feminism

We walked through the streets with our protectors. We wore our dresses. We gave up our education because that was the price of safety. That was the bargain we made with the devil we knew to escape the devil we didn't.

In the old days feminists would mock women who depended so much on a man. Today if the man is the government, not so much. A man who opens the door for you is a Neanderthal; a bureaucrat who pays for your pills? A hero.

Those who are so eager for women and girls to go back to the kitchen might think again about just what it is we might be up to in there. You can plan a lot of damage from a kitchen. It__ also where the knives are kept.

So here is what I see when we reclaim the church ladies: a woman loved and free is beautiful. She is laughing with her sisters, and together they are telling their stories, revealing their scars and their wounds, the places where they don't have it figured out. They are nurturers, creating a haven where the young, the broken, the tenderhearted, and the at-risk can flourish. These women are dancing and worshiping, hands high, faces tipped toward heaven, tears streaming. They are celebrating all shapes and sizes, talking frankly and respectfully about sexuality and body image, promising to stop calling themselves fat. They are saving babies tossed in rubbish heaps, rescuing child soldiers, supporting mamas trying to make ends meet halfway around the world, thinking of justice when they buy their daily coffee. They are fighting sex trafficking. They are pastoring and counseling. They are choosing life consistently, building hope, doing the hard work of transformation in themselves. They are shaking off the silence of shame and throwing open the prison doors of physical and sexual abuse, addictions, eating disorders, and suicidal depression. Poverty and despair are being unlocked - these women know there are many hands helping turn that key. There isn't much complaining about husbands and chores, cattiness, or jealousy when a woman knows she is loved for her true self. She is lit up with something bigger than what the world offers, refusing to be intimidated into silence or despair.

The problem with movements is that, all too often, they are associated only with the most visible figures, the people with the biggest platforms and the loudest, most provocative voices. But feminism is not whatever philosophy is being spouted by the popular media feminist flavor of the week, at least not entirely.

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won__ accept her as, is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.

Women__ history is the primary tool for women__ emancipation.

Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.

And yet, because I am without a doubt mortal, I have the troubling desire to do good, to please, to communicate my warmth, to still be very beautiful sometimes to inspire a taste for beauty. I know that these times are not fertile in grace...I am afraid tomorrow the grace of woman...may be recognized as a public utility & be socialized to the point of becoming a banal article, a bazaar object like in '93 & that one will find types of tender or amusing women with millions of copies like the creations of the big...fashion stores where it is always the same thing. I want to affirm the superiority of the god over that of the organizer of concerts for the poor.

Following the Soviet invasion, the Communists, to their credit, passed decrees making girls_ education compulsory and abolishing certain oppressive tribal customs__uch as the bride-price, a payment to the bride__ family in return for her hand in marriage. However, by massacring thousands of tribal elders, they paved the way for the __ommanders_ to step in as the new elite. Aided by American and Saudi patronage, extremism flourished. What had once been a social practice confined to areas deep in the hinterlands now became a political practice, which, according to ideologues, applied to the entire country. The modest gains of urban women were erased.__he first time a woman enters her husband__ house," Heela __old me about life in the countryside, __he wears white___er wedding dress___nd the first time she leaves, she wears white___he color of the Muslim funeral shroud. The rules of this arrangement were intricate and precise, and, it seemed to Heela, unchanged from time immemorial. In Uruzgan, a woman did not step outside her compound. In an emergency, she required the company of a male blood relative to leave, and then only with her father__ or husband__ permission. Even the sound of her voice carried a hint of subversion, so she was kept out of hearing range of unrelated males. When the man of the house was not present, boys were dispatched to greet visitors. Unrelated males also did not inquire directly about a female member of the house. Asking __ow is your wife?_ qualified as somewhere between uncomfortably impolite and downright boorish. The markers of a woman__ life__irths, anniversaries, funerals, prayers, feasts__xisted entirely within the four walls of her home. Gossip, hopscotching from living room to living room, was carried by husbands or sons.

Are you still as angry as you used to be?' Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical [movie] Julia. "I like your anger_. Don't you let anyone talk you out of it.

You won__ shoot me.""People tend to overestimate my character," I say quietly. "They think that because I__ small, or a girl, or a Stiff, I can__ possibly be cruel. But they__e wrong.

Gingerbread I knew I had to get out of therebefore the icing cracked and they discoveredthat I'm burnt around the edges,doughy in the center,that what they thought was sugaris salt.If I was a good girl,if I could satisfy their cravings, if every dream in my misshapen headdidn't bite, I might have stayed at the table.Wouldn't you run, too,from such voracious love?

She wagged a finger at him. __ou__e mispronouncing that word._ __our pardon?_ He groped, trying to remember what he__ said. __uffragette? How does one pronounce it, then?_ __uffragette,_ she said, __s pronounced with an exclamation point at the end. Like this: __uzzah! Suffragettes!

The two women did more than resolve a major problem, they went on to form a political alliance and launch a coup. Cixi was twenty-five years old and Empress Zhen a year younger. Facing them were eight powerful men in control of the state machine. The women were well aware of the risk they were taking. A coup was treason, and if it failed the punishment would be the most painful ling-chi, death by a thousand cuts. But they were willing to take the risk. Not only were they determined to save their son and the dynasty, but they also rejected the prescribed life of imperial widows _ essentially living out their future years as virtual prisoners in the harem. Choosing to change their own destiny as well as that of the empire, the two women plotted, often with their heads together leaning over a large glazed earthenware water tank, pretending to be appraising their reflections or just talking girls_ talk.

A day will come when a woman will be elected to the top of the pyramid, to be a prime minister or a president, and the whole world will know her and hear about her. She may be sitting here amongst us.

Men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus instead we are all people. Deal with it.

A self-made man" - not of woman born but alchemized, through sheer force of will, by the man himself. This is what I want to be. I want to be a self-made woman. I want to conjure myself out of every sparkling, fast moving thing I can see. I want to be the creator of myself. I'm going to begat myself