Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

There isn't a religion on earth that isn't damaging to the human race because every one of them is patriarchal and every one eliminates more than half of the human race - women. They are all oppressors of women.

All religions, if you shrink them down, are all about controlling women's sexuality.

It is the modern feminists who are the real male chauvinists, lusting for reproductive freedom (sexual irresponsibility) like playboys and demanding empowerment, that is, envying and imitating not only males, but male fools, judging inner worth by outer performance, sacrificing being for doing, finding their identity in their worldly careers, not in their inner essence, in their physical and spiritual wombs and motherhoods. This is what Karl Stern called "the flight from woman."

What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was "the problem that had no name." Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.

I never thought of myself as a sex symbol. I just do the cover of magazines. I think it’s really unfair men or people in the world think you can’t be both – you can’t be a sex symbol and a serious businessperson. Who says I can’t be both? Who says I can’t do the cover of Maxim and run a production company? Women are complex. Women are beautiful and intellectual and spiritual and social and entrepreneurial. They’re everything. And I think I’m a great example of that.

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

Too many women have given up the power over the years because men have created the terms.

I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.

For many years, despite what I thought were really punitive decisions about women in the church, I stayed and stayed and stayed. I kept saying to myself, "The Catholic church is my church, and by God, I'm going to stay here, despite what the hierarchy does."

It is ridiculous to take on a man's job just in order to be able to say that 'a woman has done it - yah!' The only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job and you want to do it.

I'm not for women, frankly, in any job. I don't want any of them around. Thank God we don't have any in the Cabinet.

Feminism is something I think about more when I watch the film, Christine, rather than when I was actually doing it, to be honest with you. But I do think it functions as a sort of interesting feministic critique, because you are seeing a woman who's resolutely incapable of behaving like the kind of woman that's acceptable at the time. She doesn't know how to play the game by everyone else's rules, and it makes you realize that actually there were rules that were functioning for a woman to be a careerist.

Cleavage is to a man what power is to a woman.

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

You had to be an over-the-top, demanding, dramatic figure in order to progress as a woman in Europe over the last few hundred years. Now people say, "You're being such a prima donna," meaning you're being hard to deal with or crazy. It's a bit sexist.

That's exactly what's exciting for me - the idea of infiltrating the male structure and affecting change from within.

There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifery.

Get over the feeling that the two words don’t go together - women and power. The fact is, if we don’t put the two together, and don’t understand how power changes complexion in the hands of women, then we’re not going to make it.

The pedestal is immobilizing and subtly insulting whether or not some women yet realize it. We must move up from the pedestal.

All the old clichés about women need to be undone. Enough already. We're in the other position now. We are desirable older, we can date younger guys and it's not this big taboo. Men have been doing this for years.

If we take into account that women have had the right to vote only for some 100 years - in some countries even less - and that we have already won seats in governments or presidential offices, I understand that men look at this rise with some anxiety.

For years I have been accused of making snap judgments. Honestly, this is not the case because I am a profound military student and the thoughts I express, perhaps too flippantly, are the result of years of thought and study.

If you are sitting there waiting for someone to tell you how wonderful you are, you'll never get anything done. Women need to get over being women. I'm tired of that socialization of women; that we are always supposed to be sitting around pleasing somebody.

Forget that I'm a woman. Forget the accusations that I am a Right Winger demanding privilege - I had precious little privilege in my early years.

I believe all women know in their heart of hearts that they truly are divine and magical, even if they've temporarily forgotten.