Women S Rights Quotes

“I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you? You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered by us, so why aren't you standing with us? Why aren't you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?”
― Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

“According to Egyptian texts, to eat of this fruit was to eat of the flesh and the fluid of the Goddess, the patroness of sexual pleasure and reproduction. According to the Bible story, the forbidden fruit caused the couple's conscious comprehension of sexuality. Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve became aware of the sexual nature of their own bodies, "And they knew that they were naked." So it was that when the male deity found them, they had modestly covered their genitals with aprons of fig leaves. But it was vitally important to the construction of the Levite myth that they did not both decide to eat the forbidden fruit together, which would have been a more logical turn for the tale to take since the fruit symbolised sexual consciousness. No, the priestly scribes make it exceedingly clear that the woman Eve ate of the fruit first - upon the advice and counsel of the serpent. It can hardly have been chance or coincidence that it was a serpent who offerred Eve the advice. For people at that time knew that the serpent was the symbol, perhaps even the instrument, of divine counsel in the religion of the Goddess. It was surely intended in the Paradise myth, as in the Indo-European serpent and dragon myths, that the serpent, as the familiar counsellor of women, be seen as a source of evil and be placed in such a menacing and villainous role that to listen to the prophetesses of the female deity would be to violate the religion of the male deity in the most dangerous manner. {...} We are told that, by eating the fruit first, women possessed sexual consciousness before man and in turn tempted man to partake the forbidden fruit, that is, to join her sinfully in sexual pleasures. This image of Eve as a sexually tempting but god-defying seductress was surely intended as a warning to all Hebrew men to stay away from the sacred women of the temples, for if they succumb to the temptations of these women, they simultaneously accepted the female deity - Her fruit - Her sexuality and, perhaps most important, the resulting matrilineal identity for any children who might be conceived in this manner. It must also, perhaps even more pointedly, have been directed at Hebrew women, cautioning them not to take part in the ancient religion and its sexual customs, as they appear to have continued to do so, despite the warnings and punishments meted out by the Levite priests.”
― Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman

“Not all men rape women,
not all men are thieves,
not all men are chicken,
not all men wanna be in your jeans.
And that's alright
because it's rude to generalize
so not all men are bad,
I understand
but all women and how they're absurd?
Now that's just a fact.”
― Maya Amlin, If I Have A Daughter One Day

“An industry created to satisfy the male sex right came to create the culture in which women had to survive.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination

“A feminist critique is fundamentally undermined by using female pronouns for men or referring to them in any way as if they were women.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination

“The advantage of adding 'gender identity' to hate crimes legislation for transgender rights activists is that it provides a way to defeat feminists by making their criticism of the transgender project illegal.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination

“Under the guise that their predilections were about something biological - a misplaced female mind in a male body rather than sexual excitement - they have represented themselves as an oppressed minority akin to homosexuals. This has enabled them to infiltrate their fantasies and priorities into policy making at local and national levels, health policy, sports policy, education policy, prison policy.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination

“Women and girls need single sex toilets to avoid men's sexual harassment and aggression. In the UK in 2018, it was reported that just under 90% of complaints regarding changing room sexual assaults, voyeurism and harassment were about incidents in unisex facilities, and two thirds of all sexual harassment in leisure centres and public swimming pools were in unisex changing rooms.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination

“Transgender rights activists campaign to downgrade the importance of biology in support of the claim that men can really be women. This has had particularly widespread consequences for women's status. For a feminist movement to exist, women have to be thinkable, to conceptualise themselves as an oppressed group based upon a common characteristic. If the word 'woman' ceases to have any meaning, or the meaning is downgraded, then feminism cannot exist because 'women' have become unthinkable. This erasure of women is the ultimate triumph of transvestism at this time in history.”
― Sheila Jeffreys

“Transvestites are seeking to empty the word 'woman' of meaning and are forming language about female biology to suit their own sexual excitements and to prevent any challenge to their ideology. They have created their own language to downgrade women's status such as the word 'ciswoman' which they use to distinguish adult human females from 'transwomen'. In this way they demote those born female to just one variety of the category of women and provide an object lesson in how men have labelled and defined women to suit their purposes over the centuries of male domination.”
― Sheila Jeffreys

“The creation of the category of 'transgender' children is the sine qua non of their argument that they suffer from a biological condition of 'gender identity'. It serves to prove that they are not sexually motivated because children are seen as innocent. Children's lifetime health and functioning has been sacrificed to support a male adult paraphilia.”
― Sheila Jeffreys

“Transgenderism is the attempt to wrest female biology from women and in that process not only violates women's agency but our collective capacity for resistance. We need the language of sex difference if patriarchy is to be challenged and resisted.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“Adherence to queer theory forbids any discussion about sex and gender that does not restrict itself to 'gender identity', namely the sexist social construct that gives ideological effect to women's oppression. Faith in 'gender identity' is hardened into its own brand of dogma, ideological conformity and coercion.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“Whether or not individual men pose harm, it benefits women if all males are excluded from some spaces.”
― Karen Ingala Smith, Defending Women's Spaces

“If we accept the concept of "cis" women, we're accepting that the class of 'woman' can be mixed sex.”
― Karen Ingala Smith, Defending Women's Spaces

“Disagreeing with the beliefs of someone is not the same as saying they don't exist.”
― Karen Ingala Smith, Defending Women's Spaces

