Quotes By and About Women
Practicing Feminist
Pedagogy in Various Classrooms
Feminist
Pedagogy Around the World
Women have been called queens for a long
time, but the kingdom given them isn't worth ruling. Louisa May Alcott
If I wanted to write, I had to be
willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting
execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance. Maya Angelou
Youthful cynicism is sad to observe,
because it indicates not so much knowledge learned from bitter experiences as
insufficient trust even to attempt the future. Maya Angelou
I'm a woman/phenomenally./phenomenal
woman./that's me. Maya Angelou
Failure is impossible. Susan B.
Anthony
No one sex can govern alone. I believe
that one of the reasons why civilization has failed so lamentably is that it
has a one-sided government. Nancy Astor
Then it comes to him: He's lost the
female body! Catch it. Put it in a pumpkin, in a high tower, in a compound, in
a chamber, in a house, in a room. Quick, stick a leash on it, a lock, a chain,
some pain, settle it down, so it can never get away from you again. Margaret
Atwood
Sentences that begin with "all women"
are never, never true. Margaret Culkin Banning
One is not born a woman, one becomes
one. Simone de Beauvior
Once we accept as basic truth that rape
is not crime of irrational, impulsive, uncontrollable lust, but is a
deliberate, hostile, violent act of degradation and possession on the part of a
would-be-conqueror, designed to intimidate and inspire fear, we must look
toward those elements in our culture that promote and propagandize these
attitudes. Susan Brownmiller
I was something that lay under the sun
and felt it, like the pumpkins and I did not want to be anything more. I was
entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of
something entire, whether it is sun, and air or goodness and knowledge. At any
rate, that is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great.
When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. Willa Cather
It is a highly radical and subversive
act to tell a familiar story in a new way. Once you start to do it you realize
that what you call history is another such story and could be told differently
and has been. And then the authoritative tradition starts to crack and crumble.
It too, it turns out is nothing more than a particular selection of various
stories, all of which have at one time or another been believed and told. Chernin
A nation is not conquered until the
hearts of its women are on the ground. Cheyenne Proverb
How difficult they make they make it
for us to become women when becoming poultry is what that really means. Helene
Cixous
Are you sure you put your sex on
properly this morning? Helene Cixous
I shall speak about women's writing:
about what it will do. Women must write her self: must write about women and
bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as
from their own bodies for the same reasons by the same law, with the same fatal
goal. Women must put herself into the test as into the world and into history
by her own movement. Helen Cixous
The challenge now is to practice
politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
A woman without a man is like a fish
without a bicycle. Irina Dunn
Thus, like most women, I have gone
through my entire education as a schizophrenic...imagining myself male I
attempted to create myself male. Lee Edwards
Instead, in Freire,we discover a
horizon and an optimistic perspective from which education can be recovered as
an instrument of liberation, as a means of questioning the established forms of
power. Miguel Escobar, Alfredo Fernandez, and Gilberto Guevara-Niebla
Going to the window facing the patio,
she raised her hands to heaven; she wanted to escape from herself, didn't want
to think about making a choice, didn't want to talk again. She didn't want her
words to shriek her pain. Laura Esquivel
The point of feminism...is to win women
a wider range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple concept, despite
repeated and enormously effective efforts to dress it up in greasepaint and
turn its proponents into gargoyles. Susan Faludi
It seems to me essential that in our
individual lives, we should day to day live out what we affirm. Antonio
Faundez
What did she think,...no, she though
because I was her daughter that I belonged to her, that she could do anything
she wanted with me. Make me into poetry, expose my chicken bones and cowrie
shell, my unopened woman. Janet Fitch
When she stopped conforming to the
conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman. Betty
Friedan
The especial genius of women I believe
to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency. Margaret
Fuller
Once you live with the issue of women
and the landscape for a while, you find that you cannot separate them from the
notion of peace, spirituality, and community. As women we must learn to become
leaders in society, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of all people.
We must support and protect our kinship with environment for the generations to
come. China Galland.
A woman may develop wrinkles and
cellulite, lose her waistline, her bust line, her ability to bear a child, even
her sense of humor, but none of that implies a loss of her sexuality, her
femininity. Barbara Gordon
Sensitivity to the needs of others and
the assumption of responsibility for taking care lead women to attend to voices
other than their own and to include in their judgment other points of view. Carol
Gilligan
But the husband cannot be guilty of a
rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial
consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto the
husband, which she cannot retract. Matthew Hale
The personal is political. Carol
Hanisch
Progressive, holistic education,
"engaged pedagogy" is more demanding than conventional critical or
feminist pedagogy. For, unlike these two teaching practices, it emphasizes
well-being. bell hooks
The more the engaged classroom becomes
overcrowded, the more it is in danger of being a spectacle, a place of
entertainment. When that happens, the potentially transformative power of that
classroom is undermined, and my commitment to teaching is undermined. bell
hooks
Educate a woman and you will educate a
family. Jovita Idar
He was profoundly embarrassed by my
pregnancies to his way of thinking they were unearned blessings, and
furthermore each one drew God's attention anew to my having a vagina and his
having a penis and the fact we'd laid them near enough together to conceive a
child. Barbara Kingsolver
Until that moment I'd thought I could
have it both ways: to be one of them, and also my husband's wife. What conceit!
