Women At Work Quotes & Sayings

Duty to his wife. Duty to his children. Duty to work, to committees, to charities. Duty to Lynette. Duty to the other women. It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself. — Richard Flanagan

Politics is still the man's game. The women are allowed to do the chores, the dirty work, and now and then
but only occasionally
one is present at some secret conference or other. But it's not the rule. They can go out and get the vote, if they can and will; they can collect money, they can be grateful for being permitted to work. But that is all. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

Women of the Gallagher Academy, who comes here?" she asked.
Just then, every girl at every table (even the newbies) stood and said in unison, "We are the sisters of Gillian."
"Why do you come?" my mother asked.
"To learn her skills. Honor her sword. And keep her secrets."
"To what end do you work?"
"To the cause of justice and light."
"How long will you strive?"
"For all the days of our lives," we finished and I felt a little like a character in one of my grandma's soap operas. — Ally Carter

At breakfast one Saturday I decided to tell Hank my desire to go back to work. He explodes, 'What can you do? You can't make enough to buy your own Kotex — Martha Lemasters

I'm a woman; in so many ways I've been programmed to please. I took the job and spent time hunkered over figures, budgets, charts, and fiscal-year projections. I tried, but I hated it.
"Working at a job you don't like is the same as going to prison every day," my father used to say. He was right. I felt imprisoned by an impressive title, travel, perks, and a good salary. On the inside, I was miserable and lonely, and I felt as if I was losing myself. I spent weekends working on reports no one read, and I gave presentations that I didn't care about. It made me feel like a sellout and, worse, a fraud.
Now set free, like any inmate I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. — Kathleen Flinn

Women really must have equal pay for equal work, equality in work at home, and reproductive choices. Men must press for these things also. They must cease to see them as "women's issues" and learn that they are everyone's issues - essential to survival on planet Earth. — Erica Jong

Women are smarter by basic instinct and by what we have to do to multitask at home and at work. My mother did that 50 years ago, but it wasn't called multitasking or stress back then. She had a job, two kids and the meals to make with no cook or maid. My father would come home every day and expect lunch. He was a nice guy, but he was clueless! — Mireille Guiliano

When a war is over I think it's a cowardly thing to leave the war behind you in minefields that hit women and children and the most vulnerable. Imagine the war is finished and you go to work and there are snipers shooting at you. Imagine taking your kids to the beach and you find that the beach is blowing up beneath you. Like there's nowhere safe. — Paul McCartney

Any insistence on equal pay is crucial and any redefinition of work to include caregiving work so that it also has an economic value, at least at replacement level, that's crucial. So change does come from the bottom up, and it will come from girls and women and men who understand that for us all to be human beings instead of being grouped by gender is good for them, too. — Gloria Steinem

My mom was a housewife, and wasn't somebody that people would think of as a feminist, and when Ms. Magazine came out we were incredibly inspired by it. I used to cut pictures out of it and make posters that said, "Girls can do anything", and stuff like that, and my mom was inspired to work at a basement of a church doing anti-domestic violence work. Then she took me to the Soidarity Day thing, and it was the first time I had ever been in a big crowd of women yelling, and it really made me want to do it forever. — Kathleen Hanna

I scarcely remember any writer who has ever ventured to say that the half of the work of the world is actually accomplished by women; and very few husbands who would be otherwise than greatly startled and amazed, if not indignant, if not derisive, at the suggestion of such an idea as that the work of their wives was equal to their own. — Margaret Oliphant

At its best fashion is a game. But for women it's a compulsory game, like net ball, and you can't get out of it by faking your period. I know I have tried. And so for a woman every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope. No wonder there are so many fashion magazines. No wonder the fashion industry is worth an estimated 900 billion dollars a year. No wonder every woman's first thought is, for nearly every event in her life, be it work, snow or birth. The semi-despairing cry of "but what will I wear?" Because when a woman says I have nothing to wear, what she really means is there is nothing here for who I am supposed to be today. — Caitlin Moran

