Women's Burden Quotes

Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today's warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children.

Across society, the lion's share of caring responsibility - whether for children or elderly relatives - still falls on women.

Women work overtime, do double triple duty, juggle ten balls at once -- children, careers, husbands, schoolwork, housework, church work, and more work -- and when one of the balls drops, we think something is wrong with us.

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to braid the hair, to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I don't know when most women sleep.

We would be driving down the street in a place like Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and started to see, my gosh, the only people that have shoes are men. Why does that woman have a baby in her belly and one on her back, and she's carrying a huge load of bananas? You start to ask these questions.

Society has not been set up in a way that allows women to go back to work after taking time off. Many women now have to work as well as do everything at home and no one can do everything. Society needs to find a way of relieving women.

Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials -- to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only one woman's hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas under the pot that is boiling over, soothe the older child who has broken a toy, and open both doors at once. She is a nutritionist, a child psychologist, an engineer, a production manager, an expert buyer, all in one. Her husband sees her as free to plan her own time, and envies her; she sees him as having regular hours and envies him.

Women's handbags are incredibly heavy. You rarely get to pick one up and, when you do, you wonder why anyone carries so much stuff around all day.

Women aren't trying to do too much. Women have too much to do.

In Kenya women are the first victims of environmental degradation, because they are the ones who walk for hours looking for water, who fetch firewood, who provide food for their families.

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

The work-life balance is a harsh reality for so many women, who are forced every day to make impossible choices. Do they take their kids to the doctor...and risk getting fired? Do they work weekends so they can afford to send their kids to better childcare...even though it means even less time with their families? Do they take another shift at work, so they can pay for piano lessons for their kids...even though it means they have to stop volunteering for the PTA? It just shouldn't be this difficult to raise healthy families.

A smattering of English is worse than useless; it is an unnecessary tax on our women.

War is a thing of fearful and curious anomalies ... It has shown that government by men only is not an appeal to reason, but an appeal to arms; that on women, without a voice to protest, must fall the burden. It is easier to die than to send a son to death.

I do think it's unfair for women who get pegged with creating fare for other women.

No matter how far they rise, women never stop being the caregiver. At the end of the day, women bear the emotional responsibility for their families.

One reason women are left 'holding the baby' is anti-male discrimination in rights of maternity/paternity leave.

People should meet an acceptable threshold of appropriateness. But for many women in the public eye, it just seems that the burden is so heavy.

I'm not superwoman. It's impossible to do everything 100 percent all of the time. And suggesting that women should be able to do it only puts more pressure on them.

We, as women, particularly if we have families, you know, we're taking care of children, we're taking care of, you know, our home, our husbands, we take care of everybody but ourselves. And it's really unfortunate.

Child care can almost bankrupt a family, even a two-parent household in which both parents are working. That keeps a parent from being at ease and it really stifles the social and economic growth of a family. Women are hit hard across the board, but particularly in homes where the mother is the head of the household and the only wage-earner. It hurts her, and it hurts her children.

Women work and feel like they have to take care of so many details. Sometimes they don't get much help from their husbands.

A home kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.

Women are the ones that bear the greatest burden. We are also the ones who nurture societies.

I think it's time we women stopped carrying supplies for the entire family. If children don't have room to carry their own toys, if men don't have pockets in their pants, tougho.