producers consume what they produce, they do not in fact produce at all, because they fall outside the production boundary. The production boundary is a political creation that, in its workings, excludes regenerative and renewable production cycles from the area of production. Hence all women who produce for their families, children, community and society are treated as ‘non-productive’ and ‘economically inactive’.... The devaluation of women’s work, and of work done in subsistence economies of the South, is the natural outcome of a production boundary constructed by capitalist patriarchy. By restricting itself to the values of the market economy, as defined by capitalist patriarchy, the production boundary ignores economic value in the two vital economies which are necessary to ecological and human survival: nature’s economy and the sustenance economy. In these economies, economic value is a measure of how the Earth’s life and human life are protected. The currency is life-giving processes, not cash or the market price. Second, a model of capitalist patriarchy which excludes women’s work and wealth creation in the mind deepens the violence by displacing women from their livelihoods and alienating them from the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend -their land, their forests, their water, their seeds and biodiversity."

"...No doubt about it, ideas about what women can do, and do well, have changed. And what women mind has changed. Male behaviour, from the caddish to the outright violent, that until recently was accepted without demurral is seen today as outrageous by many women who not so long ago were putting up with it themselves and who would still protest indignantly if someone described them as feminists."

"Ought not every woman, like every man, to follow the bent of her own talents?"

"[W]hile the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the negro there is no such privilege."

"The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her... He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective to the franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she has no voice... Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise , thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, her has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead."

"Resolved, That is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise."

"The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man."

"Women's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man. Come what will, my whole soul rejoices in the truth that I have uttered."

"Our "pathway" is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning...We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens."

"Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other... If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes."

"We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory. That function gives women such wisdom and power as no male can possess."

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal."

"To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment."

"The darkest page in history is the persecutions of woman."

"Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible. I would fain teach women that self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice."

"The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible."

"Accepting the view that man was prior in the creation, some Scriptural writers say that as the woman was of the man, therefore, her position should be one of subjection. Grant it, then as the historical fact is reversed in our day, and the man is now of the woman, shall his place be one of subjection?"

"In the criminal code we find no feminine pronouns, as "He," "His," "Him," we are arrested, tried and hung, but singularly enough, we are denied the highest privileges of citizens, because the pronouns "She," "Hers" and "Her," are not found in the constitutions. It is a pertinent question, if women can pay the penalties of their crimes as "He," why may they not enjoy the privileges of citizens as "He"?"

"My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism. Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures."

"Once men realize that they are also deprived — not as much as women, just as whites are not as deprived as blacks — but there is a full circle of human qualities we all have a right to. And they're confined to the "masculine" ones, which are seventy percent of all of them, and we're confined to the "feminine" ones, which are thirty percent. We're missing more, but they're still missing a lot. If a man fights to be his whole self, to be creative, to express emotions men are not supposed to express, do jobs men are not supposed to do, take care of his own children — all of these things are part of the feminist movement."

"Well, children, when there is so much racket there be must something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the Negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?"

"If the balance between male and female energies had not been destroyed on our planet, the ego's growth would have been greatly curtailed. We would not have declared war on nature, and we would not be so completely alienated from our Being... The suppression of the feminine principle especially over the past two thousand years has enabled the ego to gain absolute supremacy in the collective human psyche. Although women have egos, of course, the ego can take root and grow more easily in the male form than in the female. This is because women are less mind identified than men. They are more in touch with the inner body and the intelligence of the organism where the intuitive faculties originate. The female form is less rigidly encapsulated than the male, has greater openness and sensitivity toward other lifeforms, and is more attuned to the natural world."

"Nobody knows the exact figure because records were not kept, but it seems certain that during a three hundred year period between three and five million women were tortured and killed by the Holy Inquisition an institution founded by the Roman Catholic Church to suppress heresy. This sure ranks together with the Holocaust as one of the darkest chapters in human history. It was enough for a woman to show a love for animals, walk alone in the fields or woods, or gather medicinal plants to be branded a witch, then tortured and burned at the stake. The sacred feminine was declared demonic, and an entire dimension largely disappeared from human experience. Other cultures and religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism, also suppressed the female dimension, although in a less violent way. Women's status was reduced to being child bearers and men's property. Males who denied the feminine even within themselves were now running the world, a world that was totally out of balance. The rest is history or rather a case history of insanity."

"Who was responsible for this fear of the feminine that could only be described as acute collective paranoia? We could say: Of course, men were responsible. But then why in many ancient pre-Christian civilizations such as the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Celtic were women respected and the feminine principle not feared but revered? What is it that suddenly made men feel threatened by the female? The evolving ego in them. It knew it could gain full control of our planet only through the male form, and to do so, it had to render the female powerless... We now have a situation in which the suppression of the feminine has become internalized, even in most women. The sacred feminine, because it is suppressed, is felt by many women as emotional pain. In fact, it has become part of their painbody, together with the accumulated pain suffered by women over millennia through childbirth, rape, slavery, torture and violent death.... But things are changing rapidly now. With many people becoming more conscious, the ego is losing its hold on the human mind. Because the ego was never as deeply rooted in woman, it is losing its hold on women more quickly than on men."

"Feminism is a rebellion against the ruthless tyranny of the male, an attempt to dethrone his autocratic rule and revert to a more natural sexual equality."

"The more I have spoken about feminism the more I have realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating. If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop. For the record, feminism by definition is: “The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.” I started questioning gender-based assumptions when at eight I was confused at being called “bossy,” because I wanted to direct the plays we would put on for our parents—but the boys were not. I decided I was a feminist and this seemed uncomplicated to me. But my recent research has shown me that feminism has become an unpopular word. Apparently I am among the ranks of women whose expressions are seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating, anti-men and, unattractive. Why is the word such an uncomfortable one?"

"I am from Britain and think it is right that as a woman I am paid the same as my male counterparts. I think it is right that I should be able to make decisions about my own body. I think it is right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and decision-making of my country. I think it is right that socially I am afforded the same respect as men. But sadly I can say that there is no one country in the world where all women can expect to receive these rights. No country in the world can yet say they have achieved gender equality. These rights I consider to be human rights but I am one of the lucky ones. My life is a sheer privilege because my parents didn’t love me less because I was born a daughter. My school did not limit me because I was a girl. My mentors didn’t assume I would go less far because I might give birth to a child one day."

"Most of the terrible women one must meet, women with the blatant views and voices, women who have to be noticed, who shoulder one about, who can’t take life quietly, belong to this large percentage of women who have never made a sex adjustment."

"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."

"Interviewer: So, why do you write these strong female characters?"

"This particular strand of feminism is characterized by two tenets: 1. men are jerks, and 2. women should strive by all means to become like them."

""Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." , god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still."

"Women in Egypt and Tunisia and other nations have just as much right as the men to remake their governments, to make them responsive, accountable, transparent. We will certainly be watching and the world will watch."

"On March 6, 1979, Khomeini declared that women working in government offices must wear the veil; “naked women” could not work in Islamic ministries. Two days later, for International Women’s Day, tens of thousands of women spontaneously came out and marched on the streets of Tehran chanting “In the dawn of freedom, there is an absence of freedom.” Some women were bareheaded, others veiled, including some in full chador, the all-enveloping black cloak that was worn only by the most pious and conservative. There were men, too, including some who formed a protective cordon around the women as they came under attack. Feminists from around the world flocked to the protests, including the American activist Kate Millett, the author of Sexual Politics. Soon as many as a hundred thousand women were on the streets. For six days, they protested the assault on their personal freedom. Rarely—if ever—had women organized so quickly and spontaneously after a revolution. But Iranian women in Iran had gained many rights under the shah, including the right to vote, to run for office (in 1963), and to wear whatever they wanted. In an effort at modernization, the shah’s father (the first Pahlavi to rule) had briefly tried to ban the veil altogether in 1935, but that forced conservative families to keep their daughters at home for modesty. The move was quickly reversed. What Iranian women wanted was the choice: to veil or not to veil."

"Equal rights are advanced when girls can avoid child marriage and enjoy equal access to education, both men and women can plan their families, and pregnant women no longer fear losing their jobs."

"Rights groups worldwide celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD)...as they commemorate women’s achievements and call for equality. But for an event championed by international nongovernmental organizations and major global corporations, it may surprise some that IWD was born out of the U.S. socialist movement in the early 20th century. In 1909 the Socialist Party of America organized a New York City march commemorating a garment workers’ strike the previous year. The party called it National Women’s Day, and women organized by the group demonstrated for better pay and working conditions as well as the right to vote... The Socialist Party continued to hold Women’s Day celebrations on the last Sunday of February for the next few years, and newspapers from the era mentioned International Women’s Day on Feb. 27, 1910 — when thousands of women organized by the socialist movement gathered at Carnegie Hall... European women, meanwhile, were championing similar ideals... IWD, consequently, was celebrated for the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on March 19, 1911. Women in these countries demanded the right to vote, to hold public office and the right to work..."

"Russian women began celebrating IWD in 1913... After the Russian Revolution, the day was declared a holiday in the Soviet Union. From there, it was primarily celebrated in communist countries such as China. On the heels of the U.S. civil rights movement.. and as leaders such as Gloria Steinem fought sex discrimination in the 1960s and ’70s, the United Nations declared 1975 as International Women’s Year. In 1977 the U.N. officially marked IWD by inviting member countries to celebrate women’s rights and world peace on March 8. Today, IWD has corporate sponsors... But as the website points out, millennial women have lived in a time in which there are so many advances for women that they may think the battles fought by their second-wave feminist sisters have already been won. “The unfortunate fact,” it reads, “is that women are still not paid equally to that of their male counterparts, women still are not present in equal numbers in business or politics, and globally women's education, health and the violence against them is worse than that of men.”"