Don't we see that men's rightful task is to go out to work and wear themselves out trying to accumulate wealth, as though they were our factors or stewards, so that we can remain at home like the lady of the house directing their work and enjoying the profit of their labors? That, if you like, is the reason why men are naturally stronger and more robust than us - they need to be, so they can put up with the hard labor they must endure in our service. — Moderata Fonte

I am saying that I was able to mold those hours around the needs of my family, and that matters. And I really encourage other people at Facebook to mold hours around themselves. — Sheryl Sandberg

Women are often belittled for trying to resurrect these men and bring them back to life and to love. They are in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women did not do the work of teaching men who have lost touch with themselves how to love again. This labor of love is futile only when the men in question refuse to awaken, refuse growth. At this point it is a gesture of self-love for women to break their commitment and move on. — Bell Hooks

Over my lifetime, women have demonstrated repeatedly that they can do anything that men can do, while still managing traditional women's work at the same time. But the same expansion of roles has not been available to men. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume, even though the lyrics are degrading to women and offend me to my core. I am mortified by my music choices. — Roxane Gay

You know about women who work in bars." "What about them?" Bing asked. "Whores," Manx said. "Almost all of them. At least until their looks go, and in the case of Lily Carter's mother they're going fast. — Joe Hill

Henceforth we find woman no longer a slave of man and tool of lust, but the pride and joy of her husband, the fond mother training her children to virtue and godliness, the ornament and treasure of the family, the faithful sister, the zealous servant of the congregation in every work of Christian charity, the sister of mercy, the martyr with superhuman courage, the guardian angel of peace, the example of purity, humility, gentleness, patience, love, and fidelity unto death. Such women were unknown before. The heathen Libanius, the enthusiastic eulogist of old Grecian culture, pronounced an involuntary eulogy on Christianity when he exclaimed, as he looked at the mother of Chrysostom: "What women the Christians have! — Philip Schaff

As our boys and men are all expecting to be Presidents, so our girls and women must all hold themselves in readiness to preside inthe White House; and in no city in the world can honest industry be more at a discount than in this capital of the government of the people. — Jane Swisshelm

In my ninety-plus years, I have learned a secret. I have learned that when good men and good women face challenges with optimism, things will always work out! Truly, things always work out! Despite how difficult circumstances may look at the moment, those who have faith and move forward with a happy spirit will find that things always work out. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Men are biological. Women are biological. We pretend our minds are in control, but that's a very tenuous control at best, and a civilized society can't be built on uncontrolled biology. I see it in my work: intelligence betrayed by lust, by jealousy, by macho ownership; otherwise trustworthy men who can't be trusted at all around women, or vice versa. Hell, look at Congress. Well-intentioned, progressive, admired law-makers who end up losing it all because they can't control how they react to women! And I certainly don't trust most women around men — Sheri S. Tepper

What business needs now is exactly what women are able to provide, and at the very time when women are surging into the work force. But perhaps even more important than work force numbers is the fact that women
who began this sweeping entry in the mid-seventies
are just now beginning to assume positions of leadership, which give them the scope to create and reinforce the trends toward change. The confluence is fortunate, an alignment that gives women unique opportunities to assist in the continuing transformation of the workplace ... — Sally Helgesen

Tailor's work
the finishing of men's outside garments
was the "trade" learned most frequently by women in [the 1820s and 1830s],and one or more of my older sisters worked at it; I think it must have been at home, for I somehow or somewhere got the idea, while I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind. — Lucy Larcom

Do you always play this hard to get?"
"I wish I could afford to play hard to get. You women have wised up a lot in the last decade or so. None of my old lines work anymore."
"You mean 'wanna get naked' doesn't have women falling all over you?"
Mac peered at her over the top of the menu.
"Hey, that's my best one."
"I'd hate to hear your worst."
Yeah, you would. He set the menu down and leaned in as though about to say something confidential. "I crash and burn a lot."
Mac and Rachel. — Suzie Quint

