Quotes about femininity
Peter Marshall -
The world has enough women who know how to be smart. It needs women who are willing to be simple. The world has enough women who know how to be brilliant. It needs some who will be brave. The world has enough women who are popular. It needs more who are pure. We need women, and men, too, who would rather be morally right than socially correct.
Anita Johnston -
The mermaid is an archetypal image that represents a woman who is at ease in the great waters of life, the waters of emotion and sexuality. She shows us how to embrace our instinctive sexuality and sensuality so that we can affirm the essence of our feminine nature, the wisdom of our bodies, and the playfulness of our spirits. She symbolizes our connection with our deepest instinctive feelings, our wild and untamed animal nature that exists below the surface of outward personalities. She is able
Betsy Cornwell -
Those of us who embrace the feminine know its strength.
Jani Ortlund -
I believe that a godly home is a foretaste of heaven. Our homes, imperfect as they are, must be a haven from the chaos outside. They should be a reflection of our eternal home, where troubled souls find peace, weary hearts find rest, hungry bodies find refreshment, lonely pilgrims find communion, and wounded spirits find compassion.
Patton Oswalt -
I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.
Farrah Fawcett -
God made man stronger but not necessarily more intelligent. He gave women intuition and femininity. And, used properly, that combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I’ve ever met.
Iris Murdoch - the Sea
There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.
Elisabeth Elliot - Let Me be a Woman
I believe a woman, in order to be a good wife, must be (among other things) both sensual and maternal.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke - The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows tha
May Sarton - Journal of a Solitude
If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a
Wendy Shalit - A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue
Modesty answers not the crude how of femininity, but the beautiful why.
Rozsika Parker - The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine
Kate Walker´s attitude is characteristic of contemporary feminists' determination not to reject femininity but to empty the term of its negative connotations, to reclaim and refashion the category: "I have never worried that embroidery's association with femininity, sweetness, passivity and obedience may subvert my work's feminist intention. Femininity and sweetness are part of women's strength. Passivity and obedience, moreover, are the very opposites of the qualities necessary to make a sustai
Jan Moran - Scent of Triumph
What a beautiful woman. She moved with grace, she was entirely feminine, and yet, she possessed incredible inner strength. She’s a survivor.
Sister Souljah - No Disrespect
I was beautiful; after all, my skin was as rich and dark as wet, brown mud, a complexion that any and every pale white girl would pray for - that is, if she believed in God. My butt sat high in the air and my hips obviously gave birth to Creation. Titties like mangoes, firm, sweet, and ready. My thighs and legs were big and powerful, kicking Vanna White and Cindy Crawford to the curb.
Renee Topper - Pigment: The Limbs of the Mukuyu Tree
She raises her hands to the sky and breathes it in, she starts spinning, enjoying the feel and energy of this Africa. She floats, her long skirt swaying with the dry grass in the breeze with her spirals, her sandaled feet covered in dust. She is part of Africa. She has never felt so free and happy.
Nityananda Das - Divine Union
Beauty is to recognize how full of Love you are. Sensuality is to let some of that Love shine through your body.
Germaine Greer - The Whole Woman
Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women—and has become an option for men—while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character.
Ashton Applewhite - This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism
Women not only bear the brunt of the equation of beauty with youth, we perpetuate it—every time we dye our hair to cover the gray or lie about our age, not to mention have plastic surgery to cover the signs of aging.
Louisa May Alcott -
I rather miss my wild girl; but if I get a strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite satisfied.
G.K. Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World
It is quite certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission; it can be proved by the simplest of all tests. No ruler would deliberately dress up in the recognized fetters of a slave; no judge would would appear covered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be safely impressive, as judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes of female dignity. The whole world is under petticoat government; for even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - The Yearling
She drew gallantry from men as the sun drew water. Her pertness enchanted them. Young men went away from her with a feeling of bravado. Old men were enslaved by her silver curls. Something about her was forever female and made all men virile.
Marilyn Monroe -
We are all born sexual creatures,thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift.
Sheila Jeffreys - Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West
The "fashion-beauty complex'," representing the corporate interests involved in the fashion and beauty industries, has, Bartky argues, taken over from the family and church as "central producers and regulators of 'femininity'" (1990, p. 39). The fashion-beauty complex promotes itself to women as seeking to, "glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence'' but in fact its aim is to "depreciate woman's body and deal a blow to her narcissism'' so that she will buy
Emma Cline - The Girls
Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.And that's what I did for Tamar, I responded to her symbols. To the style of her hair and clothes and the smell of her L'Air Du Temps perfume. Like this was data that mattered. Signs that reflected something of her inner self. I took her beauty personally.
Christian Louboutin -
The stiletto is a feminine weapon that men just don't have.
Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Because misogynists are the best of men.” All the poets reacted to these words with hooting. Boccaccio was forced to raise his voice: “Please understand me. Misogynists don’t despise women. Misogynists don’t like femininity. Men have always been divided into two categories. Worshipers of women, otherwise known as poets, and misogynists, or, more accurately, gynophobes. Worshipers or poets revere traditional feminine values such as feelings, the home, motherhood, fertility, sacred flashes of hyst
Clarissa Pinkola Estés - Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
What does this wildish intuition do for women? Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pin things down, it has eyes that can through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools a woman takes on a shrewd and even precognitive animal consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive. It is misogynistic to suggest that they are. Sadly, women have learned to be ashamed and apologetic about pursuits that are seen as traditionally female, such as fashion and makeup. But our society does not expect men to feel ashamed of pursuits considered generally male - sports cars, certain professional sports. In the same way, men's grooming is never suspect in the way women's grooming is - a well-dressed man does not worry that, because he
Truman Capote -
I have an extremely strong, masculine mind and a feminine sensibility level, which is kind of an unusual combination. Both men and women tell me things and I can relate on two levels simultaneously.
Nava Atlas - The Literary Ladies' Guide to the Writing Life
The dilemma for women who love to write may not have so much to do with finding the elusive literary voice, as with being reluctant to use the one that's already lurking inside, just waiting for the chance to speak up. Many of us, especiall,y those from the generations taught to be good, accommodating girls, are afraid of sounding too strong, too loud, too unconventional, or simply too much like the self we're afraid to reveal to the world. Most of us have at least an inkling of what form our wr
Elisabeth Elliot - Let Me be a Woman
It is a naive sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is a distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Women can and ought to be judged by the criteria of femininity, for it is in their femininity that they participate in the human race. And femininity has its limitations. So has masculinity. That is what we’ve been talking about. To
Karen Swallow Prior - Abolitionist
A useful education served women best, More thought. To ‘learn how to grow old gracefully is perhaps one of the rarest and most valuable arts which can be taught to a woman.’ Yet, when beauty is all that is expected or desired in a woman, she is left with nothing in its absence. It ‘is a most severe trail for those women to be called to lay down beauty, who have nothing else to take up. It is for this sober season of life that education should lay up its rich resources,’ she argued.
Margaret Mitchell - Gone with the Wind
I wonder if anyone but me realizes what goes on in that head back of your deceptively sweet face.
Roman Payne - The Wanderess
Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.
Erin Loechner - Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path
The heart of a woman is the best mirror you can find.
Maquita Donyel Irvin -
I feel your words on my lipsand feel your mood in my hips
Amby C. Ezem -
Maybe if you had megaphones on your chest they'd listen to the words that came out of your lips
Rebecca M. Jordan-Young - Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences
Scientists can test only what they do not take for granted. That can make studying familiar phenomena particularly challenging...This may be especially true of masculinity, femininity and sexuality, because certain ideas abut gender and sexuality are so broadly shared in our culture
Stacey Martino -
Femininity is your greatest power. Embrace it!
Bill Maher -
First of all understand that I get it. That there are millions and millions of women who are steely eyed realists. And millions and millions of men who are anything but. However. For lack of a better term I would say that the feminine values are the values of america :Sensitivity is more important than Truth. Feelings are more important than Facts. Commitment is more important than Individuality. Children are more important than People. Safety is more important than Fun.I always hear women say '
Bill Maher -
First of all understand that I get it. That there are millions and millions of women who are steely eyed realists. And millions and millions of men who are anything but. However. For lack of a better term I would say that the feminine values are the values of america :Sensitivity is more important than Truth. Feeling are more important than Facts. Commitment is more important than Individuality. Children are more important than People. Safety is more important than Fun.I always hear women say 'Y
Valentine Glass - Between Kay and You: A Bisexual Girl's Cumming-of-Age Confession
More than that, the thought rattled uncomfortably in my child brain that I would one day become one of them. My body then was sexless. Though I had seen the curves of adults, I couldn’t fathom the chrysalis that would turn my featureless body into something with heft and gravity, curves and the inclination to use them.
Maggie Georgiana Young -
We long for an intimate connection, but that longing makes us feel vulnerable. Therefore, we guard our hearts for self-preservation, which barricades that intimacy we are longing for. Casual sex is a very sad cat and mouse game. The man is entrapped in his role as the sex-driven predator constantly on the hunt for new conquests, while the woman is the prey that must find her perfect combination of sexual allure and virtue, with the sexual allure being what attracts him and virtue what keeps him.
Meredith Russo - If I Was Your Girl
His shadow stretched out past mine. I remembered Mom telling me how frightening men were, all men really, how helpless it often felt to be a woman among men, and for the first time I understood what she meant.
Julia Serano - Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognized as female, a raw strength that only comes fro unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.
Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex
One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her femininity
Libbie Hawker - Daughter of Sand and Stone
Her voice is still pitched high, thanks to her youth, but it has a certain incipient darkness to it, a low richness that will mature in the coming years to the smoky tones of a priestess or a queen -- a woman of great natural power.
Camille Paglia -
The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.
Gloria Ng - Well Water Woman
For my relationships with men to change, I needed to change my relationship to myself as a woman.
Julie SeranoBitchfest Skirt Chasers Why the Media Dresses the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels -
While mass-media images of biological "males" feminizing themselves have the subversive potential to highlight ways conventionally defined femininity is artificial (a point feminists make all the time), the images rarely function this way. Trans women are both asked to prove their femaleness through superficial means and denied the status of "real" women because fo the artifice involved. After all, masculinity is generally defined by how a man behaves, while femininity is judged by how a woman p
bell hooks -
Whether they regard themselves as pro- or antifeminist, most women want men to do more of the emotional work in relationships. And most men, even those who wholeheartedly support gender equality in the workforce, still believe that emotional work is female labor. Most men continue to uphold the sexist decree that emotions have no place in the work world and that emotional labor at home should be done by females.
Rachilde - The Juggler
And yet, because I am without a doubt mortal, I have the troubling desire to do good, to please, to communicate my warmth, to still be very beautiful sometimes to inspire a taste for beauty. I know that these times are not fertile in grace...I am afraid tomorrow the grace of woman...may be recognized as a public utility & be socialized to the point of becoming a banal article, a bazaar object like in '93 & that one will find types of tender or amusing women with millions of copies like the creat
C.J. Redwine - Deliverance
We walked through the streets with our protectors. We wore our dresses. We gave up our education because that was the price of safety. That was the bargain we made with the devil we knew to escape the devil we didn't.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke - Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
It is only through my daughter that I have come to realise that a life without femininity – devoid of mystery, emotion, gentleness and the unerring power of a woman’s love – is no life at all.
Nikki Rowe -
No one knows what you have been through or what your pretty little eyes have seen, but I can reassure you ~ whatever you have conquered, it shines through your mind.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Half of the people lie with their lips the other half with their tears
Emily Matchar -
It's not the nineteenth century I'm not meant to be judged on how good a housekeeper I am. Getting down on the floor with a lemon and a bucket of vinegar does not make me a better person.
Paul Quarrington - The Ravine
Like all of my important memories, it has a potency that has influenced the pocket of time that holds it, so I can remember that particular Saturday afternoon, even though in many ways it was no different from any other. I can remember, for example, what van der Glick was wearing as she stepped out of the elevator, which was a dress covered with clownish polka dots. Rainie would make these heartbreaking stabs at femininity; indeed, she still does. It's not that she doesn't possess a woman's body
John Eldredge - Wild At Heart
In the case of our fair maiden, we have overlooked two very crucial aspects to that myth. On the one hand, none of us ever really believed the sorcerer was real. We thought we could have the maiden without a fight. Honestly, most of us guys thought our biggest battle was asking her out. And second, we have not understood the tower and its relationship to her wound; the damsel is in distress. If masculinity has come under assault, femininity has been brutalized. Eve is the crown of creation, reme
Lloyd Alexander -
A taste for adventure is by no means a masculine monopoly.
Idries Shah - Caravan of Dreams
Saying of the ProphetWomenWomen are the twin-halves of men.
Idries Shah - Caravan of Dreams
Saying of the ProphetReflectionThe Faithful are mirrors, one to the other.
Parul Wadhwa - The Masquerade
Myra wasn't simple or complicated. She was different. She was not perfect, not even close but her flaws were intresting. She always had an opinion, something to say about everything.Most interesting thing about her is that she never said something to please, yet she was nice to be around.
Diana Gabaldon -
Nay, he needs a woman, not a girl. And Laoghaire will be a girl when she’s fifty.
Idries Shah - The Sufis
The sight of God in woman is the most perfect of all." Ibn Arabi.
Oscar Wilde - Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories
If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.
Roman Payne -
Wanderess, Wanderess, weave us a story of seduction and ruse. Heroic be the Wanderess, the world be her muse.
Habeeb Akande -
Gone are the days when girls used to cook like their mothers and boys used to dress like their fathers. Now girls drink like their fathers and boys dress like their mothers.
Leora Tanenbaum - Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
Indeed, girls can be so in need of social approval that they confuse harassment for acceptance--thinking that any attention is better than none. Since many girls as well as boys buy the idea that sexual aggression and exploitation is normal masculine behavior, it may not even occur to them to demand to be treated as equals.
Sai Marie Johnson -
Sensuality is beautiful, and dominance and submission in the right context is a passionate art. A muse which ignites the flame of femininity, enrapturing both partners in complete euphoria, magnifying both the masculine and the feminine in one tantalizing unit.