"Women of the world want and deserve an equal future free from stigma, stereotypes and violence; a future that’s sustainable, peaceful, with equal rights and opportunities for all. To get us there, the world needs women at every table where decisions are being made. This year, the theme for International Women’s Day (8 March), “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world,” celebrates the tremendous efforts by women and girls around the world in shaping a more equal future and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and highlights the gaps that remain. Women’s full and effective participation and leadership in of all areas of life drives progress for everyone. Yet, women are still underrepresented in public life and decision-making, as revealed in the UN Secretary-General’s recent report. Women are Heads of State or Government in 22 countries, and only 24.9 per cent of national parliamentarians are women. At the current rate of progress, gender equality among Heads of Government will take another 130 years."

"No organisation should be allowed to question or ridicule Islamic values, norms of society, hijab or the modesty of Muslim women at the Aurat March or any other event held in connection with International Women’s Day as these acts hurt the sentiments of Muslims in the country.…"

"So that our daughters will know their bodies are their own. So our sons embody gentle strength. So they can dismiss both labels #WhyIMarch"

"Patriarchy requires that powerful women be discredited so that its own system will seem to be the only one that reasonable or intelligent people can subscribe to."

"Woman, compared to other creatures, is the , for she bears dominion over them. But compared unto man, she may not be called the image of God, for she bears not rule and lordship over man, but ought to obey him. The woman shall be subject to man as unto Christ. For woman, has not her example from the body and from the flesh, that so she shall be subject to man, as the flesh is unto the Spirit, because that the flesh in the weakness and mortality of this life lusts and strives against the Spirit, and therefore would not the Holy Ghost give example of subjection to the woman of any such thing."

"We have to work to find solidarity in each other’s stories, as differing as their inciting perspectives may be. The patriarchy sands out the edges of our rightful infuriation, making it harder to see in any light but our own. This blindness is part of what denies us community-forming solidarity and part of what has allowed widespread and harassment to continue for so long."

"Understanding the total impact of the patriarchy on the female experience is endlessly elusive. ... It is a constant process, perpetually blurred by the ebb and flow of so many epiphanies clouded by self-doubt."

"Patriarchy is based on three key ideas: that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are a natural, immutable and exhaustive binary; that all males should be masculine, and all females should be feminine; that masculinity is incompatible with and superior to femininity."

"Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon."

"Those of us in Jane, in the Women's Movement then and now, had not done, have yet to do, our homework, either that or we are far too trusting, or maybe we believe that the system is only in need of revision and that it will somehow at some time begin to include us (structurally), work for us. What we must understand is that the system of patriarchal imperialism is inimical to women: it always has been and it always will be. We live by the tolerance or privilege or oversight of the patriarchs. We didn't win at Suffrage. We didn't win at Roe v. Wade. There is no winning. A hundred years of hindsight has us asking how could the Suffragists have thought that getting the vote in a rigged, white, male, heterosexual system was a win. We understand that they should have not organized to become a part of such a system, but, instead, worked to take apart that system. Why do we not ask the same of ourselves? Decisions/laws hold only as long as they work for or do not work against the decision/law makers. The acts of "asking permission," of marching, of lobbying, and demonstrating acknowledge the very power imbalance women must change. We should all know by now that the rights of women are legally unacknowledged and structurally, fundamentally incompatible with patriarchy. We are treason and heresy: I think we should, embrace that, consider it kernel, foundation, nucleus, and core to being women."

"It is no wonder that abortion law does not reflect women's needs, rights, and thought: which laws do? We must notice that other patriarchal imperialist traditions such as rape, pornography, and the male beating up on women are patriarchal perks--rites as well as rights of patriarchy; these are the same rights/rites conquering forces often exert, then traditionalize, systematize. These "traditions," these "values" are so deeply incorporated into gender relations that, for instance, normative heterosexual behavior is virtually indistinguishable from some outcroppings of violence against women, like rape and pornography."

"The traditional European of the prereformation period lived and believed in the patriarchal principle which was one of authority based on love. Medieval man had not only a physical father, but also a Father in Heaven, a Holy Father in Rome, the Monarch (the Pater Patriae), the godfathers, and a "Father" in the person of his confessor. It was his physical father who had brought him into being, cooperating with the Divine Power of Creation. The physical father was truly regarded to be the auctor (in a similar, not identical sense, as God is creator mundi) and human beings looked upon themselves to be existing ex voluntate viri. Woman was merely in the position (physically as well as psychologically) to accede to man's will, to reject it or to influence man's free will through her power of attraction."

"If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O'Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God."

"If we take a survey of ages and of countries, we shall find the women, almost - without exception - at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed. Man, who has never neglected an opportunity of exerting his power, in paying homage to their beauty, has always availed himself of their weakness He has been at once their tyrant and their slave."

"When we wrote Ecofeminism we raised the issue of reductionist, mechanistic science and the attitude of mastery over and conquest of nature as an expression of capitalist patriarchy. Today the contest between an ecological and feminist world-view and a worldview shaped by capitalist patriarchy is more intense than ever. This contest is particularly intense in the area of food. GMOs embody the vision of capitalist patriarchy. They perpetuate the idea of ‘master molecules’and mechanistic reductionism long after the life sciences have gone beyond reductionism, and patents on life reflect the capitalist patriarchal illusion of creation. There is no science in viewing DNA as a ‘master molecule’ and genetic engineering as a game of Lego, in which genes are moved around without any impact on the organism or the environment. This is a new pseudo-science that has taken on the status of a religion.Science cannot justify patents on life and seed. Shuffling genes is not making life; living organisms make themselves. Patents on seed mean denying the contributions of millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of farmers’ breeding. One could say that a new religion, a new cosmology, a new creation myth is being put in place, where biotechnology corporations like Monsanto replace Creation as ‘creators’. GMO means ‘God move over’.Stewart Brand has actually said ‘We are as gods and we had better get used to it.’"

"Despite the admirable intentions of those who believe that patriarchy is solely a cultural invention, there is too much contrary evidence. Patriarchy is worldwide and history-wide, and its origins are detectable in the social lives of chimpanzees. It serves the reproductive purposes of the men who maintain the system. Patriarchy comes from biology in the sense that it emerges from men's temperaments, out of their evolutionary derived efforts to control women and at the same time have solidarity with fellow men in competition against outsiders. But evolutionary forces have surely shaped women, too, in minds as in bodies, in ways that both defy and contribute to the patriarchal system. If all women followed Lysistrata's injunctions and refused their husbands, they could indeed effect change. But they don't. Patriarchy has its ultimate origins in male violence, but it doesn't come from man alone, and it has its sources in the evolutionary interests of both sexes."

"The finest achievement of the new woman has been personal liberty. This is the foundation of civilization; and as long as any one class is watched suspiciously, even fondly guarded, and protected, so long will that class not only be weak, and treacherous, individually, but parasitic, and a collective danger to the community. Who has not heard wives commended for wheedling their husbands out of money, or joked [about] because they are hopelessly extravagant? As long as caprice and scheming are considered virtues, as long as man is the only wage-earner, doling out sums of money, or scattering lavishly, so long will women be degraded, even if they are perfectly contented, and men are willing to labor to keep them in idleness!"

"The new woman, in the sense of the best woman, the flower of all the womanhood of past ages, has come to stay — if civilization is to endure. The sufferings of the past have but strengthened her, maternity has deepened her, education is broadening her — and she now knows that she must perfect herself if she would perfect the race, and leave her imprint upon immortality, through her offspring or her works."

"I am still far from being the type of the positively new women who take their experience as with a relative lightness and, one could say, with an enviable superficiality, whose feelings and mental energies are directed upon all other things in life but sentimental love feelings."

"Much feminist theory emerges from privileged women who live at the center, whose perspectives on reality rarely include knowledge and awareness of the lives of women and men who live in the margin. As a consequence, feminist theory lacks wholeness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences. Although feminist theorists are aware of the need to develop ideas and analysis that encompass a larger number of experiences, that serve to unify rather than to polarize, such theory is complex and slow in formation. At its most visionary, it will emerge from individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center."

"Feminist thought and practice were fundamentally altered when radical and white women allies began to rigorously challenge the notion of "gender" was the primary factor determining a woman's fate. ... Looking at the interlocking nature of gender, race, and class was the perspective that changed the direction of feminist thought."

"The ideology of "competitive, atomistic " has permeated feminist thought to such an extent that it undermines the potential radicalism of feminist struggle. The usurpation of feminism by bourgeois women to support their has been to a very grave extent justified by feminist theory as it has so far been conceived. (For example, the ideology of "common oppression.") Any movement to resist the of feminist struggle must begin by introducing a different feminist perspective-a new theory-one that is not informed by the ideology of liberal individualism. The exclusionary practices of women who dominate feminist discourse have made it practically impossible for new and varied theories to emerge."

"We resist hegemonic dominance of feminist thought by insisting that it is a theory in the making, that we must necessarily criticize, question, re-examine, and explore new possibilities."

"Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most by sexist ; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage."

