“Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. She will need her sisterhood.” “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” —Audre Lorde “If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.” “I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.” —Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay “It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question ‘who am I’ except the voice inside herself.” “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” —Margaret Atwood “If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciliatory mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.” —The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography by Angela Carter “Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.” —We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie “Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” —Virginia Woolf “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” —Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911–1917 by Rebecca West “i want to apologize to all the women i have called beautiful before i’ve called them intelligent or brave i am sorry i made it sound as though something as simple as what you’re born with is all you have to be proud of when you have broken mountains with your wit from now on i will say things like you are resilient, or you are extraordinary not because i don’t think you’re beautiful but because i need you to know you are more than that” —Rupi Kaur
