Feminists From The United States

"I am an anarchist, this is because I am moved by the suffering of hundreds of millions of workers and I struggle for a world in which such exploitation is no longer possible."

"That it is impossible to imagine Trump rocking a wailing baby to sleep may strike liberal feminists like me as a sign of several fatal character defects; for many white evangelicals, it suggests he knows the natural order of things."

"[On Donald Trump] It is odd to see a man who embodies so many sins – including all seven deadly ones; is there anyone who better exemplifies a noxious combination of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth? – be so widely embraced by the religious right. This is a politician who has no home church and can't name his favourite Bible verse."

"While Republican lawmakers criminalize abortion in conservative states, and while even voters in conservative states vote for abortion rights when given the chance, the Republican hopefuls were wishy-washy on the issue – not wanting to be accountable for their party’s own extremism, but also refusing to align themselves with America’s pro-choice majority."

"And if this drug gets approved, women will get some very useful information about the men in their lives, and particular those with whom they have romantic relationships: do those men believe that they have an equal responsibility for pregnancy prevention, and are they willing to act accordingly? And if not, are those men with whom women should want to share any part of their sexual, romantic, or reproductive lives?"

"Leadership is not about being in charge. It’s about taking care of those in your charge. Investing in people is the foundation for great transformation. People are our most valuable assets, yet we often don’t value them until they’re gone. Instead of holding exit interviews, which are purely reactionary, we should conduct “stay interviews” or “purpose interviews” as a proactive way to understand what our employees need. It’s important that employees feel as though someone inside the organization cares about them, routinely engages with them, and has their back. Direct managers are uniquely positioned to fulfill this role – but we must equip them with the proper training, strategies, and tools to keep their best talent engaged. People can and will leave when they feel excluded."

"The role of leadership is evolving. What was once about objective strategic planning and organizational operations has transformed into a more subjective role – one that requires greater humanity and emotional intelligence. Traditionally feminine leadership qualities – empathy, vulnerability, gratitude – are more important now than ever. Leaders need to be able to connect with their team members on a human level in order to build trust and create a supportive environment where everyone can thrive. Let’s shift the paradigm. These aren’t “soft” skills – they’re essential skills. If we want to create warm, welcoming workplaces, we should be prioritizing these skills by making them requirements and including them as part of profiles, job descriptions, and evaluations."

"Create a culture of belonging"

"Soft’ skills are the new essential skills"

"Embrace proximity-ship"

"I'm very fortunate I was in a couple of movies that really resonated with women and sort of struck a nerve."

"Thelma and Louise end up driving off a cliff, and still viewers felt exhilarated by their story. It made me realize how few opportunities we give women to come out of a movie feeling inspired and empowered by the female characters. It changed everything about how I chose roles moving forward."

"What was so striking was the intense reaction to the film. It changed everything about how I chose roles moving forward."

"I was raised on TV shows where there were very few female characters that I wanted to pretend to be,” “My best friend, Lucyann, and I, every day after school, would play characters from The Rifleman. Because I was taller, I would be the father, Lucas, and she would be my son, Mark. It never occurred to us that there weren’t female characters that we wanted to play."

"I only realised well into it that that was one of the things that was incredibly appealing to me,” Davis said, noting how she’s also gotten into archery, horseback riding, ice skating and sword fighting for other film roles. “You get satisfaction from how well you did instantly, without anybody else’s opinion having to come into it."

"We have to be willing to embrace the full autonomy of people who are less privileged and understand that equity means making access to opportunity easier, not deciding what opportunities they deserve."

"The problem has never been the ways that victims don’t tell, so much as it has been that some victims aren’t seen as valuable enough to protect."

"There is no shame in asking for help; it takes strength to admit you need it."

"For women of color, the expectation that we prioritize gender over race, that we treat the patriarchy as something that gives all men the same power, leaves many of us feeling isolated."

"Politeness as filtered through fragility and supremacy isn't about manners; it's about a methodology of controlling the conversation."

"There’s nothing feminist about having so many resources at your fingertips and choosing to be ignorant. Nothing empowering or enlightening in deciding that intent trumps impact. Especially when the consequences aren’t going to be experienced by you, but will instead be experienced by someone from a marginalized community."

"One of the biggest issues with mainstream feminist writing has been the way the idea of what constitutes a feminist issue is framed. We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met."

"Sometimes being a good ally is about opening the door for someone instead of insisting that your voice is the only one that matters."

"Learning to defend myself, to be willing to take the risk of being a bad girl, was a process with a steep learning curve. But like with so many other things, I learned how to stand up even when other people were certain I should be content to sit down. Being good at being bad has been scary, fun, rewarding, and ultimately probably the only path that I was ever meant to walk."