At first, they joked about it but as they became more detoxed and more assertive from therapy, paid ironically by the husbands, they began to realize that they each had unique strengths and powers and a burning desire for revenge. Between the Three Wise Women they had an IT expert, an actress and a supermodel, all very wealthy and beautiful. All the three men's' brains appeared to reside in their pants and they wondered if they set a honey trap could it possibly work. A plan was proposed by Felicity and she called it Operation Devastation. Angelina would hack into their MIS computer systems, bug their telephones, offices, cars and homes. Ava would seduce Ryan, who owned Novels and the computer firm, Angelina's husband in a honey trap and get it all on DVD for the divorce court. Then Ava would seduce Felicity's husband, James, the Irish footballer. Finally, Sean who was Felicity's friend who was an out of work actor would seduce Patrick — Annette J. Dunlea

I later became more interested in equal rights for women in the work place because of what was happening at IBM. One of the women at Remington Rand had previously been a system service girl for IBM during the war. After a system was installed, a system service girl would go out and show the users how it worked. She was the liaison between the users and the computer company. She was married and had been fired to make room for a returning veteran. When the war ended, IBM rehired all of its former employees who had left to join the military, then fired all of the married women with jobs that could be filled by men. — Jean Jennings Bartik

We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe ... taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, ... and eating bran flakes .. and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust. — Garrison Keillor

Besides, men aren't worth your time anyway, Letti. If we women spent as much time on ourselves as we do fretting over men, we'd be invincible! Work on yourself because at the end of the day, you're the only person you can trust. — S.R. Crawford

In addition, there are huge benefits to communal effort in and of itself. By definition, all organizations consist of people working together. Focusing on the team leads to better results for the simple reason that well-functioning groups are stronger than individuals. Teams that work together well outperform those that don't. And success feels better when it's shared with others. So perhaps one positive result of having more women at the top is that our leaders will have been trained to care more about the well-being of others. My hope, of course, is that we won't have to play by these archaic rules forever and that eventually we can all just be ourselves. We — Sheryl Sandberg

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. — Susan L. Taylor

Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work. — Alexander Smith

There was danger at times that women might not be judged by the highest standards, but more leniently because of their sex. "She is a remarkably good chemist
for a woman," you might hear a man say. It seemed to me essential, if the ablest young women scholars were to achieve the best work of which they were capable, that they should be held to the most rigorous standards ... To advance, a woman must do at least as good work as her male colleagues, usually better. — Virginia Gildersleeve

Our goal is to tell people about the International Space Station. I think very rarely people look up 250 miles and think, What are those guys working on, what are those men and women doing at this moment ... They're living and doing regular things, but also doing incredible work as well. We really want to bring that to people. — Soledad O'Brien

I am a feminist. I reject wholeheartedly the way we are taught to perceive women. The beauty of women, how a woman should act or behave. Women are strong and fragile. Women are beautiful and ugly. We are soft-spoken and loud, all at once. There is something mind-controlling about the way we're taught to view women. My work, both visually and musically, is a rejection of all those things. — Lady Gaga

Women are in bondage; their clothes are a great hindrance to their engaging in any business which will make them pecuniarily independent, and since the soul of womanhood never can be queenly and noble so long as it must beg bread for its body, is it not better, even at the expense of a vast deal of annoyance, that they whose lives deserve respect and are greater than their garments should give an example by which woman may more easily work out her own emancipation? — Lucy Stone

Why can't science work on making women more entitled in general? Or at least get us to listen to those L'Oreal ads that tell us how we're worth it? — Julie Klausner

Women have to work much harder to make it in this world. It really pisses me off that women don't get the same opportunities as men do, or money for that matter. Because lets face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define our values and to define what's sexy and what's feminine and that's bullshit. At the end of the day, it's not about equal rights, it's about how we think. We have to reshape our own perception of how we view ourselves. — Beyonce Knowles

Women must show their public face. We must help to work out our own community problems. We must insist on having equal voices and equal responsibilities ... In large part, success depends on changing minds at home, in the streets, and at the workplace - not just in legislatures and in the courts. Each and every one of us has and important role to play in completing that task. — Joan Biskupic

