Manal al-Sharif Quotes

I am not telling men to step away from speaking for women's rights; rather, I am focusing on women to be independent to fight for themselves.

Girls' education is no silver bullet. Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them, so both remain mired in the past. But when a country educates and unleashes women, those educated women often become force multipliers for good.

For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, we have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier.

If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.

If we should see ladies attending conventions, traveling about the country in great carts drawn by many yoke of oxen, waving their pocket handkerchiefs to assembled multitudes, it would greatly shock our sensibilities.

In May 2011, I drove a car in the city of Khobar, Saudi Arabia, to protest the kingdom's ban on women driving.

With each generation, women's ability to live the lives they choose reaches a place their grandmothers never thought possible. But that doesn't mean everything is perfect or that our work is finished.

For a people is only as great, as free, as lofty, as advanced as its women are free, noble and progressive.

Unfortunately, as obsessed as I am with all of those Grimm's slash Disney princesses, I do think women have evolved socially in so many ways.

Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don't know how much history young women today know about those battles.

Certain things happened in the early church. Women who had never had any freedom suddenly have the ability to stand up and speak and be treated as equals within the life of the church.

The women's movement completely changed attitudes all over the world in ways we'll never be able to count.

There are many women who came before me who didn't really have the same opportunities that I have had. That's why I always wanted to be a great ambassador - not only today's generation - but for the women who really didn't have a voice, but who paved the way for me.

I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned.

I think, certainly in the more civilized societies, women's roles are growing in power all of the time.

Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more to emancipate women than any other single thing. The bicycle was linked in the psyches of women at that time as a symbol of practical emancipation. Women could go places, wear their skirts shorter to manage the bicycle, and be independent.

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

Women have had the vote for over forty years and their organizations lobby in Washington for all sorts of causes; why, why, why don't they take up their own causes and obvious needs?

The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.

This nation is really ready for a woman president. It's taken time, but we're ready.

While all of these are important and significant events, it is the United States' foreign policy that furthers the advancement of freedoms and rights for women that is the most striking for me.

It took the United States until 1920 to give women the franchise and another 40 or 50 years to start utilizing women's potential. How many women of incredible potential did we fail and what achievements were lost to all because we never tapped that potential?

I certainly came up in an era where women were really making strides and making a point to beat down doors and find their place and crash through the glass ceiling.

There are many Saudi women doctors, and there are many wealthy and powerful and well-educated Saudi women who circumvent the restrictions put upon them, quietly or otherwise.