"My grandmother remains—despite her futile efforts to make me more ladylike—one of the most feminist women I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and yet she would never have carried that label. Because so much of what feminists had to say of her time was laden with racist and classist assumptions about women like her, she focused on what she could control and was openly disdainful of a lot of feminist rhetoric. But she lived her feminism, and her priorities were in line with womanist views on individual and community health."

"No woman has to be respectable to be valuable."

"Too often white women decide that when they feel uncomfortable, upset, or threatened, they can turn to the patriarchy for protection. Because they don't want to lose that protection (dubious as it is), they stand by when it's convenient, and challenge it only when it directly threatens them. Yet, they know they benefit from it being challenged, and thus rely on others to do the heaviest lifting. They fail to recognize the conflicted relationship they have with the patriarchy includes a certain cowardice around challenging not only it, but other women who have embraced it."

"Poverty is an apocalypse in slow motion, inexorable and generational."

"An intersectional approach to feminism requires understanding that too often mainstream feminism ignores that Black women and other women of color are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of hate."

"America loves the myth of a meritocracy more than anything else, because it lets us ignore the reality of the impact of bigotry."

"This is especially true for women of colour and trans women: we are losing out on talented writers who are part of marginalised communities because they don’t want to pursue a career where harassment is considered an expected part of the gig"

"When you find out that you're the best at something, normally it makes sense to feel happy. I'm not sure that reaction applies, though, when what you're top at is being hated."

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

"Writing about Cutting Loose, quoted in Sara Davidson article"

"I would like to be cold and clear and selfish, to demand satisfaction for my needs, to compel respect rather than affection. And yet there are moments, and perhaps there always will be, when I fall back upon the old cop-outs. Why should I trouble to win a chess game or a political argument when it is so much easier to lose charmingly? Why should I work when my husband can support me, why should I be a human being when I can get away with being a child?"

"And I wonder always whether it is possible to define myself as a feminist revolutionary and still remain in any sense a wife. There are moments when I still worry that he will leave me, that he will come to need a woman less preoccupied with her rights, and when I worry about that I also fear that no man will ever love me again, that no man could ever love a woman who is angry. And that fear is a great source of trouble to me for it means that in certain fundamental ways I have not changed at all."

"Women's Liberation is finally only personal. It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."

"I knew the writing came from the place that’s the closest you can get to truth. But the downside was, I became a character in a public story that resembled mine but was a huge oversimplification of a complex life."

"I am no longer submissive, no longer seductive; perhaps it is for that reason that my husband tells me sometimes that I have become hard, and that my hardness is unattractive. I would like it to be otherwise. I think that will take a long time."

"When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women. Most men can’t really imagine “equality.” All they can imagine is having the existing power structure inverted."

"We can care about things without clinging to them."

"When you give up partnership relationships you also give up a certain kind of intimacy. But you gain a lot of freedom, and you also experience a wider, less exclusive form of love."

"Not even the ashes of heroes have peace. Being great is synonymous with loneliness."

"Every slave of a golden cage feels some hatred towards their master. Wondering the cause of such restlessness, they begin their emancipation."

"My feminism is the feminism of Puerto Rican writer Clotilde Betances Jaeger, who, in 1929 responded to the racist comment of Carrie Chapman Catt that Latin American women were not helping to build peace, by stating that while peace was a central principle for Latin American and Caribbean women, it was based on freedom from US imperialism."

"Language has life because it lives in humanity...Language lives in me because it lives in everyone and everyone lives with it."

"The personal and the impersonal coincide because life itself impels them. Killing humanity kills language. Once the language is dead, the human self disappears."

"Loneliness, the difficulty involved in becoming an independent yet attached person, and the way to find a reasonable agreement between these two positions: these are existential questions, and that's where the women's movement tapped in so deep by asking them [...] But to name these things is not to cure them. It's a battle every day. We struggle to bring to life what we say and believe. Our insides tell us one thing, but living that out is quite another."

"It's a much longer struggle than we ever dreamed of, and it's painful to see how the same battles must be fought again and again. When #MeToo happened in 2017, I couldn't believe my ears. They were saying everything we'd said 40 years ago. But then I realised that every generation repeats and repeats – until it’s over. It isn't over until it’s over."

"My late blooming was very much attached to my being a girl. It's a major thing, being a girl. But after that, you also have to figure in the personal neuroses of each human being. I was smart. My mother saw it, and decided I should get an education – but I had to remember that love was the most important thing in a woman's life. College was only to protect me against the possibility that my husband would die or leave me stranded. I was so hesitant to believe in myself."