"For many feminists, however, Playboy’s philanthropy could only go so far. Controversy erupted in 1971 when the foundation offered legal support to the National Organization for Women. Instead NOW asked for one night’s profit from all Playboy Clubs. The organization publicized their request I order to put pressure on “Playboy”, but Hefner refused to go along, calling it “crude extortion.” NOW went on to declare that “no amount of money ‘would compensate for the low rating of the source. . . [T]o accept money from the [Playboy Foundation] would only contaminate us.” The conflict caused Barbara A. Townley of New Orleans to write, “I’m wholeheartedly in factor of women’s rights, but I don’t think Hugh Hefner even remotely resembled the Antichrist. . . . thanks for you offer to help. Perhaps when the women’s movement. . . starts going after the real dragons, we can get together. If some feminists in the seventies reacted foundation money, others accepted it as reparations, or as a necessary evil in difficult economic times, or they simply accepted it. Noting that funding for women’s projects was sparse in the early seventies, Marjorie Fine Knowles, writing for the Women’s Studies Newsletter, promoted the Playboy Foundation among organizations that were willing to assist or work toward feminist goals. Likewise, when the foundation paid the printing costs of the Dayton Women’s Center’s service directory, scholar Judith Ezekiel notes that there was “surprisingly little debate.” An ACLU board member said o foundation money, “How much s hand wash and how much is real, I don’t know. . . . but I’ll put up with it.” At the height of the women’s movement, Playboy’s money inspired debate. There was no consensus among feminists."

"By the last third of the twentieth century, a number of factors fueled movement building by feminists of color who focused on matters they would soon associate with reproductive justice. These included the influence of international and U.S. antiracist and feminist-led human rights movements. Movement activists organize against laws and policies that amounted to official reproductive abuse of peple of color and their communities. Abuses included coerced sterilization; welfare and fostering policies that punished poor women for “illegitimate” motherhood, and the Hyde Amendment, which denied federal aid to poor women seeking abortions. In other words, reproductive justice was born from the claims of women of color that they had the right to be sexual persons and to be fertile. They claimed the right to decide to become parents and the right to the resources they needed to take care of their children. They also claimed the right to mangage their fertility by having access to contraception and abortion services. And they made the case that the reproduction-related abuses of the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s and beyond constituted the direct legacies of a long history of reproductive abuse, reaching back into the slavery regime and earlier. They also drew on their own histories to define the fundamental human rights of all fertile and reproducing persons."

"Abortion-rights groups often adopted population-control arguments as a more pragmatic alternative to those involving women's rights. For movement pragmatists, women's-rights claims likely seemed risky. In the early 1970s, the women's movement remained poorly understood and, in some cases, unpopular, A 1970 Harris poll, for example, found that sympathy for the women's movement did not top fifty percent in any of the age groups surveyed.""

"[A]s feminists gained positions of leadership in the abortion-rights movement, women activists began reinterpreting abortion rights, arguing that they reflected the constitutional significance of women's interests in autonomy and equality. As had been the case for Betty Friedan and Carol Greitzer before Roe, many feminists viewed abortion as being a women's-rights issue. With the controversy surrounding population control and the necessity of defending Roe, feminists saw a valuable opportunity to reframe abortion as an issue of rights for women."

"Abortion-rights groups often adopted population-control arguments as an alternative to those involving liberty and equality for women. Some supporters of abortion rights had no independent interest in the women’s movement or its demands. Many other activists, however, sympathizes with or even focused on the struggle for women’s liberation. For movement pragmatists, however, women’s rights claims seemed risky. In the early 1970s the women’s movement remained poorly understood and, in some cases, unpopular. For example, the 1971 Virginia Slims American Women’s Opinion Poll found that only 42 percent of respondents favored a movement to “strengthen or change women’s status in society.” Moreover, the women’s movement pushed not only for abortion but also for equal employment, changes in the portrayal of women in the media, and publicly funded child care. Invoking women’s liberation appeared likely to create the kind of controversy the movement could ill afford."

"I think 99% of women’s lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the follows the technology, it doesn’t precede it. The complaints may precede it, but the change follows. So I think that women who are are not as in touch with reality as they ought to be, because technology makes our lives possible. I certainly wouldn’t want to live in any earlier time, speaking as a woman. I would be dead several times over by now."

"(Women's Liberation) ... is an ontological, spiritual revolution, pointing beyond the idolatries of sexist society and sparking creative action in and toward transcendence. The becoming of women implies universal human becoming. It has everything to do with the search for ultimate meaning and reality which some would call God. p. 6"

"It requires a kick in the imagination, a wrenching of tired words, to realize that feminism is the final and therefore the first cause, and that this movement is movement. Realization of this is already the beginning of a qualitative leap in be-ing. For the philosophers of senescence 'the final cause' is in technical reason; it is the Father's plan, an endless flow of Xerox copies of the past. But the final cause that is movement is in our imaginative-cerebral-emotional-active-creative be-ing. p. 190"

"If we have no intuition of ourselves as independent, unmediated beings in the world, then we cannot conceive ourselves surviving our liberation; for what our liberation will do is dissolve the structures and dismantle the mechanisms by which Woman is mediated by Man. If we cannot imagine ourselves surviving this, we certainly will not make it happen."

"1980. I recognized in Reagan's election that the liberalism I had for years seen as the real danger was being superseded, that the right was gaining power, with all its Jew-hating, racist, sexist, homophobic capitalist thrust. At the same time the anti-Semitism I was encountering in the women's movement and on the left hurt me more, not because it was more threatening but because the feminist left was where I needed to be: this added to my sense of isolation as a Jew."

"The way Jews have been met with "not you too," the way anti-Semitism becomes the one issue too many, suggest that many white women are angry and resistant to dealing with racism but are too frightened to express that anger openly; suggest further how little our movement has taught us to see struggles against racism as life-giving, nourishing; as our own."

"By speaking about anti-Semitism, Jewish women unsettle an unspoken equation in the radical women's movement: in a society like ours, deeply racist and absurdly pretending to classlessness, class comes to be seen as identical to race. People of color are considered the same as working and poor people."

"Only the fresh revolutionary storms were strong enough to sweep away hoary prejudices against woman and only the productive-working people is able to effect the complete equalization and liberation of woman by building a new society."

"The emancipation of women is not an act of charity, the result of a humanitarian or compassionate attitude. The liberation of women is a fundamental necessity for the Revolution, the guarantee of its continuity and the preconditions for its victory."

"The revolutionary Chicana does not identify with the so-called women's liberation movement in the United States because up to now that movement has been dominated by white women of middle class background...Up to now, the U.S. women's liberation movement has been mainly concerned with sexism and ignored or denied the importance of racism. For the Chicana, the three types of oppression cannot be separated. They are all a part of the same system, they are three faces of the same enemy."

"I think the women’s movement is wonderful, a great thing. I hate to see some of the mean struggles within it, but I don’t see how it could exist without it. Everybody should try to be as honorable and truthful and fierce as they can be."

"That word identity has been hard for many women who live secular lives and maybe harder for religious women and also feminists. But the women's movement has made a big difference. I don't know who it hasn't helped in this world. It's given a lot of Jewish women courage to stay Jewish and fight."

"There’s hardly a woman writer who doesn’t receive some kind of support from the women’s movement. We’re very lucky to be living and writing now."

"(How do you relate to the women's movement?) LMS: I feel I've benefited by it just generally in the sense that anything that undermines the stereotypes perpetrated on all of us by white men is helpful. What it does is take some of the pressure off those of us who have never lived very close to the stereotypes. I've always been the way I was. Here at Laguna, a lot more is expected of women; women are expected to be strong, to manage the property. Children belong to women and to their families. Women do the plastering. It's a relief to have the stereotypes knocked down. It's just made it easier for me to do what I want to do."

"Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men."

"Men may rule the world, but women rule the men who rule the world."

"Feminism, coveting social power, is blind to women’s cosmic sexual power."

"I'm absolutely a feminist. The reason other feminists don't like me is that I criticize the movement, explaining that it needs a correction. Feminism has betrayed women, alienated men and women, replaced dialogue with political correctness."

"But the chant ‘Mera Jism Meri Marzi‘ is important because of the vast injustices women in Pakistan and all around the world have to face at the hands of the patriarchy against their very own bodies. The message behind the slogan is important. Like a man, it is a woman’s right to choose whatever happens with her body. Whether she chooses to follow a certain religion or whether she chooses to walk around proudly without any clothes, it is her right to do as she wants and nobody else has a right to prevent her from exercising her choice."

"Men, women and even kids need to learn this important lesson about boundaries and consent. Just like we teach kids not to let strangers touch them or let even those they know well touch them inappropriately, women have a right to claim their own bodies and not be forced to do things that someone else wants them to."

"..When we say that people should have full bodily autonomy, that having bodily autonomy is a human right, we mean that people should have full control over their body and be able to freely make choices concerning their body (unless it means that your choice will cause public health concerns and outbreaks, making other people ill, such as within the case of refusing vaccinations)...Bodily autonomy is a human right, a concept that is applied not only to abortion, but also for ending human rights violations such as slavery, female genital mutilation, forced sterilization, sex trafficking, sexual assault, rape, to name some examples.....Your fight for bodily autonomy must be all-inclusive. If your fight for human rights are not universal, it is self serving and it allows unjust harm onto vulnerable and marginalized peoples. One should have full control over their body. Our body. Our choice..."

"...Trans persons should have the right to access legal and safe healthcare which includes medical procedures, surgeries, and hormones without discrimination. Folks who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and two-spirit should not be forced into conversion therapy and should have the right to engage in sexual relationships without violations towards their bodily autonomy...."

"'..My fans love the fact that everything I’m doing is my choice. It’s my body. I want what I do to be memorable and so do my fans – I’m just living, just being.’"

"“My Body My Choice” His Body My choice. His life My choice. His money My choice. His freedom My choice. His mannerisms My choice. His family My Choice. His decisions My Choice – Stop these double standards and then say this is a patriarchal society."

"Mera jism, meri marzi literally means that womxn want bodily autonomy and have the right to make decisions concerning their bodies"

"Justice is a day where I can confidently say, “My sexuality, my decision. My body, my choice.”"

