Women S Rights Activists

"We continue to see women miss out on human rights due to lack of due attention."

"We need to have men understand gender equality and cease to be oppressors and perpetrators. This will increase the involvement of human rights affairs."

"Gender rights and women rights ought to be understood and implemented holistically. You cannot ask women what right to have; they should enjoy all rights, rights to their reproductive health, leadership, education, food among other rights."

"As African women, we don’t have to live up to other people’s expectations. We too can question the status quo"

"For us girls, there were no praises, just criticism"

"When we see African Union putting women rights at the centre of their deliberations, it has taken our push and advocacy over previous years."

"I’m a human being; there isn’t any number of cows that will determine my value"

"In Rwanda, there is good political will in terms of gender equality and women’s rights thanks to the President who advances women’s rights and is a believer in gender equality."

"It’s possible to question cultural practices if they don’t align with our values"

"Actually in most countries, women wish to get half of what Rwanda has."

"The liberation of women is conceived as the desire of women to reduce men to housekeepers. Since most men despise manual work for feudal and middle class reasons, women’s liberation is feared as an effort by women to ‘feminise’ men, that is, degrade them."

"What we want in Africa is social transformation. It is not about warring with men, the reversal of role, or doing to men whatever women think that men have been doing for centuries, but it is trying to build a harmonious society."

"The oppression of women, economic or personal, is not solely a White-Black Race confrontation although the oppression of Black Women is deeply tied to the variable of race in the history of imperialism."

"The transformation of African society is the responsibility of both men and women and it is also in their interest."

"My mother took her place very firmly as a leader in many structures, though in the"

"We must remember that there were radical outlets for women in indigenous African cultures, and in our colonised societies, contact with Europe brought with it the inheritance of European movements and social concerns. So there were inheritors of the British suffragette movement in Nigeria, while my mother, a teacher's college professor, was a practitioner of many of the radical ideas of the Victorian period about women. My perceptions of gender hierarchies were sharp growing up. I was raised with a male sibling as well as female and male wards living with my mother. I was much of a tomboy then. I did not have any important position in my nuclear family of five children, meaning I was neither first nor last boy or girl. No position! I could also see that boys had advantages, even though my progressive mother made all the boys in her house, including my other brothers, do housework. They learned to sew, knit and embroider! She also made us share the housework with the house help or servants. She said her children could not grow up spoilt while others learnt to be effective and efficient. So from very young I had a healthy attitude towards class differences, having been raised to respect everybody in the work they did.Gender hierarchies were so sharp for me that I always wondered as a pre-teen whether marriage was a good idea. Many folktales and other forms of informal educational modes existed to help prepare women for accepting male dominance in marriage. I saw marriage in the Christian world I was in as restrictive, though my mother was a suffragette, if there was any such thing. I say "Christian" world because I could also see that women in the local, unWesternised society around us had different values and freedoms. Within Yoruba marriage, the woman was culturally expected to defer to the husband. Yet Christian marriage restricted Yoruba women of my mother's generation in an unusual way (dress, freedom of movement, association, and gainful work outside the home beyond the financial control of the husband). There were dignifying and structurally important roles for women in Yoruba culture, even within its patriarchal assumptions, and some would say, androgynous cultural practices and cosmology of the Yoruba, expressed in the philosophical fount to the culture that Ifa Divination Poetry with its thousands of verses. One argument is that women were weighted equally with men as human beings, but had to defer to men in certain contexts, while men deferred in others."

"Every human being has autonomy, whether in a marriage or a single people. That you are married does not take out your human right."

"Just speak out. You owe it to yourself and to no one, whenever you are able to share your story or even to say I need help. There is absolutely freedom in asking for help. There is no shame and no self-guilt."

"The Nigerian policemen and women are a representation of our society. And until our society begins to push back, against their violence and saying no more will you disrespect our women and girls then, of course, our society’s silence emboldens the culture of abuse against women."

"...guarding yourself against partnerships that want to suck the life out of you not because they share the same value, but because they like the fame you’re getting. So you need to be discerning in terms of working with people."

"Take care of your own mental health and well being because that is very important."

".....there’s nothing impossible to do except you don’t just have the will to do it."

"We live in a country that is wearing a veil of silence."

"What we need to do as individuals is to continue to educate people on the importance of respecting women’s rights. We need to hold people accountable."

"Mental health is not for ‘mad people’. It is basically your psychological and emotional wellbeing."

"Oh! Be A Fine Girl — Kiss Me!"

"In our troubled days it is good to have something outside our planet, something fine and distant for comfort."

""WOTCLEF is my fervent prayer, dream and aspiration to restore human dignity"."

"We women leaders must rise up to the task of reshaping our country by providing our intuitive ideas to support the developmental ideals of Nigeria."

""So amazed, I asked if this is what these people do to these children so it hurt my feelings and I said to my God given self that one day, when I am in position, I will help these young vulnerable children"."

""In WOTCLEF, we have strategies we use to accomplish our mission, through sensitization, we create awareness, and we assist the trafficked victims and the vulnerable persons, and we rehabilitate and we re-integrate them into the society and even with their parents or guardians, we bring them together all to re-integrate them back into society. Apart from advocacy, we do capacity building for these children, we partner with stakeholders, both national and international agencies and the work is very easy for us. Through this WOTCLEF has earned accolades in the United Nations (UN). We have a seat at the UN and if they are having any discussions or forum on women trafficking or child labour, we are invited to come and have a say in whatever they are doing"."

"We must endeavour to raise good children and of course inspire them to do the same to their children. Through this, we shall raise a generation of conscientious leaders who will have the fear of God in them to do all the needful to develop our dear Nation."