H&M approached us to collaborate, and see if we could translate the dream we created at Lanvin to a wider audience, not just a dress for less. I have said in the past that I would never do a mass-market collection, but what intrigued me was the idea of H&M going luxury rather than Lanvin going public. This has been an exceptional exercise, where two companies at opposite poles can work together because we share the same philosophy of bringing joy and beauty to men and women around the world. — Alber Elbaz

There is no bleaker moment in life of the city than that one which crosses the boundary lines between those who have not slept all night and those who are going to work. It was for Sabina as if two races of men and women lived on earth, the night people and the day people, never meeting face to face except at this moment. — Anais Nin

The backlash against women's rights would be just one of several powerful forces creating a harsh and painful climate for women at work. Reagonomics, the recession, and the expansion of a minimum-wage service economy also helped, in no small measure, to slow and even undermine women's momentum in the job market. But the backlash did more than impede women's opportunities for employment, promotions, and better pay. Its spokesmen kept the news of many of these setbacks from women. Not only did the backlash do grievous damage to working women C it did on the sly. — Susan Faludi

When I was 22, I met with some janky manager, and she told me, 'You're never going to work at this weight.' I think I was a size 6 at the time. There is just this weird thing about how we perceive women in this country. I would love to be a part of breaking that down. — Melissa McCarthy

A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom ... Goodbye to all that. — Robin Morgan

I think obviously we need to work harder at extending the women's movement. How do women who have prepared for careers and have a child get back to the workplace and still fulfill maternal roles? — Tom Brokaw

Eleanor Mondale and Monica Lewinsky could not satiate the president's horndog sexual desires. There were many others. I saw plenty of awkward run-ins and drama with other officers and staff. President Clinton had difficulty managing where he saw his many mistresses, whether it was at the White House or on the road. It baffled the Uniformed Division as to how he could manage all these women without any of them realizing there were so many others. We wondered how he got any work done and joked that he would have been better at running a brothel in a red-light district than the White House. — Gary J. Byrne

I found that when women were able to act in line with their natural inclinations and ambitions
whether to work or stay at home
they were generally happy, and generally felt that their children were happy too. Whereas those whose natural inclinations and ambitions had been thwarted
whether they were working or stay-at-home moms
were sure that they and their kids would be better off if they changed course, and either went to work or went home. The morality of the situation
whether they felt it was good or bad for their chidlren
derived, not from some external sense of the morality of their "choices," but from the amount of happiness generated by any given arrangement. — Judith Warner

When it comes to women, our perfectionism gives us a lot of grief. Women want to be super moms, super partners and super performers at work - and all at the same time. That's stressful. — Kristina Schroder

I think sports gave me the first place where this awkward girl could feel comfortable in my own skin. I think that's true for a lot of women-sports gives you a part of your life where you can work at something and you look in the mirror and you like that person. — Teri McKeever

Every time we sit at a table at night or in the morning to enjoy the fruits and grain and vegetables from our good earth, remember that they come from the work of men and women and children who have been exploited for generations ... — Cesar Chavez

Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a 'leisure gap' between them at home. Most women work one shift in the office or factory and a 'second shift' at home. — Arlie Russell Hochschild

Then men were not dependent upon women after all, as she had thought - women were dependent upon men. Boys were frail, boys cried, boys were tender, boys were helpless. Mary Anne knew this, because she was the eldest girl among her three young brothers, and the baby Isobel did not count at all. Men also were frail, men also cried, men also were tender, men also were helpless. Mary Anne knew this because her stepfather, Bob Farquhar, was all of these things in turn. Yet men went to work. Men made the money - or frittered it away, like her stepfather, so that there was never enough to buy clothes for the children, and her mother scraped and saved and stitched by candlelight, and often looked tired and worn. Somewhere there was injustice. Somewhere the balance had gone. "When I'm grown up I shall marry a rich man," she said. — Daphne Du Maurier