Amos Oz -
She had not wanted him to but had let him have his way because ever since she was a child she had generally yielded before anyone with strong willpower, especially if it was a man, not because she was naturally submissive, but because strong male willpower gave her a feeling of safety and trust, together with acceptance and a desire to give in.
Elona Washington - From Ivy League To Stripper Life: 10 Lessons Learned
Sexual power encompasses the power of seduction and the power of pursuit.
Jean Kilbourne - Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel
But many people do not fully realize that there are terrible consequences when people becoming things. Self-image is deeply affected. The self-esteem of girls plummets as they reach adolescence partly because they cannot possibly escape the message that their bodies are objects, and imperfect objects at that. Boys learn that masculinity requires a kind of ruthlessness, even brutality. Violence becomes inevitable.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke - Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
Our culture is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory in many sectors.
W Anne Joh -
...at the heart of sexism is the construction of gender polarization, in which femininity and masculinity are assumed to be clearly delineated and any transgression of this pattern warrants punitive measures.
J. Jack Halberstam -
We seem to assume that no one really wants to be a girl or a woman, and therefore some people, say female-bodied people, must be forced into these abject genders
Sheila Jeffreys - Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism
Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.
Julia Serano - Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
The hardest part has been learning how to take myself seriously when the entire world is constantly telling me that femininity is always inferior to masculinity
Anaïs Nin - In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays
There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.
Brian McGreevy - Hemlock Grove
She had not been conferred with a practical sense of how one went about this strange and all inverted business of being a girl, where seemingly natural stuff like going on about all the great things you just learned about Siberian tigers on National Geographic was suddenly weird, but totally weird stuff in and of itself like drawing around your eyeball with a pencil became normal, and it impressed to no end that it was a product of meticulous effort that made the twins seem so perfectly and effo
Roman Payne - The Wanderess
She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She was brave, and I never once saw her cry out of fear. She never cried because she was afraid that something would happen; she would cry because she feared something that could render the world more beautiful, would not happen… She believed if I gave in to make her fortune become realized, the world would be ultimately profound and beau
Roman Payne - The Wanderess
What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.
Margaret Atwood -
He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face.She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that. He said, It's not just the pointy plastic tits, it's the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid mal
Stevie Nicks - Best Of Fleetwood Mac (Easy Piano)
She is like a cat in the darkAnd then she is the darknessShe rules her life like a fine skylarkAnd when the sky is starlessAll your life you've never seen a womanTaken by the windWould you stay if she promised you heaven?Will you ever win?
Lisa See - Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Our words had to be circumspect. We could not write anything too negative about our circumstances. This was tricky, since the very form of a married woman's letter needed to include the usual complaints -- that we were pathetic, powerless, worked to the bone, homesick, and sad. We were supposed to speak directly about our feelings without appearing ungrateful, no-account, or unfilial.
Ashlee Willis - A Wish Made of Glass
I remember myself as a child, pudgy and awkward and unsure of myself. For a moment I wonder how anyone could love such a child as that, let alone the woman she promised to become.
Renee Wade -
Both spouses are equal, yet different. One of the most beautiful things about a relationship is that the feminine energy can feed a masculine man’s heart. And, the masculine energy can totally light up the feminine energy.
Lindsay Armstrong - The Seduction Stakes
I'm sorry I don't conform to your standards of feminine perfection, but I'm quite happy the way I am—anyway, I wasn't born to be buxom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
Indra Devi -
We must keep both our femininity and our strength.
Barbara Pym - No Fond Return of Love
He certainly is very charming, but he makes me feel slightly ill at ease—almost as if I were a woman manquée, if there could be such a thing—you know, something lacking in me.""Oh, well, that's hardly his fault.""No," Dulcie agreed. "Mine, of course.
Miya Yamanouchi - Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
Don't tell me I'm "too tall" just because my height happens to threaten your rather fragile sense of masculinity. The fact that men cannot look down upon women who are taller than them is the very reason that many men find tall women so intimidating.
Rainbow Rowell - Eleanor & Park
She is a good girl," Park said. "You don't even know her." His dad was standing, pushing Park toward the door. "Go," he said sternly. "Go play basketball or something.""Good girls don't dress like boys," his mother said.
Lierre Keith -
Masculinity is simply a conglomeration of the personality traits necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist: physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational, domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up to "handsome" as well. Likewise femininity is ultimately a description of the personality that results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive, yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of the dominators and desperate for the dominator's attention.
Srividya Srinivasan -
May every man find the softest and most fragile expression of his personality with the right woman who would treasure and honour the beauty of his femininity and not misuse it and may all women find empowering and supportive men who would exult in her self expression and success without fear of being overshadowed by the power of her masculinity and in that beautiful new world, shall we enter as partners, equal and empowering, supporting and caring, vulnerable and strong.
Gwen Sharp -
Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.