"I have been trolled a lot of times for my size, make-up, clothes, hair, for my low cleavage. ..... Sometimes I gain or lose weight, so they have a problem with that too. There are times when they don't like my clothes or dance, so they comment on that too. I want to tell these faceless people it is my body, my choice I will do what I feel is right. I have earned it,"

"“....My body, my choice, my life, my … Free yourself from people’s judgement, feel liberated, live with a kind heart & love yourself, or change till you do… For when you truly love yourself, you can truly love someone other than you...""

"I have poetry on my body and the idea is my body is mine to use and abuse,.....It's mine. It's not God's or anybody else's. It's mine. I'm a writer and I see myself as a canvas, as a space where I can write as well,"

"My body, my choice! has long been the rallying cry of the abortion movement. In recent years, advocates made a more concerted effort to substantiate the sound bite by pushing a philosophical argument for abortion they called the “bodily autonomy” (or bodily “integrity”) argument. ... The argument goes like this: The highest moral good is to have autonomy over one’s own body. This autonomy includes the right to kill the body of a preborn child attached to and reliant on my body. Therefore, abortion is moral."

"It's My life, my choice and my responsibility"

"Still my body is not determined by my limitations. Rather I create my body through my choices and my actions, in this I have created myself.My entire lived experience determines my body. My choice...,my habits...result in what I may call at any moment - for that time - by body. My body is mutable chargeable living substance. It is continuous with my mind, which is no less subject to temporal change, mutability, growth, and decay, and no less a product of my exercise of choice and free will."

"The right to control and make decisions about our own bodies is fundamental to women's freedom. Seems simple right? Logically 'My body my choice' should be met with "Her body her choice." But far too often it's not. Instead "My body my choice" is often is met with a resounding wall of "not really your body, not really your choice." And yes this makes steam comes out of my ears. My ears are in my body, by the way. There is good reason for this steam; A woman's right to access to birth control, abortion, and reproductive health care has all been increasingly under attack in the past several years."

"...The lack of autonomy is a cruelty thrust on them by a society that has decided their value is in their biology, not their minds...To have a soul is to be human, to have bodily autonomy is to exist freely."

"One Instagram user "..“My body is not mine, but rather Allah’s..”."

"Another Instagram user "...“Don’t we need to ensure that we live in a world where your/God’s body is respected?..""

"The public debate that 'Aurat March' has triggered is groundbreaking, Men, for centuries, believed they owned women's bodies, so a placard asserting a woman's right to her own body is not going down well with them."

"..Had you replied, "I had or have no regrets for being a porn star. I entertained you just like any other star on the big or small screen....I'm proud that I didn't have to use anyone else's body to hike the TRP or to hit the box office."..." I wonder how the next 18 minutes of the air time would've been covered! , I was not at all surprised by his "around the bush? approach. I would've admired him had he interrogated you straight by giving the anti-porn feminist rap about "commoditization or objectification of female body; how it's a systemized degradation, and how it leads to proliferation of sexual violence etc.? Since he isn't smart enough to drop names beyond Aamir Khan, you could've quoted scholars like Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon whose crusade has been to regulate if not eradicate pornography. There upon throwing 's name who asserts that pornography benefits women both personally and politically, you could've asked, "If we as feminists believe in "my body, my choice?, why cannot pornography within the regulatory limits be my Sunny, this is a classic duel between individual freedom and social control. The present day hash-tags about intolerance erupt from this very conflict. Where do you draw the line between "allowed? and "offensive?? Who draws that line? Who gives them that right to override your personal liberty?"

"....The only concern you will be sharing with them is when the participation in such activities is coerced and non-consensual. When participants are under duress or are incapable of giving their consent (as in case of mentally or physically challenged or intoxicated persons), forcing them is wrong in every sense. Our dispute arises against their omnipotent audacity to claim that the consenting women are so damaged and exploited by the patriarchy that their consent is neither voluntary nor free. If my consent for my adult acts is alleged to be notional, why won't you call a wife's freedom offered by the institution of marriage an illusion? Is a married woman devoid of the patriarchal cultural dictate? Isn't she expected to present her sexy avatar to her divine husband and to surrender? Is it not objectification? When you are reacting to my actions on the screen, don't you think that I AM the owner of my own body? Can you think so about your wife when you are imposing yourself on her? Irony is that a wife's conduct has to conform to the approved text of patriarchy. Sunny, you are free of all this hypocrisy. Don't believe in the accusation of married women that you corrupt their husbands as was alleged by the interviewer. He conveniently hide the statistics showing the percentage of female surfers of the porn sites."

"I had an abortion. I just simply wasn’t in a place, financially or emotionally to take that on. I was and still am glad I had that choice because that’s exactly what it was, it was my choice, my body."

""...Who do you know that has ever said, “I’m going to get really drunk and then drive around on public roads?”; Who do you know that has ever said, “I’m going to go out in public, but I refuse to wear a face mask?”"

"My daughter occasionally goes on a hugging and kissing strike....No, she doesn't have to....She doesn't have to hug or kiss anyone just because I say so, not even me. I will not override my own child's currently strong instincts to back off from touching someone who she chooses not to touch...I figure her body is actually hers, not mine....It doesn't belong to her parents, uncles and aunts, school teachers or soccer coach. While she must treat people with respect, she doesn't have to offer physical affection to please them. And the earlier she learns ownership of herself and responsibility for her body, the better for her."

"...Men, it’s time to stop body-shaming women. It’s time to tune into your what’s driving your comments and how they impact women’s opinions of themselves and one another. It’s time to support your wives, friends and daughters to see themselves beyond their body....My body is mine. Hers is hers. Yours is yours...My size, and the size of any woman’s body, is none of your business..."

"[Talking to friend Veronica, Anita Blake worries she may be pregnant.] Ronnie: I could ask, who's the father, but that's just creepy. If you are, then it's this little tiny, microscopic lump of cells. It's not a baby. It's not a person, not yet. Anita: We'll have to disagree on that one. Ronnie: You're pro-choice. Anita: Yep, I am, but I also believe that abortion is taking a life. I agree women have the right to choose, but I also think that it's still taking a life. Ronnie: That's like saying you're pro-choice and pro-life. You can't be both. Anita: I'm pro-choice because I've never been a fourteen-year-old incest victim pregnant by her father, or a woman who's going to die if the pregnancy continues, or a rape victim, or even a teenager who made a mistake. I want women to have choices, but I also believe that it's a life, especially once it's big enough to live outside the womb."

"Samuel smiled at me. "Freedom and fairness are very important to you, aren't they?" I nodded, and frowned. "They're important to everybody." He laughed. "Oh, no, Anita, you would be amazed at the number of people who try to give away their freedom at every opportunity. They much prefer that someone else make their decisions.""

"Translation:"

"There’s nothing to be ashamed on your body.I don’t understand why always more & more women get bullied just because of their body. :w:Rabi Pirzada done nothing wrong. Its her life. It’s her choice. Shame on those whose cursing her. #IAmRabiPirzada #Nobodyshame #WestandwithRabi,"

"You have to be a special kind of pervert or worse, deeply privilleged and entitled to assume that #MeraJismMeriMarzi is about asking for sex. Also, women are not responsible for how you interpret placards. The burden is yours to educate yourself."

"It's stupid to have this conversation. Everyone has the right to their lives and to look the way they want to! Tomorrow I can put on 25 kilos... it's my choice, my body! She's at home taking care of her baby."

""Beta (daughter in law), now if I tell you that you should also know how to cook a little, you will start with this new ‘My Choice’ thing. I went to the club yesterday and all my friends were saying that their daughters-in-law have recorded this video and play it at full volume. They were showing it to me; Hai Bhagwan, all these big words, ‘I am a snowflake, you are dandruff, I make brain freeze, you make head itch’. Beta I want to ask you, is this all you girls think about? Sex before, sex after, when do you find time to work or look after your children?”"

"“Mummy, at the very least it makes people think about women and their choices. What choices did you have when you were younger? You had to stay at home, then get married, have kids and by the time you were forty, life was at a standstill; at least women can try different things now.”"

"Why is #MeraJismMeriMarzi considered so offensive? Because the control of women’s bodies is the bedrock of our patriarchal system. If a woman refuses this & asserts that her body is her own, it shakes the foundations of patriarchy. Sugarcoat it how you like; this is the truth!"

"#MeraJismMeriMarzi means opposing:"

"Will say it louder now. Will carry more placards that say the same. Mera jism, meri marzi. Mera jism meri marzi. Don't touch me, don't make decisions for my body, don't police it, don't stare it, don't rape or abuse it. Mera jism, meri marzi."

"'Uh oh. Some of us mums are being chastised for pumping. No one bats an eyelid prepping their own breakfast, why choose to get flustered over my baby having his? Boobs were designed to feed....'How funny that some fat, cells and glands could so deeply offend so many. Being a mum is hard enough. ..... Seemingly, everyone knows how to raise YOUR baby except you.....'If you feed with formula, you're supposedly the devil, if you breastfeed, you're offending those that don't or can't and worse yet, the patriarchy won't be able to control themselves...stop titillating the men folk!'....'My body, my baby, my choice. ...my miracle baby. It's a part of our bond. I love, LOVE doing it for him....The photos of other women breastfeeding, pumping, normalise things for me and if mine, in turn, do the same for other mothers who feel embarrassed, judged or that they should need to stifle their baby under a Muslin lest they offend some wallflower with their life giving, breastfeeding skills, I'll continue posting....these mums deserve support and respect, not critique...'"