Well, if women's work was never done, why trouble about how much of it wasn't being accomplished at any given moment? — Diana Gabaldon

I have tried to be a leader. I have tried in my role of being one of the first women at Google, let alone the first woman to have a baby, to really try to set the tone that this is a great place to work for diversity reasons. — Susan Wojcicki

When the war ended, more than twelve million men and women put their uniforms aside and returned to civilian life. They went back to work at their old jobs or started small businesses; they became big-city cops and firemen; they finished their degrees or enrolled in college for the first time; they became schoolteachers, — Tom Brokaw

The first trailblazer was Ivy Lee. He is often considered the founder of modern public relations and the originator of corporate crisis communications.* In 1914 he went to work for the Rockefeller interests after coal miners striking at one of the mines they controlled in Ludlow, Colorado, were massacred by the National Guard. Between nineteen and twenty-five people were killed, including two women and eleven children. Lee's press releases claimed that their deaths were the result of an overturned camp stove. Ivy Lee was one of the first members of the Council on Foreign Relations when it was founded just after World War I; he was thus co-opted into America's foreign policy establishment. Shortly before he died in 1934, Congress began investigating his public relations work on behalf of the notorious German chemical monopoly I.G. Farben, which helped fund Hitler's rise to power and would later develop the poison gas used in the Nazi death camps. — Anonymous

In those same 10 years, women are getting more and more of the graduate degrees, more and more of the undergraduate degrees, and it's translating into more women in entry-level jobs, even more women in lower-level management. But there's absolutely been no progress at the top. You can't explain away 10 years. Ten years of no progress is no progress. — Sheryl Sandberg

Let us open the doors to the Spirit, let ourselves be guided by him, and allow God's constant help to make us new men and women, inspired by the love of God which the Holy Spirit bestows on us! How beautiful it would be if each of you, every evening, could say: Today at school, at home, at work, guided by God, I showed a sign of love towards one of my friends, my parents, an older person! How beautiful! — Pope Francis

I think women should have choices and should be able to do what they like, and I think it's a great choice to stay at home and raise kids, just as it's a great choice to have a career. But I don't entirely approve of people who get advanced degrees and then decide to stay at home. I think if society gives you the gift of one of those educations and you take a spot in a very competitive institution, then you should do something with that education to help others ... But I also don't approve of working parents who look down on stay-at-home mothers and think they smother their children. Working parents are every bit as capable of spoiling children as ones who don't work - maybe even more so when they indulge their kids out of guilt. The best think anyone can teach their children is the obligation we all have toward each other - and no one has a monopoly on teaching that. — Will Schwalbe

Have a look at the results when Australians are asked if they agree or disagree with the statement: 'It is better for the family if the husband is the principal breadwinner outside the home and the wife has primary responsibility for the home and children.' In 1986, just over 55 per cent of men agreed with that proposition. That proportion swan-dived down to about 30 per cent by 2001, but by 2005, it had gone up again, to 41.4 per cent. Women subscribe to that view less enthusiastically than men on the whole, but they too have waxed and waned over the last 30 years. In 1986, 33 per cent of them thought it was better for men to work and women to keep house. By 2001, that had dipped to 19 per cent. But by 2005, it had bobbed back up to 36.4 per cent.17 — Annabel Crabb

what studies are finding is that in many cases, women are more suited for leadership roles than men. And this is thanks to the numerous innate skills that women have. These skills are leading to more women functioning at a much higher level in the workplace, while also caring more about their employees. This results in a better work environment for all those involved. — Kris Hart

The average American salesmen keeps 33 men and women at work - 33 people producing the product he sells ... and is responsible for the livelihood of 130 people. — Robert A. Whitney

I'd worked on leprosy and malaria in India [at the World Bank] and asked myself the question: Why do we let 2 million children die every year around the world for not having clean water? Because they're faceless and nameless. So, for me, Facebook looked like it was going to solve the problem of the invisible victim. — Sheryl Sandberg

Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and postwar Europe, were distinctly younger than those who had gone before. Rather than resign themselves, young people are more likely to look at a problem and demand that it be solved. — Tony Judt

