Womens Liberation Quotes

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.”
― Rebecca West, The Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917

“People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West

“You speak your mind, don't you...? A rare find in a woman.”
― Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher

“Because transsexuals have lost their physical “members” does not mean that they have lost their ability to penetrate women—women’s mind, women’s space, women’s sexuality. Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women so that they seem noninvasive.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“Once settled arguments about women’s emancipation, individual rights, religious freedom, sexual freedom, animal rights, and freedom of speech are up for debate again in Europe.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“The concept of the "female" is a loaded one. Female. Woman. The entire concept of the womyn is derived from, and supports the existence and submission to the male.

When you hear "female", the social association is weakness, incompetence, and fragility. Almost as if nothing done can shatter the chain of alleged inferiority. If you refuse this, society makes you a "radical".”
― Sasha Scarr

“Finally, and I think most important, there are more male-to-constructed-female transsexuals because men are socialized to fetishize and objectify. The same socialization that enables men to objectify women in rape, pornography, and “drag” enables them to objectify their own bodies.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“More than any other major religion, Islam formalizes the subordination of women. Islamic religious law, as codified by the “official” schools of Sunni Islamic law (the Hanbali, Shafi’i, Hanafi, and Maliki schools), insists on male guardianship over women. In Islam, “any woman must have a ‘guardian,’ wali; her closest male relative if she is unmarried, her husband if she is not.”16 This remnant of seventh-century Arab culture—which has spread through Islam to the other parts of the world that are now Muslim majority—has never been revised in official schools of Islamic law.17 Imams and other Islamic religious leaders today continue to chastise women for disobeying the modesty doctrine. They cite passages in the Quran to assign girls a position in the family that requires them to be docile, to depend on male relatives for money, and to submit to their husband’s dominion over their bodies. Marriage is typically arranged, and there is often an exchange of money in the process. Under the religious rule of Islam, it is still common today that a woman’s rights are essentially sold to a man she may not even know.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“Islamism has become the “go-to” haven for those seeking order amid such chaos. Sharia courts have been established in these countries, filling the void of social control. After the savagery of dictatorship and civil war, the promise of divine law is understandably welcomed by a population hungry for order and stability. When the Islamists come to town, they therefore reestablish order again with their own savagery. For example, the immodest woman is no longer considered simply immodest; she is an adulterous sinner who must be flogged and stoned.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“Rapists are created, not born” has become the accepted wisdom.39 But when it comes to migrants and minorities, pointing to cultural explanations for their behavior toward women is taboo. This seems contradictory. Indeed, when you consider how Muslim men are educated about sex—or not—it makes no sense at all.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“In 2006, Egyptian bloggers witnessed hundreds of men thronging the streets to celebrate the end of Ramadan, harassing women with or without hijabs, ripping off their clothes, encircling them, and trying to assault them.48 Girls ran for cover in nearby restaurants, taxis, and cinemas. As protests continued in Tahrir Square in 2012, mob attacks against women became more organized. Men formed concentric rings around individual women, stripping and raping them.49 Some Egyptian women spoke out, taking their accounts and video evidence of sexual assaults to police, but little headway was made until laws against sexual harassment were introduced in 2014.50 The rape game crossed the Mediterranean in December 2015. During New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne, as we have seen, more than a thousand young men formed rings around individual women, sexually assaulting them.51 When the victims identified the perpetrators as looking “foreign,” “North African,” and “Arab,” they were pilloried as racists on social media.52 The local feminist and magazine editor Alice Schwarzer’s dogged reporting established that the young men had coordinated and planned the attacks that night “to the detriment of the Kufar [infidels].”53 Schwarzer was vindicated twelve months later, when Cologne police chief Jürgen Mathies confirmed that the attacks had been intentionally coordinated to intimidate the German population.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“It may no longer be fashionable to make such comparisons, but the economic evidence is unequivocal: liberal democratic societies are more peaceful, prosperous, and tolerant than those that permit autocratic rule, as in Russia; one-party rule, as in China; or theocracy, as in Iran. Yet these days, those who advocate the superiority of Western civilization are demonized, especially on university campuses, as racists or white supremacists. Few within the establishment are willing to challenge the politically correct consensus and insist instead on upholding the core classical liberal values.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“As the legitimate authorities shut down the free speech of those who seek to defend the open society, they inadvertently create an opportunity for forces that are not much more committed to liberal values than those they seek to expel or exclude from Europe.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“True white supremacists want to enslave, subjugate, or annihilate nonwhites—much as true jihadis think that those who refuse to submit to Islam ought to die. Ordinary Europeans who express concern that waiting lists for hospital services and housing will worsen as more migrants enter the country are not white supremacists. However, simply ignoring their concerns or labeling them racist will only create political opportunities for true racists.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“Rather than focusing on where people come from and their motivations for leaving, I believe the main criterion for granting residence should be how far they are likely to abide by the laws and adopt the values of their host society.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“Europe must stop pretending that the stabilization of the Muslim world is somebody else’s problem. More than “soft power” is required to restore order to the countries from which so many immigrants are coming. EU member states must be willing to engage in leadership and, if necessary, to intervene militarily to restore order in international conflict areas rather than continuing to depend on the United States to deal with each crisis. As it stands, European defense budgets are unjustifiably low considering the rapidly escalating violence of the regions to the south and east of the Mediterranean.