Feminine Struggle Quotes

I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.

For more than six thousand years the history of woman has been one of hopeless sadness. She moved only to the clank of chains, and her vain desire for better and higher things could not find expression, for woman was by force of circumstances inarticulate. Detraction of one sex and exaltation of the other became a habit of mind expressed in law, in religion, in literature as well as in the ordinary activities of everyday life.

I wish I wasn’t a girl who needed so much but a little free creature that slept in deserts and ran on clouds and lived on lilies.

Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism.

Every single girl in the world has had to fight to have herself heard, to have space, and to have a self in societies that try their best to deny them all three.

The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'

All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.

I think if there's anything 2016 has taught me, it's that we have a real hard time with women in our society; we have a hard time with the feminine.

The woman hanging from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago is not alone...She is all the women of the apartment building who stand watching her, watching themselves.

Even as a woman who has a voice in the world, I struggle to find it, to use it, to keep it, to stretch it, to take risks with my words. And I don't think I'm alone. I think the most powerful women among us struggle with how to use their voice. Because I think what every woman knows, is that when she speaks her truth she is at risk - whether it's Hillary Clinton or a rural woman in Rwanda.

For men, the answer was always the same and never farther away than the nearest sword. For a woman, a mother, the way was stonier and harder to know.

He saw wan Woman toil with famished eyes; He saw her bound, and strove to sing her free. He saw her fall'n; and wrote "The Bridge of Sighs"; And on it crossed to immortality.

I do not have a competitive advantage when fighting another woman.

The hardest thing about being a woman is different for everyone. For me, it's the mirage of 'having it all' somewhere off in the distance. I think in many ways you do have to choose.