Women should feel more liberated to say you know what? I can't bake the cookies for the school bake sale because I just don't have the time. Or I'm really sorry, but I can't do this at work because I've got too much else going on this week. We have to be more up front in saying no, for lack of a better word, and then modeling that for others. — Debora Spar

Hierarchies must rise and conglomerate as they extend over fewer and larger corporations. A seat in a high-rise job is the most coveted and contested product of expanding industry. The lack of schooling, compounded with sex, color, and peculiar persuasions, now keeps most people down. Minorities organized by women, or blacks, or the unorthodox succeed at best in getting some of their members through school and into an expensive job. They claim victory when they get equal pay for equal rank. Paradoxically, these movements strengthen the idea that unequal graded work is necessary and that high-rise hierarchies are necessary to produce what an egalitarian society needs. If properly schooled, the black porter will blame himself for not being a black lawyer. At the same time, schooling generates a new intensity of frustration which ultimately can act as social dynamite. 6 — Ivan Illich

To have the external pressure of a job removed is very astonishing. Your own will is now your only motor and it has no horse-power. Sometimes I think that perhaps the most competent business men, and lawyers and doctors, who must be at the office at nine o'clock every morning, do not realize this and take more credit for initiative and industry than they deserve. And it is why all the bright women of the world, who if more were expected of them, might do important work, but who instead have a chronic feeling of ineffectiveness and sloth. — Brenda Ueland

We're workers, they say. Work, they call it! That's the crummiest part of the whole business. We're down in the hold, heaving and panting, stinking and sweating our balls off, and meanwhile! Up on deck in the fresh air, what do you see?! Our masters having a fine time with beautiful pink and perfumed women on their laps. They send for us, we're brought up on deck. They put on their top hats and give us a big spiel like as follows: "You no-good swine! We're at war! Those stinkers in Country No. 2! We're going to board them and cut their livers out! Let's go! Let's go! We've got everything we need on board! All together now! Let's hear you shout so the deck trembles: 'Long live Country No. 1!' So you'll be heard for miles around. The man that shouts the loudest will get a medal and a lollipop! Let's — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Brooding is more something I do when I'm working. I know so much more about sitting around worrying about a work project than I do about worrying about kids. This could just be a fact of life for older moms. We've worked and worked and worked and if we are lucky enough to finally have a child or two, we find ourselves suddenly catapulted into a most alien kind of chaos.
Work is so much easier. Anyone will tell you that. To have a desk, where you have everything all lined up, and a schedule you more or less get to agree to. Work. I am a worker. This is so funny because I never really think of my work as work. I certainly never though of myself as having a career. Writing, work, this is just who I am. I am a person who sits at a desk and makes phone calls and taps at a computer keyboard and sips coffee and calls her mom at five. That I am anything better or smaller than that has come as sudden news to me.
Brand new.
News. — Jeanne Marie Laskas

I'm not a person who believes in the great difference between women and men as editors. But I do think that quality is key. We're very good at organizing and discipline and patience, and patience is 50 per cent of editing. You have to keep banging away at something until you get it to work. I think women are maybe better at that. — Thelma Schoonmaker

Did Morris put anybody on Coltraine, specifically?"
"Clipper."
"Die-For-Ty? Talk about the sex. How come so many death doctors are wholly iced?"
"A mystery I've pondered throughout my career."
"No, seriously. Clipper's like ummm. He's gay and has a partner, but a yummy treat for the eyes. His partner's an artist. He paints people, literally I mean. Body painting. They've been together about six years."
"How do you know all this stuff?"
"Unlike you, I enjoy hearing about people's personal lives, especially when it involves sex."
"At least since Clipper's not into women, you won't be troubled by sexual fantasies."
Peabody pursed her lips in thought. "I can work with it. Two naked guys, body paints, me. Oh yeah, endless possibilities. — J.D. Robb