"“...When I say Mera Jism Meri Marzi, I don’t mean I want strip my clothes off and run around naked!...I mean to say that I am a human and this is my body, so it is up to me whether I allow you to stare at it or touch it, or not. It means that I can report you if you don’t comply. It means that I can take an action against you if you harass me because you have no right over MY body...”"

"It means that it is my body and no one can violate it, abuse it, harass it, grope it, or do anything with it without my consent."

"...the 14th amendment of the U. S. Constitution grants all citizens bodily autonomy, which is the right to be the master of your own body..."

""The girls own their bodies. I totally agree that my daughter and granddaughter own their bodies,....When you own something, like property don’t you get a consultant to help you?”"

"Finally, what I have said about the dog s obedience applies"

""...The body being the instrument of the free-will of the"

"“...When you’re exposed to someone who is unvaccinated, that takes away your personal freedom....You’re infringing on other people’s choice...”"

"...I definitely believe that everyone has the right to be able to make the choices that they want to make for their own lives..."

"Don't understand the problem so many are having with #MeraJismMeriMarzi"-Mera jism meri marzi nahi toh kis ki marzi ho gi?? "My body is mine" is a critical component of the Life Skills Based Education classes we teach to help children protect themselves from abuse & harassment"

"Will scream #MeraJismMeriMarzi till I can’t scream anymore because millions of women in this country are subjected to pregnancies they had NO input in. None. Our bodies are not incubators"

"Your Body Is a Bioweapon...People using "my body, my choice" to protest coronavirus safety guidelines are putting everyone in danger..."

"It's just the latest instance of people co-opting the abortion rights rallying cry as if it's a clever "gotcha"—that it's somehow hypocritical to support both people's right to choose to have a medical procedure and also requirements that protect public health, like wearing face coverings during a pandemic....Anti-vaxxers have famously weaponized the language of choice in an attempt to prove their case that refusing vaccination is simply exercising their right to control their bodies...But choosing not to wear a mask or not to stay home is extremely unlike the choice to have abortion—"my body, my choice" can neither be applied to vaccinations or emergency orders to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Abortion is entirely a personal decision that—and this is key—doesn't affect the health of your neighbor, or your grocery store clerk, or your bus driver. Abortion is not a public health issue, while measles and coronavirus absolutely are. Your body, in other words, is a disease vector...."

"‘Mera jism, meri marzi’ means ‘nobody touch us without our consent’ and there is nothing wrong about it(slogan)."

""My body, my choice" is an issue that is relevant to Pakistani women across all classes. When a woman is killed in the name of "honor," her body is attacked; when a woman is denied the right to choose her partner, her body and her choice are compromised; and when a woman faces domestic violence, her body is attacked. All other issues that our "Aurat March" (women's march) raised are equally important, but they all emanate from a deep-rooted misogyny in our society. Women do not have the agency over their own bodies and that is the main issue, in my opinion."

"A lot of people said it should have been Meri Zindagi, Meri Marzi, (my life, my choice) or Mera Wujood, Meri Marzi (my existence my choice). The point is, the slogan was so triggering to men because of the word jism (body). When they think of jism, they think of all things sexual. Whereas Mera Jism, Meri Marzi is women fundamentally saying you don’t get to set the terms of my life, my body, my decisions, my agency, you don’t get to dictate."

"My body my rules. My flower pot My rules; Your flower pot, your flowers (English+Hindustani the original quip:Mah badan, mah rulz..My gamla my phoolz..Your Gamla, your phool.) (Of uncertain south Asian origin)"

"“Why character is always related to size of cloth? Or Does really covering full body makes a difference? Answer is No! Most of us would have faced issues even after being covered up top to toe isn’t it? Eyes on us like they can see through clothes, which makes us feel like “Kuch dikh rha h kya ?” Looking for a chance every time “SHE” bends areee kya pta kuch dikh jaye. Stop being judgemental about me. It’s my body my choice who you are to tell me? If something has to be changed it’s you, your thought about woman. It’s never about the size of clothes it’s about how he or she is been raised up? Reason I am including “She” here is because there are also set of woman who provokes such things. This is not to offend anyone, I totally understand all men aren’t like this but unfortunately number of men who aren’t like this is very small.”"

"Anti-vaxxers Stole 'My Body, My Choice' from the Abortion Rights Movement....The problem is, deciding whether or not to vaccinate isn’t a personal choice—it’s a matter of public health."

"Marie Solis in Anti-vaxxers Stole 'My Body, My Choice' from the Abortion Rights Movement, vice.com June 19, 2019."

"...The problem is, according to medical professionals, choosing whether or not to vaccinate yourself or your child isn’t merely a personal choice—scientifically speaking, it’s a matter of public health, while abortion is not. Someone's choice about whether or not to have an abortion doesn't potentially affect the health of the people they interact with, while choosing not to get vaccinated does....There are people who should not get the measles vaccine for CDC-approved medical reasons (pregnant people, people with weakened immune systems, children under age 1) and those people could get measles from someone who chose not to get vaccinated because of personal beliefs...."

"I woke up angry today cos of a conversation I had before bed. Women are so strong. So OBVIOUSLY strong. You sweat blood for a spot at a table that disrespects your sweat. Then you spend EVERY SINGLE DAY convincing people you belong there. And the damn table isn't even all that,...And when you say "Fuck it. My life, my rules." They ask why. It's because it never ends. Nothing is ever enough. And complaining is a waste of time.This is why most of the women that STAY winning have to win on their own terms. Ass-kissing is exhausting..."

""...On International Women’s Day, a slogan mera jism meri marzi raised by Pakistani girls was severely criticised. Now it’s become a matter of honour of Pakistan. “I’m the mother of a daughter and the grandmother of a granddaughter. The meaning that was attached to the slogan in Pakistan was painful. I’ve never been part of the feminist movement. I’m a writer. But when I saw how men came out to say that they are the ones who are the custodians of women’s bodies (us ke jism ka muhafiz mard hai), it turned me into a feminist. ...”"

""...Has my body ever really been..really mine! Has there ever been a time that I could do whatever I wanted with it and not fear other people’s judgement? I was born with my body and it is attached to my brain. I control the mobility of it. But do I really have control of it? I like putting clothes on it, and making a statement when I walk out my front door. ....Over the years I have spent a lot of time and energy on my body. But can I say that I feel 100% ownership of it? No, I can’t! Sometimes I feel like I am renting it and doing the best I can.....I noticed that if my body had over a certain fat percentage that I was not accepted very easily...When I got to college, the boys my age liked it if I filled my body with liquids that made me less coherent and more willing to do what they wanted me to do...After college I ... started dating. It seemed the main question between my potential boyfriend and me was when was I going to give him my body?..., these magazines put me over the edge as the women looked amazing!..I felt fat and ugly and sidelined from society....So, I had a 2 year old baby, my body was back in shape and I was feeling pretty good. Was my body mine yet? Did my husband like my body? I started to feel like his eyes were drifting to other bodies. Was I not good enough anymore?.. For years I continued to pour my energy into my body so that it appeared inviting and vibrant. I wasn’t ready not to be noticed and a lot of my self esteem came from being admired for my outside qualities. But, shouldn’t I be the one who accepts my body first, rather than worry if everyone else accepts it? Now that I am entering midlife,.... And I sometimes look at my body and feel that it is not good enough..not beautiful enough....But I am starting to realize that the true beauty of my body doesn’t solely depend on how it looks but what it does for me. My body held it all together for me when I was a child, it got me through trauma and confusion. It stayed strong and held me up so that I could walk away from the abuse. My body walked me to work and helped me to be proficient in my..career so that I could support myself and start my own life. My body would give me signals that helped me to figure out who was on my side and who just wanted to use me. My body felt relaxed and safe when I met my husband, and it let me know that it was ok to let my guard down. My body became more powerful when my daughter was born, as it filled with strength to protect her and guide her through life. My body has been there for me every step of the way.....My body has been beat up, tormented, used and taken for granted but it keeps honoring me, it keeps talking to me, it keeps telling me what is best for me. My body is my best friend. And now I have the power to decide if I love and honor my best friend or turn my back on her."

"What about my choice? Shouldn’t my right to an intact body matter? Lerner doesn’t address the possibility that a man should have the right to make the choice for himself. Advocates of circumcision evidently believe the feelings of the human who is being cut are irrelevant. Anyone with an open heart who listens to the screams of a baby being circumcised cannot honestly believe that babies want to be circumcised."

"Mera jism, meri marzi. It is not an expletive. It is not meant as an insult. It is merely a reiteration of a God-given right strengthened by the best of human values. My body does not belong to anyone but me. Whose rules, whose marzi should be applicable to my body?"

"Mera Jism Meri Marzi is .... assertion to take control of what is already hers, mine, yours. The issue is agency. The purpose is to define authority. The goal is real autonomy. What it connotes: my body is mine. Not to be used for ...-harm ... but to empower. My body is not to be touched against my will.... It is not a badge for brutal machismo. My body is not to be raped. Even my inaudible protestation through the resistance of my limbs must be the loudest NO in the world. My body is not a baby-making machine. The decision to have .... children must be my prerogative. My body is not a litmus test of my femininity. .... not a topic for societal notions of acceptable attractiveness. My body is not my spouse’s personal property. The right to say no is always mine as it is his."

"Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the State die? Oh, no."

