Female Empowerment Quotes
Marcus Porcius Cato. This quotation has had two different interpretations over time. One was that women if they received equality of treatment and voting would have an advantage for they also had their traditional “feminine wiles” and their sexuality, hence would dominate men. The second was a also a warning but based on the fact that women were superior in many ways, and given an equal chance, would excel men. The later interpretation is argued by some who point to the 2011 American data that shows more females than males graduating from high school and college, and females outnumber males in medical, law and several other professional schools. With the exception of a few Roman men, most heeded Cato’s warning and never took a chance on female equality.
This was another historical reality that shocked traditionalists. There was nothing in the Koran or Islamic scripture requiring women to wear veils and burkas. Many Muslims and non-Muslims, to this day, do not realize that.
An “asp” was the term Greeks and Romans used for a poisonous snake. Menander was a very popular playwright 300 years before the birth of Christ. His phrase was not a new idea at the time but, common wisdom” among Greeks—including many women who were controlled by the social values of the day that were very sexist. However, when Menander wrote it, it received mass distribution in that plays were the major form of mass media and entertainment at the time. So this conventional wisdom was common as Rome became the superpower and whose culture dominated including the Greek plays. Note that this attitude did not reflect the point of view that women were not important enough to educate to write. To the contrary, the implication is that women were too potentially dangerous to allow them to learn to write. Upper class women however were expected to read, but men were not only taught to write but to do so persuasively.
Jinnah was a modern Islamist who saw the role of females in a modern context. He, like the Indian Hindu leaders were in a sense products of the West and Western government and education. He would be very surprised that in his Pakistan men can murder their female relatives who they believe have dishonored the family, or that women would not be educated in the Madrassas, or that authorities could sentence a female relative of a man deemed guilty of seduction to be gang raped, but that is what happens in modern Pakistan. Jinnah and many of the early leaders believed that their new government could modernize Islam but the control and influence went the other way. Pakistan became a religiously dominated autocracy rather than the democracy that Jinnah foresaw.
This statement is referring to the custom of women covering their eyes whenever a man who they did not know passed them. Turks did not ever use Burkas the way some other Muslim countries do, but they wore headscarves and covered their eyes when a strange man appeared. This was a shocking statement in a sexist Islamic culture. Although the process of modernization and reform in Turkey was relatively bloodless, Ataturk was prepared to and did use force to defend it. This and many others made the role of women not only uniquely equal in the Islamic world, but women were suddenly elevated to the level of most Western nations and in voting rights were ahead of most. He used his own family to set an example. See {584503}.
Although she was living proof of a woman’s ability to accomplish what most men could not, she was always publicly differential to men and their sexism. Although she opposed women voting in Parliamentary elections, she did believe that women should vote in local elections where the understood the issues much better.