What keeps me up at night? Sometimes it's day-to-day work stuff. And a lot of the times, it's, 'Am I making the wrong decisions in terms of reaching young women?' — Tyra Banks

If they lived in Saudi Arabia, under Shari'a law, these college girls in their pretty scarves wouldn't be free to study, to work, to drive, to walk around. In Saudi Arabia girls their age and younger are confined, are forced to marry, and if they have sex outside of marriage they are sentenced to prison and flogged. According to the Quran, their husband is permitted to beat them and decide whether they may work or even leave the house; he may marry other women without seeking their approval, and if he chooses to divorce them, they have no right to resist or to keep custody of their children. Doesn't this matter at all to these clever young Muslim girls in America? — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

It was the United States, after all, which poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp — Seumas Milne

The money men make from their willingness to work the least desirable hours is not a sign of discrimination against women, but a sign of the willingness of mostly married men to lose sleep to support the family as their wife loses sleep to feed the child. A willingness to do the uncomfortable shifts is one reason married men earn more than twice what never-married men earn. Men's contribution, made at night, need not be lost in the dark. — Warren Farrell

A lot of actresses are doing incredible work right now, playing real women, complicated women. I don't feel despairing at all. And I'm more looking with hope for something fascinating. — Maggie Gyllenhaal

The work these brave men and women do is extremely important, not only to our nation but to all the countries that our troops are stationed at around the world. I am grateful to the USO for having us and to all the troops who shared their day with us. — Zakk Wylde

If women could only have more," I said longingly. "If we could have more in our own right. Being a woman at court is like forever watching a pastrycook at work in the kitchen. All those good things, and you can have nothing. — Philippa Gregory

I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain. — Anais Nin

I have no country...my countrymen are the men and women who work against oppression- it does not matter where they are. With them I feel at home- we understand each other. Others are foreign to me." -Agnes Smedley in Daughter of Earth — Agnes Smedley

I thought of how many women told me dispiritedly about how their husbands waited for them to ask - or to make a list - and how demoralizing that was for them. I could not help thinking that there was some element of passive aggression in this recurrent theme of nice men, good, playful dads, full of initiative and motivation at work, who "waited to be asked" to do the more tedious baby-related work at home, until the asking was finally scaled back or stopped. — Naomi Wolf

The speaker was good, I liked what he had to say. I had expected a dry recitation on how women should change their gender if they expected to advance in a man's world, since I wasn't about to grow a cock and balls this man gave me hope and inspiration. Women dominated the audience, not surprising since the average African man wouldn't support a speaker preaching gender equality. Africa was a continent with generational precedent for the alpha male, it was part of their culture, learned at an early age. This led to abuse on many levels. Women were expected to do the physical work, produce male babies and satisfy the sexual urgings of men. Urgings that in other societies would be called rape but in Africa were accepted as common practice. I understood this better than most. Pictures of the Kony boy-soldiers and their adult commander were burned into my memory. — Nick Hahn

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? — Sojourner Truth

There are all kinds of ways and reasons that mothers can and should be praised. But for cultivating a sense of invisibility, martyrdom and tirelessly working unnoticed and unsung? Those are not reasons. Praising women for standing in the shadows? Wrong. Where is the greeting card that praises the kinds of mothers I know? Or better yet, the kind of mother I was raised by? I need a card that says: "Happy Mother's Day to the mom who taught me to be strong, to be powerful, to be independent, to be competitive, to be fiercely myself and fight for what I want." Or "Happy Birthday to a mother who taught me to argue when necessary, to raise my voice for my beliefs, to not back down when I know I am right." Or "Mom, thanks for teaching me to kick ass and take names at work. Get well soon." Or simply "Thank you, Mom, for teaching me how to make money and feel good about doing it. Merry Christmas. — Shonda Rhimes

There is an unspoken pact that women are supposed to follow. I am supposed to act like I constantly feel guilty about being away from my kids. (I don't. I love my job.) Mothers who stay at home are supposed to pretend they are bored and wish they were doing more corporate things. (They don't. They love their job.) If we all stick to the plan there will be less blood in the streets. — Amy Poehler

You really work in those conditions?"