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“men monopolizes the most desirable mates. Since accumulating wealth and status takes time and work for most men, the norm of polygamy pushes up the age of marriage for males, drives down the age of marriage for females, removes incentives for female educational and economic attainment, and increases the fertility rate. The surplus of unmarried males scrambling for an artificially reduced pool of marriageable females spurs the growth of crime and violence.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“The extreme, yet perhaps inevitable, expression of all these beliefs and behaviors—polygamy, religiously sanctioned bigotry, unchecked sexual harassment, a lack of sex education, repressed sexual urges, and the honor/shame dichotomy—is taharrush gamea, “the rape game” in Arabic.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“Dawa is happening not only in Muslim communities but also in Western prisons. Believing that religious education will benefit prisoners, the authorities mistakenly give agents of dawa access to Muslim prisoners. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they claim to be religious community representatives, all the while harboring links to terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and Hizb ut-Tahrir.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“Honor violence is a set of enforcement measures used to uphold the modesty doctrine. Girls and women who step out of line face injury and even murder at the hands of relatives if they drift too far toward emancipation. So-called honor killing is meant to remove a stain on a family’s honor caused by real or alleged sexual misconduct. In Western countries, the victims of honor violence also include Sikh, Hindu, and Kurdish women, but most appear to be Muslim.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“Young people in Western societies have grown up with the assumption that gender equality is a given. They did not have to fight for basic equality and are often oblivious to its being undermined around them. Even when they are confronted with the erosion of women’s rights in the street, they sometimes apologize for criticizing their attackers. In court, victims of sexual assault appearing on the witness stand have to insist that they are not racists. Almost every woman I interviewed in the course of researching this book felt obliged to begin with a caveat: “I’m not against migrants,” “I’m from the Left,” or “I am not racist.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“Societies that permit the existence of parallelthe girl’s situation did not meet the requirements for coercive measures under the law, and if the girl would not voluntarily move away from her husband, it could not force her to. As a direct consequence of the case, the social services in Mönsterås had to move to a different location after receiving threats.14 This is a blatant breakdown in the rule of law. This girl’s rights were not protected by those who are paid by Swedish taxpayers to enforce the law against child marriage. And there are many more like her. In the United States, an estimated 248,000 children, some as young as 12, were married between 2000 and 2010.15 In Germany, too, the problem of child marriage arose as asylum-seeker numbers increased. In 2016, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community reported that 1,475 refugee minors were married, three-quarters of them girls and 361 of them under the age of 14.16 In response to these figures, the following year, the German government passed a law stating that the minimum marriage age is 18 years. In an attempt to pander to Muslim constituents, both the Left and the Greens voted against the law for being “too general.”17 SHARIA COUNCILS AND LEGAL DOUBLE STANDARDS Societies that permit the existence of parallel communities resign themselves to the growth of parallel legal systems. This is the case with sharia courts that apply Islamic law to the marital affairs of believers. Dutch researcher Machteld Zee’s study of sharia councils in the United Kingdom estimates that between ten and eighty-five sharia councils operate there.18 Zee documents cases of women seeking divorce being sent back to abusive husbands by sharia courts and being denied the legal protections that non-Muslim wives receive under UK law.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“For decades Western authorities have turned a blind eye to unequal treatment of women in immigrant communities not only when it comes to marriage and divorce but also in regard to education. Examples of voluntary gender segregation at university student events may seem like minor encroachments on equal rights, but when university heads defend gender segregation, we should be concerned. In 2013, the University of Leicester’s Islamic Society seated women at the back of the room for a training course.21 Rather than condemning the discrimination, the head of Universities UK, Nicola Dandridge, defended it, suggesting that segregation of the sexes was “not completely alien to our culture.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“If Egyptian men harass Egyptian women in the streets of Cairo and then come to Germany and do the same thing to German women in the streets of Cologne, it is not because they feel inferior or oppressed; it is because they think they can get away with it, just as they did back home.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“Of all the forces holding back immigrants who grew up Muslim, Islam is the biggest precisely because it enshrines the subordination of women.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“The UK Social Mobility Commission found that only 19.8 percent of adult British Muslims had a full-time job in 2017”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“It appears that those immigrants with illiberal and misogynistic ideas are protected but we liberal feminists are not.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“The world’s population has trebled since 1951, when the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was ratified in Geneva. It was created in a completely different global context from the one that exists today. It was devised following the mass displacement and attempted genocide of European Jews during World War II and aimed to offer a safe haven to relatively small numbers of individuals from countries fleeing explicit, documented political persecution by governments. [...] In 1967, the convention was extended universally so that anyone living in a dangerous place, not just those personally persecuted by the state, had grounds for asylum. Millions—potentially hundreds of millions—of people now qualify.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

“Og det slår meg en ting i at man uten videre godtar at en ung mann skal (og må) ha en tid hvor han lærer verden å kjenne, 'samler erfaringer', 'raser ut'... eller hva man nå vil kalle set. At han "gjør sine erfaringer" med kvinner, forutsetter at han har en partner, at man er to om det (eller minst to). Men hans partner? Herregud, hvor dypt det sitter i alle: at det som er tillatt for en ung mann, ja til og med en fordel, å ha 'verdenserfaring', det er for en tilsvarende ung pike ikke en fordel, men en skittflekk, en fornedrelse, noe som har merket henne for livet, noe som aldri mere kan vaskes av.”
― Jens Bjørneboe, Uten en tråd

“Women seek relief in tears where men seek relief in masturbation, which may be a distinction to be valued”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman