Mattie Brinkerhoff Quotes

Rural communities in Africa, South Asia and Latin America are where the majority of hungry people are and the inequality that exists between women and men in these communities is holding back progress. These women have a very tough time, so much is expected of them.

The ability of women is not known because they are relegated to the business of procreation, child-rearing, and breast feeding.

In our tribal areas the literacy rate among women is 3%; among men, 17%; and there is no economy.

Usually this desire for family size limitation has been laid to economic pressure... It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and abortion

Treating women like a burden to the men is one of the reasons for poverty.

I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.

We have had virtually unlimited access to abortion for nearly twenty years. Yet during that same period, more and more women and children have slipped into poverty.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

As a child I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was a key to improving an individual's life.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

Women with money and women in power are two uncomfortable ideas in our society.

Women are more than smart enough to see that McCain's policies are a disaster... He is anti- every reproductive issue we've ever fought for.

Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.

Women are the face of hunger. Hunger has a female face. It affects women disproportionately, and therefore it affects children as well, and it gets passed on inter-generationally, too.

In order to stabilize human population growth, we must prioritize the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the provision of ubiquitous access to the knowledge and techniques of fertility management, and the continued raising of child survival rates.

Men always suffer when women are ignorant. They suffer more than women, not only because women are stronger than men and more resistant, but because men are peculiarly vulnerable to the damage ignorant women can do at the periods of their life when they most need intelligent and wise care: in infancy, in adolescence, in times of illness and mental and emotional crisis, and in old age.

The dogma of woman's complete historical subjection to men must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created in the human mind.

Choice is a uniquely female issue. We don't share the same reproductive systems.

Women are now in the situation of the mass of mankind a few years since, when science and learning were in the hands of priests, and property was held by vassalage.

Most Americans are well aware that the societies that are most restrictive of women’s rights are also the nations of greatest poverty, disease and environmental degradation …

Sexist and racist economic policies in the United States such as a lack of educational opportunity for poor families and a lack of sustainable income from many jobs contribute to women’s and girls’ entry into prostitution. The economic and legal vulnerability of undocumented immigrant women in the United States is exploited in prostitution/pornography

The fragility and powerlessness of the state in large swathes of Africa, and the uncivil nature of the forces that emerge to fill the gaps, give cause for concern. In places such as Sierra Leone or Liberia, where there is mass illiteracy and up to three-quarters of the women have been raped, what are the prospects for civil peace and reducing widespread violence?

Whilst, alas, upon such times are we fallen that a learned man seems well-nigh a portent, and erudition in a woman is a thing utterly unknown.

It is an obscenity—an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.