She, irritated by the contact, pulled her arm away, protesting: "And how do you work, the two of you, how do you work?"

They didn't answer. They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by the work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions _she_ worked in; they couldn't tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn't happen to the women important to them and that - this was the idea they had grown up with - they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. "Fuck off," she said, "you and the working class. — Elena Ferrante

Sura 2:223 says that 'your wife is as your farm to you, so treat her as you would your farm.' The ulema have quoted this as if it meant you could treat women like the dirt under your feet, but these clerics, who stand as unneeded intercessors between us and God, are never farmers, and farmers read the Quran right, and see their wives are their food, their drink, their work, the bed they lie on at night, the very ground under their feet! Yes, of course you treat your wife as the ground under your feet! — Kim Stanley Robinson

(Georgie) Two hundred years later and it's exactly the same thing. You want to spend every single moment with your children and still have a fulfilling life at work. — Nancy Woodruff

Among our people, theres not any question about women being strong
even stronger than men
they work in the fields right along with the men. When your survival is at stake, you dont have these questions about yourself like middle
class women do. — Dolores Huerta

I don't have one role that I want to play. I guess ... I want to be a producer. I want to be an activist. I want to be proactive in bringing about work for men, women, boys, girls, everybody who is good at what they do and deserve a shot at it. — Octavia Spencer

We don't have enough support for maternal leave and the kinds of things that some of the European countries do. So we still make it hard on women to go into the work force and feel that they can be good at work but then doing the most important job, which is raising your children in a responsible and positive way. — Hillary Clinton

Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance; their accomplishments are always magnified if they're pretty and diminished if they're not. Even worse, some girls get the message that they can get through life relying on just their looks, and then they never develop their minds. [ ... ]
Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even what you work at it, you're working at being passive. — Ted Chiang

Breast cancer is not just a disease that strikes at women. It strikes at the very heart of who we are as women: how others perceive us, how we perceive ourselves, how we live, work and raise our families-or whether we do these things at all. — Debbie Wasserman Schultz

How many people worldwide are victims of this type of slavery, in which the person is at the service of his or her work, while work should offer a service to people so they may have dignity. I ask my brothers and sisters in faith and all men and women of good will for a decisive choice to combat trafficking in persons, which includes "slave labor." — Pope Francis

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely. — Marguerite Duras

I think we have to acknowledge that people are different and succeed at different things, first of all. Men are better than women at some professions like firefighting, construction work, and physics. But women are better than men at some professions, too, like elementary teaching, prostitution, and giving birth. Who's to say which is more important? — Zach Braff

Women are tough and rather coarse. They were built for the raw, crude work of bearing children. You'd be amazed at what they can do when they divert that baby-hatching energy into some other enterprise. — Tom Robbins

BlogHer is an incredibly important conference because it really taps into the power of women. It gives women an ability to do what they do - take care of the home, go to work - and, at the same time, spread their power through the power of the digital world. — Indra Nooyi

At the time, the question of woman's emancipation was of great interest to reformers. For the nihilist the issues were regarding work and sexual freedom. Because a woman's passport (which was used for general travel and not just travel abroad) was legally controlled by men - a father, or husband, had ultimate control of a woman's life. The nihilists solved this problem by having 'fictitious' marriages. This allowed for an emancipation of women de jure if not de facto. This resulted in women having the freedom of mobility to pursue some academic pursuits (which were curtailed during the White Terror) and some enterprise. Finally, the nihilists adopted the credo that adultery was a natural, and even desirable trait, in contrast to the spirit of their time, or their own cultural composition (i.e. they were prudes). — Anonymous

It does appear that in some other cultures the work of motherhood is not left entirely up to one person the way it is here, so a baby can be handed around to many relatives, which gives the mother some blessed relief. Our society tends to elevate pregnancy and childbirth to unrealistic romantic heights then leave women on their own to struggle with the task, making them wonder what they are doing wrong when at times it all seems too much. — Robin Barker