A Quote by Erica Jong

We've shown again and again, in every UN report on the status of women, that wherever women control their own bodies and have access to education, societies prosper. Men's fortunes go up, children's fortunes go up. This is not news - it's been proven repeatedly. Anywhere those things are threatened, we have to defend them.
The nature of women's oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children - we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.
I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didn?t even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of women?of embryos, of eggs, of bodies?by a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasn?t freedom from men but total control by men.
It should be self-evident that women have the right to make decisions about their own bodies. Yet throughout history, those in power - usually men - have tried to control women's bodies.
It is men of desperate fortunes on the one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who go abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road.
the lady is almost the only picturesque survival in a social order which tends less and less to tolerate the exceptional. ... In the age-long war between men and women, she is a hostage in the enemy's camp. Her fortunes do not rise and fall with those of women but with those of men.
For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way.
You'll discover in countries where women have control over their own bodies, where they have education, where they have birth control, where they have facilities and where they are literate, when those things happen, the birth rate falls.
Men are expendable; women and children are not. A tribe or a nation can lose a high percentage of its men and still pick up the pieces and go on ... as long as the women and children are saved.
There’s a saying in Africa, if you give a woman empowerment, you empower a community, you empower men, you empower man. When women become empowered and live in their strength it’s beneficiary to others, and I think as young women today we sometimes forget that we are standing on the struggle of other women. Those women had to stand up to make a change, and they were not popular, and now we’re making them unpopular again.
It is observed in the course of worldly things, that men's fortunes are oftener made by their tongues than by their virtues; and more men's fortunes overthrown thereby than by vices.
The mortality of those who dig minerals is very great, and women who marry men of this sort marry again and again. According to Agricola, at the mines in the Carpathian mountains, women have been known to marry seven times.
Men aren't actively writing women to oppress them, men are writing what they know. I say you can be much better as a woman for women's rights if you just go up there and write your own material.
And how can we ever again succeed in educating children to become moral men and women if, in America's public schools, we consciously deny them all religious instruction, and deny them access to that primary source of morality, God's own word. The Bible is the one book from which they are expressly not allowed to be taught.
If you really do want to increase women's status, you could focus on just that, but you'd probably better focus also on women's education. Access to artificial contraception, I would say, is also a very important determinant of women's status.
The Islamic tradition does show some areas of apparent incompatibility with the goals of women in the West, and Muslims have a long way to go in their attitudes towards women. But blaming the religion is again to express an ignorance both of the religion and of the historical struggle for equality of women in Muslim societies.
If you are blessed with great fortunes. . . you may love your fate. But your fate never guarantees the security of those great fortunes. As soon as you realize your helplessness at the mercy of your fate, you are again in despair. Thus the hatred of fate can be generated not only by misfortunes, but also by great fortunes. Your hatred of fate is at the same time your hatred of your self. You hate your self for being so helpless under the crushing power of fate.
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