I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do
perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more woman who
clamps their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer
another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what
there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars. Barbara
Kingsolver
A woman's strength comes from being
able to adapt and yet still be strong enough to fight back. Yuri Kochiyama
This is the secret of really vulgar and
of pornographic people…sex is dirty and dirt is sex and sexual excitement
becomes playing with dirt, and any sign of sex in a woman becomes a show of her
dirt. D. H. Lawerence
Girls begin to talk and to stand on
their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good
crops. Martin Luther
When I dare to be
powerful: to use my strength in the service of my vision- then it becomes less
and less important whether I am afraid. - Audre Lorde
I don't need a man to rectify my existence.
The most profound relationship we'll ever have is the one with ourselves. Shirley
Maclaine
She writes on sand or weaves cloth for
the reader who can see something other than the printed page as text. Marcus
A woman is full circle. Within her is
the power to create, nurture, and transform. A woman knows that nothing can
come to fruition without light. Let us call upon woman's voice and woman's
heart to guide us in this age of planetary transformation. Diane Mariechild
I touch the future. I teach. Christa
Mcauliffe
The more girls a boy has, the better.
He has a bright look, having reaped fruits, blooming. He stalks around,
sure-shouldered, and you have the feeling he's got more in him, a fatter heart,
more stories to tell. For a girl, with each boy it's as though a petal gets
plucked each time. Susan Minot
It's nice when grown people whisper to
each other under the covers...they are under the covers because they don't have
to look at themselves anymore; there is no stud's eye, no chipped glance to
undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls
and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath the undercover
whispers. Toni Morrison
But Joe is partial to blue. He wants to
slip under it and hold on to her. Take her hand put it on his chest, his
stomach. He too imagines, as he lies with her in the dark, the shapes their
bodies make the blue stuff do. Violet doesn't care what color it is, so long as
under their chins that avenue of no-question-about-it satin cools their lava
forever. Toni Morrison
I feel there is something unexplored
about a woman that only a woman can explore. Georgia O'Keefe
I permit no woman to teach…she is to
keep silent. St. Paul
I know the bottom, she says./I know it
with my great tap root:/ it is what you fear./ I do not fear it: I have been
there. Sylvia Plath
The main point of the article was that
a man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are
different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds
and the two different sets of emotions together properly. Now the one thing
this article didn't seem to me to consider was how a girl felt. Sylvia Plath
I thought it sounded just like the sort
of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously
feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and…she would go
straight home and start another baby. Because the drug would make her forget
how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that
long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up
and shut her in again. Sylvia Plath
The silence depressed me. It wasn't the
silence of silence. It was my own silence. Sylvia Plath
Like Broadway, the noel, and god,
feminism has been declared dead many times Katha Pollitt
I am a woman, hear me roar, in numbers
too big to ignore, and I know too much to go back and pretend… Helen Reddy
It's just breeding ground for
unhappiness, all these little suburban towns. People feel like they have to
live up to being perfect, or have a perfect life, or be perfectly happy, and
then it just makes them more unhappy. It's really crazy. Christina Ricci
She didn't write it. She wrote it, but
she shouldn't have. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. . She wrote
it, but she wrote only one of it. She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist,
and it isn't really art. She wrote it, but she had help. She wrote it, but
she's an anomaly. She wrote it, but there are very few of her. Joanna Russ
Male professors, male historians, and
male poets cannot be relied on for the truth about women. Woman herself must
undertake the study of a woman. Of course, to do so, she must secure enough money
to line on and a room of her own. Schweickart
Too many women in too many countries
speak the same language silence. Anasuya Sengupta
Sexism goes so deep that at first it's
hard to see; you think it's just reality. Alix Kate Shulman
I never had to become a feminist; I was
born liberated. Grace Slick
"'Today I am a woman,' wrote
Francie in her diary. She looked down at her long thin and as yet formless
legs. She crossed out the sentence and started over. ‘Soon, I shall become a
woman.' She looked down at her chest, which was as flat as a washboard and
ripped the page out of the book. She started fresh on a page. Betty Smith
We are really defining power. We no
longer mean that power is the ability to make other people do something. We
mean that power is the ability to control our own destiny, to control our own
lives, and to be in a community of others with equal power. Gloria Steinam
The first problem for all of us, men
and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. Gloria Steinem
When life descends into the pit, I must
become my own candle willingly burning myself to light up the darkness around
me. Alice Walker
The reason people and angels hover
around human sexuality is because it is a light source that has been kept in
the dark Alice Walker
It is to our knees that we must
sometimes be driven, before we can recognize, witness, or welcome our own
light. Alice Walker
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to
lavender. Alice Walker
A woman can do anything. She can be
traditionally feminine and that's all right: she can work, she can stay at
home; she can be aggressive, she can be passive; she can be anyway she wants
with a man. But whenever there are the kinds of choices there are today, unless
you have some solid base, life can be frightening. Barbara Walters
People call me a feminist whenever I
express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute Rebecca
West
I cannot see past my three-dimensional
concept of reality, bound as it is to good/bad, black/white, real/unreal,
alive/dead. Jeanette Winterson
It is time to effect a revolution in
female manners time to restore to them their lost dignity and make them, as a
part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. Mary
Woll-Stonecraft
Wherever one looked men thought about
women and thought differently Virginia Woolf
It is obvious that the values of women
differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex. Virginia
Woolf
I point out the prodigious output because
I think depression ought to be understood as something so mighty and
complicated that it drives its sufferers in a multitude of directions and
occasionally fives the impression that if behind every great man there is a
woman, then behind every great woman there is a madness. If the male driving
force is the need to make a living, the female ambition is fueled by suffering.
Elizabeth Wurtzel