"..My body is mine, yet for time it was yours. I was made for you - my form created to be your habitat, all aspects of my being working in unison to support your growth and development. You grew and grew, becoming your own person within the liminal space of my womb..... You are of me, of us, yet separate, your own unique being. I housed you, gave you food and warmth through my body. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, body of my body; yet spirit of your spirit. ... We were one body, and yet I could feel your distinct personality - your wriggles, kicks, your preferences, and the way you would respond when I ate foods you liked. I felt your distinct spirit in the way you would respond with glee to your father's voice and his hands...Sometimes when I would sleep you would begin your own party: Exploring your space..this way and that...It was a luxury to experience your being housed within mine during pregnancy. Sharing one body with two souls is an honor that I am so grateful to have shared with you for a brief time. My body was a house, a launching pad, a starting place, a foundation, a habitat for you to grow and develop..."

"...outer makeup and beauty is not modernity. Modernity is internal makeup and is about evolution. There are three paths of modernity. Path one is ‘my life, my rules’. One should not bother about other’s thinking on himself. One should take his/her own decision for his/her life. He/she should not influence others. One should be modern in thought process and in broadness. The second path is equality- gender equality. One should change his / her notions of equality. Gender equality is demonstrated to modernity. Third is body positive. One should have to raise about his/her body shape. One should not bother about his/her body shape. One should take it in positive way,..."

""My body, my choice" is a feminist phrase that applies to many issues beyond reproductive rights, as well. The message that nobody should do anything or force us to do anything we don't want to do with our bodies is necessary for creating a culture of consent. In contrast to rape culture, which renders bodies (particularly women's bodies) the property of others (often men), consent culture allows us the freedom to do whatever we want with our bodies and gives us a say in how we interact with other people."

"...“My body, my choice” the women chant, “Her body, her choice” the men chant. The preservation of women’s safety, well being and rights benefit not only women, but benefit every human being and the health of the entire planet. ..."

"My body, my choice,” was the most popular chant that I heard at the protests, as it should be. That should be a universal truth that women should be able to do whatever they want with their bodies, whether that is dressing modestly, showing more skin, sleeping with a lot of people or remaining celibate. No man or woman should be able to tell another woman what they can and can’t do with their bodies, and no administration, especially, should be able to tell a woman what they can and can’t do with their bodies. That was a really powerful chant and definitely an important one to me, and one that I really wanted to include in the song."

"Good sexual and reproductive health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being in all matters relating to sexuality and the reproductive system. All individuals have a right to make decisions governing their body and to access services that support that right (Starrs and others, 2018). Every individual has the right to make his or her own choices about his or her sexual and reproductive health, which implies that people should be able to have a satisfying and safe sex life, the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so (United Nations Population Fund, 2014; WHO, 2004)."

"We will, hopefully by next year, introduce a core syllabus for all schools that will be mandatory for students apart from the additional subjects each institution chooses to teach. This is how you create a nation. This is how you end rival cultures from developing. The that just happened… a different culture was visible in it. this is a cultural issue and this comes from the schooling system."

"... And if we are keen to make so many allowances for foreign women to experiment in the public space in Pakistan, why do we come down so hard on the local female organisers of the ?..."

"Aurat March is a sham...Khalilur Rehman Qamar sahab is a modern day philosopher and I don’t think she (:w:Marvi Sirmed) should have used women’s rights to further her own agendas.."

"“The Aurat March is the need of the hour because it is a voice against extremism....It showed the men in power back then that you cannot trample over women,..”"

"Ecofeminism is a philosophical, political, and academic movement that studies the intersection of feminism and environmentalism, drawing parallels between the systemic oppression of women and the degradation of nature, both of which result from male domination of society. It is a broad field with several overlapping branches that study the various ways in which feminist issues intersect with environmental concerns."

"The belief that “meat-eating is a form of patriarchal domination” is pervasive among many ecofeminists who aim to include the oppression of nonhuman animals in ecofeminism as there is a strong correlation between the oppression of women, nonhuman animals, and the environment. Speciesism—the assumption of human superiority that justifies exploitation of animals based on species membership—is a form of oppression central to the ecofeminist concept....Just like women are objectified in the society, nonhuman animals are too. This objectification allows humans to subject mice, guinea pigs, monkeys, rabbits, pigs and other nonhuman species to systems of violence under the guise of “scientific testing” in several industries. The abuse of animals for the amusement of humans in entertainment industries is another example."

"Ecofeminism helps us see that we are all connected, that divisions such as human and nonhuman, are false binaries—and that by harming nonhuman forms of life, we harm ourselves. Ecofeminism asks that we eliminate all forms of “power over,” and that we live in equity with all biotic life. Poison the earth, we poison ourselves. Harm others, we harm ourselves. Continuing to live in our present system of patriarchal domination and exploitation will ultimately result in our complete self-destruction and ecocide."

"I think part of the big shift that we need is a better balance between masculine and feminine — finding a more deeply interconnected, nurturing side. But that requires time... A genuine appreciation of the other, a genuine appreciation of the plants, the animals, and the sun requires free time we cannot get through the speed that these new technologies are imposing on us. You might ask yourself: What happens to us — as individuals, as communities — under the time pressures that nearly all of us experience today?... The first step is to connect with like-minded people, and then collectively start questioning the dominant assumptions. Part of that is to listen to what really makes your heart sing. Where were you and what were you doing when you experienced moments of deep contentment and happiness? Listen to the answer and use it as a guide."

"(What did ecofeminism mean to you in the 1970s and what does it mean for you, today in 2020?) CV: First of all, I never heard of the term ecofeminism in the ’70s, no one was using that term. [Laughter] I don’t know if anyone used the term to classify their art. I was thinking about it–I was doing it in the ’60s–I was working through what I was seeing and feeling while living in Chile, you know and being near the South Pacific Ocean. I was doing and making what people now call land art long before that language existed as a name or concept, and I’m not the only one either who was shaping the movement without using any terminology to define it."

"Eco-feminism is a critical and wide-ranging set of ideas that call attention to the link between centuries of exploitation of women and the environment — a patriarchal system that exclusively serves the interests of those benefiting from the global capitalist economy."

"In a university classroom packed with a multigenerational crowd... Spanish Ministry of Finances researcher María Pazos Morán dug into what she identified as the “core” of climate problem: a male-driven economy that centers the needs of only half of the population. “Cars and planes,” “meat” and “caretaking” were the headings of a grid she and her colleagues drew on a whiteboard. “These are three major topics that are big contributors to contamination,” she said... Men are most employed by and most involved in the consumption of two of the most polluting: private means of transportation and meat consumption. Given that men continue to hold more leadership roles in government, they also disproportionately advocate for policies that enable the uninhibited continuation of each, such as ongoing corn and soy subsidies which keep beef prices artificially low and a lack of funding for public transit projects."

"Women are more likely to experience poverty and have less socioeconomic power than men, which makes it more difficult for them to recover from weather disasters that are becoming more and more frequent. Ecofeminism is a movement that aims to address this problem. It recognizes that life in society as well as nature should be maintained by means of collaboration instead of domination — and that the domination of women and nature stem from the same roots."

"Ecofeminist scholars who coined the term “ecofeminism” in the 1970s argued that the system of capitalist patriarchy is the underlying source of both the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women. As stated in the book Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, the desire for dominance over females has led men to oppress women through rape, violence, and sexism, while the desire for profit has led men to oppress nature through the exploitation of its resources and the destruction of ecosystems."

"Now that record numbers of women are running for office in the U.S. in 2018 and men, as well as many enlightened companies, are increasingly supporting the movement for gender equality, a much more gender equal political-economic system is emerging in our country—one that holds the promise of a much healthier planet..."

"We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a future at all"

"Eco-Feminism, one of the more recent developments in feminist theory, advocates that the paternalistic/capitalistic society has led to a harmful split between nature and culture that can only be healed by the feminine instinct for nurture and holistic knowledge of nature’s process. The strikingly new concepts of Eco-Feminism are metaphorically narrated in some of the mobile network ads. Women are equipped with a heightened sense of sustainability and a caring attitude. In one ad, the gift given to the retired man is a sapling, given by a girl. In another ad, the idea of developing traditional and nature-friendly products to develop the village is proposed by the girl; and she leads the men of her village to this goal. All of these advertisements promote eco-friendly ideas such as the use of paper bags, planting of trees and sustainable development."

"The Great Mother archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many traditional cultures today. But this archetype has been violently repressed in the West for at least 5,000 years starting with the Indo-European invasions - reinforced by the anti-Goddess view of Judeo-Christianity, culminating with three centuries of witch hunts - all the way to the Victorian era. In Victorian times - at the apex of the repression of the Great Mother - a Scottish schoolmaster named Adam Smith noticed a lot of greed and scarcity around him and assumed that was how all "civilized" societies worked. Smith... created modern economics, which can be defined as a way of allocating scarce resources through the mechanism of individual, personal greed... If a society is afraid of scarcity, it will actually create an environment in which it manifests well-grounded reasons to live in fear of scarcity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy!"

"The Great Mother... specifically symbolizes planet Earth - fertility, nature, the flow of abundance in all aspects of life. Someone who has assimilated the Great Mother archetype trusts in the abundance of the universe. It's when you lack trust that you want a big bank account. The first guy who accumulated a lot of stuff as protection against future uncertainty automatically had to start defending his pile against everybody else's envy and needs. If a society is afraid of scarcity, it will actually create an environment in which it manifests well-grounded reasons to live in fear of scarcity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy!... We have been living for a long time under the belief that we need to create scarcity to create value. Although that is valid in some material domains, we extrapolate it to other domains where it may not be valid. For example, there's nothing to prevent us from freely distributing information. The marginal cost of information today is practically nil. Nevertheless, we invent copyrights and patents in an attempt to keep it scarce. So fear of scarcity creates greed and hoarding, which in turn creates the scarcity that was feared. Whereas cultures that embody the Great Mother are based on abundance and generosity."

"In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground- a time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now."