“MURRAY CONTINUED TO RAISE the issue of sex discrimination in her writings and presentations to academic and civic groups. On June 19, 1970, at a hearing held by the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, she described the multilayered discrimination black women faced, using an impressive array of charts to compare salary and unemployment rates by race, sex, and age to supplement her testimony. From her days as a restaurant worker in college to her career as an attorney and educa-tor, she had been paid less than, and denied the respect accorded to, her male peers. She had spent the first half of her life fighting for equal rights as an African American, only to discover that she would have to spend the second half fighting for equal rights as a woman. 'If anyone should ask a Negro woman what is her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be,' Murray told the committee, her voice laden with emotion, 'I survived.' Three months later, she would testify before the New York City Commission on Human Rights, headed by fellow Yale Law School alumna Eleanor Holmes Norton. Unable to hold back the tears, Murray openly wept as she recounted the opportunities she had been denied.”
― Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

“To one male seminarian, who complained that all the talk about discrimination dominated too much class time, Murray responded, 'If you have to live with anger, I have to live with pain. I'lI trade you both my pain, my sex, my race and my age--and see how you deport yourself in such circumstances. Barring that, try to imagine for 24 hours what it must be like to be a Negro in a predominantly white seminary, a woman in an institution dominated by men and for the convenience of men, some of whom radiate hostility even though they do not say a word, who are patronizing and kindly as long as I do not get out of my place, but who feel threatened by my intellect, my achievements, and my refusal to be suppressed.' Of their differences, Murray told him, 'If I can't take your judgmental statements and your anger, I am in the wrong place. If you cannot take my methods of fighting for survival, then you have chosen the wrong vocation.”
― Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

“After writing so bitterly about the clothes of my youth, I must now be just, and admit that they had one great advantage over the clothes we wear nowadays. We had Pockets. What lovely hoards I kept in them: always pencils and india-rubbers and as mall sketch-book and a very large pocket-knife; beside string, nails, horse-chestnuts, lumps of sugar, bits of bread-and-butter, a pair of scissors, and many other useful objects. Sometimes even a handkerchief. For a year or two I also carried about a small book of Rembrandt’s etchings, for purposes of worship.
Why mayn’t we have Pockets? Who forbids it? We have got Woman’s Suffrage, but why must we still always be inferior to Men?”
― Gwen Raverat, Period Piece

“Men's sexual violence in all these forms ensures women's awareness of their second class status and constructs the way in which women interact with the world. However, many of the forms of men's sexual violence are not taken seriously, they are blamed on women, hidden, or compartmentalised so that the whole picture of how women's lives are affected cannot be grasped.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination

“For women to share in the rights and opportunities considered important for men, the abolition of sexual harassment is a necessity.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination

“The forms of men's fetish behaviour that have been unleashed in recent decades are not private. They do not consist of fantasies that men keep to themselves but affect women profoundly. In some cases, as with contemporary men's transvestism, they threaten the whole understanding of what women are, attack the very basis of feminism and destroy women's human rights because the men actually claim to be women.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination

“The touchy feely intersectional feminism which is supposedly so 'inclusive' and 'kind' is more than just toothless in resisting patriarchy: it is another form of misogyny, aggressively helping to obfuscate and drown out, and even in some versions, to actively suppress, the very range of voices that make up feminisms constituency.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“Patriarchy is the cultural power structure in which male people are default humans, and female people are defined by projections - and the acts of domination those projections impel and licence - which flow from male people towards male people.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“[...] 'Transwomen' are intensely preoccupied with the ancient patriarchal question: "What is a woman?" Their answer is that a woman is who she says she is, so long as it is not actually a woman who says it!”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“The denial of women's sex-specificity repeats in a newly invented format - the historic patriarchal refusal to grant specific recognition and value to women - to our rationality, bodies, and agency. The elimination of sex as a biological, material reality does not facilitate gender fluidity or breakdown gender hierarchy. On the contrary, it sures up the very patriarchal foundations which abuse women and children's human rights to agency and bodily integrity. Rather than transgenderism being about the opening up of gender for men to reject the norms of masculinity, it is the imposition of masculine dominance in a newly-minted form.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“When Stonewall reframes gender dysphoria as an identity badge, it absolves schools of the responsibility to offer individualised support to each child and replaces it with a blanket politicised approach. The child is presented as a member of a political rights group, rather than as a child who may be experiencing distress and confusion and who is in need of careful and thoughtful support.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“Diversity policies, saturated with a monologic view of 'gender identity', execute a masculinist trans rights political programme through the universities, the healthcare system, Gender Identity Development Clinics, the school system, the police and political parties in the UK. Through this politicised programme 'group think', the majority of the population - women - have a 'cis' identity foisted upon us and cries of transphobia are heard whenever a woman rejects the idea that male bodied humans are our 'sisters' (just because they say they are) and who, in the 'victimisation awards', suffer extreme oppression at our hands.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“The transgender movement shift shapes by wearing a cloak of progressivism, human rights, equality, diversity and inclusion. It is particularly dangerous since it hides its authoritarianism in plain sight. Perhaps one day society will look back and wonder how, a century after women were 'allowed' to get the vote, women and men were prepared to vilify, exclude and gag by any means possible the women who saw through the pomp and stood aside from the baying, frightened crowd to declare: 'the Emperor has no clothes'.”
― Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics

“Transgender people should be accepted as they are, but not as the sex they are not.”
― Karen Ingala Smith, Defending Women's Spaces