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Exlpore more Feminism quotes

"To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions?"

"The mass depiction of the modern woman as a 'beauty' is a contradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, 'beauty' is by definition inert, timeless, and generic. That this hallucination is necessary and deliberate is evident in the way 'beauty' so directly contradicts women's real situation."

"Now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women."

"The beauty myth of the present is more insidious than any mystique of femininity yet: A century ago, Nora slammed the door of the doll's house; a generation ago, women turned their backs on the consumer heaven of the isolated multiapplianced home; but where women are trapped today, there is no door to slam. The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see."

"Feminist politics is losing momentum because feminist movement has lost clear definitions. We have those definitions. Let's reclaim them. We can share the simple yet powerful message that feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression."

"Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims."

"Women united can create movements. We can empower entire generations. We can build peace one action at a time. Together we rise. The time is now."

"When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men."

"Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood

"Also I could hear Amanda's voice: Why are you being so weak? Love's never a fair trade. So Jimmy's tired of you, so what, there's guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they're wilted. But you have to act like you're having a spectacular time and every day's a party."

"They were wrong about the sun.It does not go down into the underworld at night.The sun leaves merelyand the underworld emerges.It can happen at any moment.It can happen in the morning,you in the kitchen going throughyour mild routines.Plate, cup, knife.All at once there's no blue, no green,no warning."

"Everything I'd been longing to get away from, true, but not through destruction. I'd wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will."

"Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done."

"That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies."

"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel."

"They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills."
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