"Basically, ecofeminism sees a relationship between the serious environmental damage done to the earth and the repression of women. But that one relationship can take many forms, depending on what kind of ecofeminist you are. One form of ecofeminism takes it very literally, saying that women are viewed in the same way as natural resources: as something to be taken, plundered, or used... Whatever your interpretation, ecofeminism is a unique feminist lens on the very real relationship between gender and environmental issues. Damage to the environment is definitely a feminist issue; it desperately needs the involvement of empowered, educated women to succeed in protecting communities and stopping further serious degradation."

"When Maria Mies and I wrote Ecofeminism two decades ago, we were addressing the emerging challenges of our times. Every threat we identified has grown deeper. And with it has grown the relevance of an alternative to capitalist patriarchy if humanity and the diverse species with which we share the planet are to survive. Ecofeminism was first published one year after the Earth Summit, where two important treaties were signed by the governments of the world: the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. There was no World Trade Organization. However, two years after Ecofeminism, the WTO was established, privileging corporate rights, commerce and profits, and further undermining the rights of the Earth, the rights of women and the rights of future generations. We wrote about what globalization implied for nature and women. Every crisis we mentioned is deeper; every expression of violence more brutal."

"If the dichotomy between life-producing and preserving and commodity-producing activities is abolished, if men acquire caring and nurturing qualities which have so far been considered women’s domain, and if, in an economy based on self-reliance, mutuality, self-provisioning, not women alone but men too are involved in subsistence production they will have neither time nor the inclination to pursue their destructive war games. A subsistence perspective will be the most significant contribution to the de-militarization of men and society. Only a society based on a subsistence perspective can afford to live in peace with nature, and uphold peace between nations, generations and men and women, because it does not base its concept of a good life on the exploitation and domination of nature and other people."

"Finally, it must be pointed out that we are not the first to spell out a subsistence perspective as a vision for a better society. Wherever women and men have envisaged a society in which all — women and men, old and young, all races and cultures — could share the ‘good life’, where social justice, equality, human dignity, beauty and joy in life were not just utopian dreams never to be realized (except for a small elite or post poned to an after-life), there has been close to what we call a subsistence perspective."

"Kamla Bhasin, an Indian feminist who tried to spell out what ‘sustainable development’ could mean for all women in the world lists a number of principles of sustainability similar to the features of a subsistence perspective. It is clear to her, as it is to many women and men who are not blind to the reality that we live in a limited world, that sustainability is not compatible with the existing profit- and growth-oriented development paradigm. And this means that the standard of living of the North’s affluent societies cannot be generalized. This was already clear to Mahatma Gandhi 60 years ago,who, when asked by a British journalist whether he would like India to have the same standard of living as Britain, replied: ‘To have its standard of living a tiny country like Britain had to exploit half the globe. How many globes will India need to exploit to have the same standard of living?’ From an ecological and feminist perspective, moreover, even if there were more globes to be exploited, it is not even desirable that this development paradigm and standard of living was generalized, because it has failed to fulfil its promises of happiness, freedom, dignity and peace, even for those who have profited from it."

"The common thread among ecofeminsts is that the patriarchal power in society oppresses both nature and women. This interconnection between the mistreatment of nature and the degradation of women is the core of ecofeminism. In this sense, "the rape of the earth, in all its forms," to quote Plant (1989), "becomes a metaphor for the rape of woman, in all its many guises" (p. 5). In Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, (1978), Griffin discusses the close connection between women and nature, revealing how the female speaker feels proud of having her roots in the earth: I know I am made from this earth, as my mother’s hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth and I long to tell you, you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what we know: the light is in us (p.227). ...If we learn to communicate with each other and acknowledge the value of being interconnected with both the human and the other-than-human on this planet, we can then unmake the current world and start anew."

"The word ‘ecofeminism’ might be new, but the pulse behind it has always driven women’s efforts to save their livelihood and make their communities safe. From the Chipko forest dwellers of North India some 300 years ago to the mothers of coal mining Appalachia right now, the struggle to create life-affirming societies goes on. It intensifies today as corporate globalization expands and contracts, leaving no stone unturned, no body unused. The partnership of Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva symbolizes this commonground among women; it speaks of a grassroots energy that is found in a movement across all continents. Ecological feminists are both street-fighters and philosophers."

"With ecofeminism, the political focus turns outwards. Its first premise is that the ‘material’ resourcing of women and of nature are structurally interconnected in the capitalist patriarchal system. Ecofeminists may draw on other strands of feminism at times, but liberal and postmodern approaches are generally unhelpful for building global political alliances with workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, and other victims of the Western drive to accumulation. A critically important facet of ecofeminism is that it offers an alternative to the relativism that takes over as capitalist commodification homogenizes cultures. Mies and Shiva paint a sharp contrast between the social decay of passive consumerism and the social vitality of skillful, self-sufficient and autonomous livelihood economies: subsistence."

"Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world, can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for “growth” creates a culture of rape—the rape of the earth, of local self-reliant economies, and of women."

"The displacement of women from agriculture disempowers women and reduces food security. Food systems evolved by women based on biodiversity based production rather than chemical based production produce hundreds of times more food, with better nutrition, quality, and taste.... The Millennium Development Goals ignore these women friendly alternatives which would not just halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. Women can remove hunger not just by 50% ‐ they would remove it by 100% both because their knowledge system and technologies produce more while using less, but also because in our value system it is unacceptable that in 2015, 500 million should continue to go hungry."

"In Ecofeminism Maria Mies, a German social scientist and activist in the feminist movement, and Vandana Shiva, an Indian theoretical physicist from the ecology movement, issue a serious and urgent call for a new vision, which they term the subsistence or survival perspectives. For Mies and Shiva the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (UNCED, June 1992) simply confirmed their conviction that "solutions to the present worldwide ecological, economic and social problems cannot be expected from the ruling elite of the North or the South... [Rather] a new vision -a new life for present and future generations, and for our fellow creatures on earth... can be found only in the survival struggle of grassroots movements."

"Our aim is to go beyond this narrow perspective [patriarchy and hierarchies] and to express our diversity and, in different ways, address the inherent inequalities in world structures which permit the North to dominate the South, men to dominate women, and the frenetic plunder of ever more resources for ever more unequally distributed economic gain to dominate nature."

"Could the terrors and crimes of today be possible if both Origins had been balanced? In the hands of woman lies the salvation of humanity and of our planet. Woman must realize her significance... she should be prepared to take responsibility for the destiny of humanity. Mother, the life-giver, has every right to direct the destiny of her children. The voice of woman, the mother, should be heard amongst the leaders of humanity. The mother suggests the first conscious thoughts to her child. She gives direction and quality to all his aspirations and abilities. But the mother who possesses no thought of culture can suggest only the lower expressions of human nature. But in her striving toward education, woman must remember that all educational systems are only the means for the development of a higher knowledge and culture. The true culture of thought is developed by the culture of spirit and heart. Only such a combination gives that great synthesis without which it is impossible to realize the real grandeur, diversity, and complexity of human life in its cosmic evolution. Therefore, while striving to knowledge, may woman remember the Source of Light and the Leaders of Spirit—those great Minds who, verily, created the consciousness of humanity. In approaching this Source, this leading Principle of Synthesis, humanity will find the way to real evolution."

"There are some who hold onto rigid ideas of biological sex, but I do not expect feminists to be among them. When I hear people refer in code to “biology 101,” meaning the scientific basis of female and male sex difference, to claim that trans women are not “biologically women,” I want to offer in rebuke, “Biology 101? Patriarchy wrote that textbook!” and pass them a copy of Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating, a radical feminist text that supports transsexuals having access to surgery and hormones and challenges what she calls “the traditional biology of sexual difference” based on “two discrete biological sexes.” To be so-called gender critical while leaving traditional biology intact tightens rather than loosens the hold of a gender system on our bodies."

"Anti-trans feminists’ repeated claims that they were being silenced were in fact highly effective in getting their viewpoints aired on television, radio and in the press."

"The way we are all taught, from a young age, to make the link between visible biological sex traits and behaviour can be extremely powerful in shaping our intuitions about other people. This process of interpretation and the way it affects how we relate to and behave towards others is part of the system we call gender. Feminism, though, ought always to interrogate biological essentialism (the idea that a person’s nature or personality is innate; arising from, or connected to, their biological traits). The idea that anyone born with a penis is inherently more aggressive or violent because they have a penis is an anti-feminist idea: it actually suggests that male violence is linked to biological ‘essence’ and is therefore inevitable, immutable, perhaps not even truly men’s fault. Yet anti-trans feminism is forced to rely on biological essentialism in its insistence that there is too great a similarity between trans women and cis men for the former to be regarded legally and politically as women. Transphobic feminism often uses imagery connected to penises (imagined or real) belonging to trans women as a powerful rhetorical tool, to suggest that trans women are exhibiting aggression or entitlement or are a threat."

"The existence of trans people ought to make everyone take a long hard look at their own dearly held ideas about gender, and wonder whether these ideas are quite as stable and certain as they once thought. This would be healthy. The distinction between men and women is often arbitrary. The distinction between ‘binary’ trans men and women and non-binary trans people is equally arbitrary and, in reality, the precise distinction between people we call cis and people we call trans isn’t rigid either. The fact that definitions can be so unstable is clearly deeply troubling to many – which is why it is easier to belittle challenges to binaries than to take on their contradictions, complications and exceptions. ‘We are all non-binary’ is potentially a radical new analysis for how we might reorder society, but conventionally it is used by gender critical feminists to mock those people making political demands to dismantle the binary’s imprint on our culture. Yet those critics provide no alternative for how we would otherwise emancipate society from binary gender stereotypes and roles. Once more, feminist hostility to non-binary people reasserts the notion of an inescapable biological sex that should be given more social and legal credence than a variant gender identity, a notion that merely replicates patriarchy’s own logic."

