American Woman Quotes

• Do one thing every day that scares you.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Inspirational, Positive, New Year

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  If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.

  Abigail Adams

  Women, Memorable, Equality

  Letter to John Adams, 31 Mar. 1776 See Defoe 2

  81 Copy quote

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• I know why the caged bird sings.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Children, Book

  Title of book (1969), taken from the last line of "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar in Lyrics of Hearthside (1899). Cf. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1979) 567:10

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• God, make me so uncomfortable that I will do the very thing I fear.

  Ruby Dee

  Peace, Uncomfortable

  57 Copy quote

• We cannot educate white women and take them by the hand. Most of us are willing to help but we can't do the white woman's homework for her. That's an energy drain. More times than she cares to remember, Nellie Wong, Asian American feminist writer, has been called by white women wanting a list of Asian American women who can give readings or workshops. We are in danger of being reduced to purvey­ors of resource lists.

  Gloria E. Anzaldúa

  Reading, Hands, White

  56 Copy quote

• The problem that has no name-which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities-is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

  Betty Friedan

  Country, Women, Lost Youth

  The Feminine Mystique ch. 14 (1963)

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• All the American women had purple noses and gray lips and their faces were chalk white from terrible powder. I recognized that the United States could be my life's work.

  Helena Rubinstein

  Fashion, Purple, White

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• French women typically think about good things to eat. American women typically worry about bad things to eat.

  Mireille Guiliano

  Thinking, Worry, French Woman

  11 Copy quote

• The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer.

  Pat Buchanan

  Real, Shopping, Scary

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• An estimated 2 million American women will be diagnosed with breast or cervical cancer this decade and screening could prevent up to 30% of these deaths for women over 40.

  Matthew Lesko

  Cancer, Breasts, Screening

  Matthew Lesko, Mary Ann Martello (1999). “Free Stuff for Busy Moms”, Information USA Incorporated

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• I'm not a woman! Let's make that very clear! Oh I don't know, maybe I am. I am an American woman. Or 65 percent of me is.

  Lars von Trier

  Clear, Percent, Knows

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• There are whole precincts of voters in this country whose united intelligence does not equal that of one representative American woman.

  Carrie Chapman Catt

  Country, Usa, Doe

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• The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

  Betty Friedan

  Mother, Memories, Real

  betty friedan (1963). “the year's most controversial bestseller the feminine mystique”

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• American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood, to make laws for you and your daughters awake to the danger of your present position and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Daughter, Order, Law

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ann Dexter Gordon, Susan Brownell Anthony (2000). “The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Against an aristocracy of sex, 1866 to 1873”, p.237, Rutgers University Press

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• There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Real, Opportunity, Men

  Pearl S. Buck (1941). “Of Men and Women”

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• I am a Cajun Baby in a Texas girl, an all-American woman and a global goddess.

  Erin Cummings

  Girl, Baby, Texas

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• It is unconscionable that 10,000 boys have died in Vietnam. If 10,000 American women had mind enough they could end the war, if they were committed to the task, even if it meant going to jail.

  Jeannette Rankin

  War, Boys, Jail

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• I fall into that nebulous, quote-unquote, normal American woman size that legions of fashion stylists detest. For the record, I'm a size 8 - this week, anyway. Many stylists hate that size because I think to them, it shows that I lack the discipline to be an ascetic; or the confident, sassy abandon to be a total fatty hedonist.

  Mindy Kaling

  Fashion, Hate, Fall

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• African-American women who develop breast cancer are more likely to die from the disease than White women of the same age. Survival rates are worse among African-Americans for colon, prostate and ovarian cancers as well.

  Frank C. Garland

  Cancer, White, African American

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• As a first-generation "Asian American woman," for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an "Asian American woman." Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  America, Justice, Firsts

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• You know that just before that first Thanksgiving dinner there was one wise, old Native American woman saying, Don't feed them. If you feed them, they'll never leave.

  Dylan Brody

  Thanksgiving, Wise, Native American

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• It is an old error of man to forget to put quotation marks where he borrows from a woman's brain

  Anna Garlin Spencer

  Men, Errors, Brain

  Anna Garlin Spencer (1908). “Woman's Share in Social Culture”

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• The potential significance of Black feminist thought goes far beyond demonstrating that African-American women can be theorists. Like Black feminist practice, which it reflects and which it seeks to foster, Black feminist thought can create a collective identity among African-American women about the dimensions of a Black women's standpoint. Through the process of rearticulating, Black feminist thought can offer African-American women a different view of ourselves and our worlds

  Patricia Hill Collins

  Practice, Our World, Views

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• I suggest that Black feminist thought consists of specialised knowledge created by African-American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women. In other words, Black feminist thought encompasses theoretical interpretations of Black women's reality by those who live it.

  Patricia Hill Collins

  Reality, Feminist, African American

  57 Copy quote

• I had this idea that I wanted to do this mixture of visions of African American women and visions of African American men. And call it 'The Men' and call it 'The Women' and show different faces of these two people.

  Faith Ringgold

  Men, Ideas, Two

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