"In 1940, at the World's Fair held in New York City, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, addressing a receptive audience, declared that it is woman's main task to stop war...Though more militant than Mrs. Catt as a leader in the suffrage movement, Alice Paul was no less certain that war sprang from men's nature and that women were under obligation to put a stop to wars. When, in April, 1941, she was interviewed on her return from Geneva, where she had spent two years directing the organization of an international movement for equal rights for women, she declared, relative to the war in Europe: "Women's instincts are constructive and tend to build and create, not to tear down." The guilt of war she laid wholly on men, saying: "This war was brought about without the women having anything to say or do about it, and now they are the greatest sufferers.""

"I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, “What did she do to deserve it?” This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell’s telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the Nineteenth Amendment for all women — by refusing to endorse the inclusion of women of Color, although we had worked to help bring about that amendment."

"..….let me point out that nothing can be achieved without the following: a clear vision, burning desire, an unquenchable passion and corresponding actions."

"Other evidences of changes in women’s status were more immediately apparent. The legendary ‘‘flapper’’ made her debut in the postwar decade, signaling with studied theatrical flourishes a new ethos of feminine freedom and sexual parity. The Nineteenth Amendment, enacted just in time for the 1920 presidential election, gave women at least formal political equality. The Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed by Alice Paul of the National Women’s Party in 1923, sought to guarantee full social and economic participation to women. An organized movement for the promotion of birth control, founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921 as the American Birth Control League, heralded a growing feminine focus on reproductive control and erotic liberation. Countless women, especially if they were urban, white, and affluent, now used the new technologies of spermicidal jelly and the Mensinga-type diaphragm, both first manufactured in quantity in the United States in the 1920s, to limit the size of their families. This development worried the authors of Recent Social Trends, who feared that the old-stock, white, urban middle class would be demographically swamped by the proliferation of the rural and immigrant poor, as well as blacks."

"When I started, so many people did not understand and asked questions like how can human beings be trafficked? Many people were taken aback and not until when the real thing started. The moment I started it, the Italian government were very impressed and they started repatriating our girls back to Nigeria. The first batch of girls that were repatriated were 70 and were accompanied by 140 Policemen because these children were very reluctant, they enjoyed the life out there and didn’t want to go back home and it was something else and since then we brought it to the front burner of the government and work started and that is how WOTCLEF came about."

"Miss Alice Paul, Ph.D., D.C.L., author of the Equal Rights Treaty, and a founder of the National Woman's Party of the United States, is chairman of the committee on nationality of the Inter-American Commission of Women, and to her indefatigable labor in research and the compilation of material is due the commission's monumental report now ready for presentation at the first plenary session. This report covers the nationality of women throughout the world. In every case, it gives actual excerpts from the law in the original language, with translation. This applies even to laws in Japanese, Greek, Siamese, Bulgarian, Russian, etc., with the original text in the original script facing the translation on the opposite page. Synopses of the laws are included also with important original chapters by Miss Paul so that the juridical information is made easily understandable to all readers, whether familiar with legal terms or not. Comprehensive tables on nationality prepared by Miss Stevens and Miss Paul are another novel and important feature of this report which is as plain as daylight, as thrilling as an air race, and as fascinatingly involved as a detective story."

"I feel very strongly that if you are going to do anything, you have to take one thing and do it."

"(how would you describe your contribution to the struggle for women’s rights?) I always feel ... the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end."

"NAWSA opposed Paul's tactics, but many historians concur in the opinion that these militant actions helped to spur the urgency of the moment."

"during that time we opened—and by “we” I mean the whole women’s movement—we opened a great many doors to women with the power of the vote, things like getting women into the diplomatic service. And don’t forget we were successful in getting equality for women written into the charter of the United Nations in 1945."

"we did hear a lot of shouted insults, which we always expected. You know, the usual things about why aren’t you home in the kitchen where you belong. But it wasn’t anything violent. Later on, when we were actually picketing the White House, the people did become almost violent. They would tear our banners out of our hands and that sort of thing."

"(You were once quoted to the effect that in picking volunteers you preferred enthusiasm to experience.) AP: Yes. Well, wouldn’t you? I think everybody would. I think every reform movement needs people who are full of enthusiasm. It’s the first thing you need. I was full of enthusiasm, and I didn’t want any lukewarm person around. I still am, of course"

"if we had universal suffrage throughout the world, we might not even have wars."

"Woman suffrage is an almost forgotten issue today, and yet the battle is not won. Despite the capitulation of Congress last June, nearly three-fourths of the women of these States will be denied the right to vote in the Presidential Campaign of 1920, unless a miracle is accomplished in the next two months. The miracle will not fall from Heaven. If it occurs, it will be the result of hard work on the part of those same good fighters who picketed the White House and went to jail and finally wrung the Federal Amendment out of a distressed and embarrassed government,-Alice Paul's gallant band of militants."

"When the Quakers were founded…one of their principles was and is equality of the sexes. So I never had any other idea…the principle was always there.”"

"if women who are Republicans simply help the Republican Party, and if women who are Democrats help the Democratic Party, women’s votes will not count for much. But if the political Parties see before them a group of independent women voters who are standing together to use their vote to promote Suffrage, it will make Suffrage an issue — the women voters at once become a group which counts; whose votes are wanted."

"(When did you actually become involved in suffrage work?) AP: Well, after I got my master’s in 1907, my doctoral studies took me to the School of Economics in London. The English women were struggling hard to get the vote, and everyone was urged to come in and help. So I did. That’s all there was to it. It was the same with Lucy Burns."

"I especially want to promote ICT among girls and women because many think that it is a man’s world—and it still is. But if you look at the history of computing you will find that women played an integral role as well."