"Feminism must concern itself with radical possibilities for our future, a future in which gender-based violence and harm is abolished, freeing us all to lead more joyful lives. That cannot begin with barring the freedom to find other ways to look at, understand or do gender."

"TERF ... has expanded to include any woman worried that permitting men who “self-identify” as female to enter women’s changing rooms or refuges unchallenged makes her less safe. TERFs, according to trans activists, are evil. TERF is the new witch. Search on Twitter for "TERFs must die" or "burn in a fire, TERF" and behold a cauldron of violent vitriol. Before the meeting, a trans-woman posted: "Any idea where this is happening? I want to f*** some TERFs up, they are no better than fash [fascists]." Search "punch a TERF" and you will find crowing approval of what happened to Maria. So at Speakers’ Corner trans activists and feminists were chanting and taunting each other. Maria was taking photographs when an opponent grappled with her, snatched her camera and smashed it on the ground. Then a tall, male-bodied, hooded figure wearing make-up rushed over, hit her several times and as police arrived, ran away. I asked a young activist if she was OK with men smacking women: “It’s not a guy, you’re a piece of s*** and I’m happy they hit her”, came the reply. So when is it OK to punch a woman? When she won’t do what you want; when you don’t like what she says. Some things never change."

"The word ‘radical’ means ‘going to the roots’. It is derived from the Latin radix, meaning root. Radical Feminism goes to the root of oppression and the way out. And I define it as “way of being characterised by (a) an Awesome and Ecstatic sense of Otherness from patriarchal norms and values (b) conscious awareness of the sadosociety’s sanctions against Radical Feminists (c) moral outrage on behalf of women as women (d) commitment to the cause of women that persists, even against the current, when feminism is no longer ‘popular’; in other words, constancy."

"To be a Radical Feminist now is to do quantum leaping. That means to act with fantastic courage because you see real hope now, not lovely little lah-didah hope (a very contained hope), but really great Hope for participation in Quintessence, which is the harmony of the universe."

"The contemporary radical feminist position is the direct descendant of the radical feminist line in the old movement, notably that championed by Stanton and Anthony, and later by the militant Congressional Union subsequently known as the Woman’s Party. It sees feminist issues not only as women’s first priority, but as central to any larger revolutionary analysis. It refuses to accept the existing leftist analysis not because it is too radical, but because it is not radical enough: it sees the current leftist analysis as outdated and superficial, because this analysis does not relate the structure of the economic class system to its origins in the sexual class system, the model for all other exploitative systems, and thus the tapeworm that must be eliminated first by any true revolution."

"Radical feminist movement has many political assets that no other movement can claim, a revolutionary potential far higher, as well as qualitatively different, from any in the past."

"If any revolutionary movement can succeed at establishing an egalitarian structure, radical feminism will."

"Revolutionary feminism is the only radical programme that immediately cracks through to the emotional strata underlying ‘serious’ politics, thus reintegrating the personal with the public, the subjective with the objective, the emotional with the rational – the female principle with the male."

"“You can be a groundbreaker, a leader and a lady.”"

"In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the revival of a serious for . It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history. Its aim: overthrow of the oldest, most rigid class/caste system in existence, the class system based on sex – a system consolidated over thousands of years, lending the archetypal male and female roles an undeserved legitimacy and seeming permanence."

"Not only do trans people need feminism, but feminism also needs trans people."

"Transfeminism is a term used to describe a collection of perspectives on feminism that centre the experiences of trans people. This perspective recognizes trans people as a group who, like cis women, suffer greatly at the hands of patriarchy, which punishes us for transgressing the roles laid out for us from birth. It is not a rival movement to other forms of feminism, nor is it a subdivision. It is a specific approach to feminist thought and organizing that begins with trans experience, rather than seeking to slot trans people into a cis feminist theory that is often articulated without us in mind."

"Naturally, cisgender women’s feminism starts with the general principle that patriarchy is a system that benefits men to the detriment of women, and empowers men specifically by disempowering women. In some form or other, most cis feminist thought argues for a crucial distinction to be made between sex – one’s biology – and gender, a social structure that dictates appropriate male and female behaviour. Trans feminists also believe that, while the difference between bodies and the cultural narratives we use to interpret those bodies does exist, such difference is not always easily recognized or mapped. Our sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings: consequently, how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex. The gender critical feminist idea – that there exists an objective biological reality which is real and observable to everyone in the same way and, distinct from that, a constructed set of subjective gender stereotypes that can be easily abolished – is an oversimplification. The way we perceive and understand sex differences and emphasize their significance is so deeply gendered that it can be impossible to completely divorce the two."

"Trans feminists seek to interrogate society’s ingrained assumptions about the social and cultural meanings we ascribe to biology. They also generally incorporate an analysis of intersex people, who do not fit this reductive model, and who have suffered historical and ongoing mistreatment at the hands of a medical establishment obsessed with imposing binary biological sex on to bodies that don’t ‘fit’. The experiences of trans and intersex people show us that not all humans fit perfectly into two clear-cut categories of biological sex; indeed, the belief there are two separate sex categories is itself an erasure of sex variations that occur either naturally or through medical modification. The global dominance of men over women can never be dismantled while simultaneously maintaining, preserving and reinforcing the binary model of sex and gender."

"I believe it is important to debunk the myth that transfeminism is a new departure from the feminist theory of the past. As we have seen, ambivalence about the categories of man and woman, challenging biological essentialism, and championing a multifaceted analysis of the harm that misogyny does to every human being (including men) have always been central to feminist thought."

"Like women more generally, many trans women are feminists. Feminism and transgender activism are not in any way incompatible or mutually exclusive. As feminists who acknowledge intersectionality, we believe that we should be fighting to end all forms of sexism and marginalization — this includes both traditional sexism and transphobia. Forcing trans women into a separate group that is distinct from cis women does not in any way help achieve feminism’s central goal of ending sexism."

"Science is stratified, with an unequal distribution of research facilities and rewards among scientists. Awards and prizes, which are critical for shaping scientific career trajectories, play a role in this stratification when they differentially enhance the status of scientists who already have large reputations: the ‘’. Contrary to the – the expectation that the personal attributes of scientists do not affect evaluations of their scientific claims and contributions – in practice, a great deal of evidence suggests that the scientific efforts and achievements of women do not receive the same recognition as do those of men: the ‘Matilda Effect’. Awards in are not immune to these biases. ... While women’s receipt of professional awards and prizes has increased in the past two decades, men continue to win a higher proportion of awards for scholarly research than expected based on their representation in the nomination pool."

"The undervaluing of minorities and their researcher contributions reduces when a threshold level of minority representation (between 15 and 30%) is reached in a group or community. Botany is celebrated as a discipline in which women have been able to make important contributions, especially in the past. At the same time, other s have raised worries that women's research contributions are being neglected or dismissed not just in the past but even currently. Based on data on the representation of women authors in 15 , I will suggest that the difference between botany and other disciplines may arise from the numbers and proportions of women. The contributions made by women in botany could not be as easily dismissed or neglected as elsewhere in biology due to women's higher representation in botany."

"Recent work has brought to light so many cases, historical and contemporary, of who have been ignored, denied credit or otherwise dropped from sight that a sex-linked phenomenon seems to exist, as has been documented to be the case in other fields, such as medicine, art history and . Since this systematic bias in scientific information and recognition practices fits the second half of Matthew 13:12 in the Bible, which refers to the under-recognition accorded to those who have little to start with, it is suggested that can add to the , made famous by Robert K. Merton in 1968, the 'Matilda Effect', named for the American suffragist and feminist critic of , who in the late nineteenth century both experienced and articulated this phenomenon. Calling attention to her and this age-old tendency may prod future scholars to include other such 'Matildas' and thus to write a better, because more comprehensive, and ."

"By the mid-seventeenth century, depictions of s, animals, and plants had officially been declassed to the status of inferior art genres, deemed decorative, even frivolous—lacking the conceptual depth, moral integrity, and ethical elevation of art portraying grandiose human narratives. ... Or at least that was the case until aspiring female artists like , , , , , , , , Frances Elizabeth Tripp, , and , among others, turned to painting plants and flowers, spearheading an unparalleled botanical revolution in Western art. Initiating an unwavering, albeit gradual, ascent in the arts and in society, these women artists made the most of what was available to them to showcase their aptitudes, talent, and conceptual acumen."

"The work of women artists, which often transgresses the racial, ethnic, and gender dictates of society, asks us to consider the ambiguous boundary between self and other not with horror and fear—a convention of exclusion on which much of society is founded—but as offering an opening onto a new form of ."

"We know little of the practice of the arts by women in ancient times. The degraded condition of the sex in Eastern countries rendered woman the mere slave and toy of her master; but this very circumstance gave her artistic ideas capable of development into independent action. These first showed themselves in the love of dress and the selection of ornaments. From the early ages of the world, too, and were feminine employments, in which undying germs of art were hidden; for it belongs to human nature never to be satisfied with what merely minsters to necessity."

"After studying the optical effects of the , in 1960 began to make the extremely precise pictures for which she is known today. Her participation in , a 1965 show at the , earned Riley an international reputation. Although went out of fashion very quickly, Riley's work continued to fascinate viewers because of its impeccable technique and sophisticated compositions."

"Why, yes, of course I wrote all the Arab of Mesopotamia. I've loved the reviews which speak of the practical men who were the anonymous authors, etc. It's fun being practical men, isn't it."