It's Women's Equality Day, and you know what that means: a flood of Facebook posts and tweets poignantly wondering why we're still celebrating gender equality. It's enough to make any feminist roll her eyes. But before you do any permanent damage, check out these 17 inspiring quotes about women's equality. It won't erase the knowledge that half your high school acquaintances and distant relatives don't have a basic understanding of how sexism works, but I guarantee it will help.
Every Women’s Equality Day is worth celebrating, but this year is especially important. August 18, 2015 — just eight days ago — marked the 95th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. (Well, some women, anyway.) Despite the difficulties women today may face, we owe our current progress in gender equality to our feminist sisters, who fought for more than 70 years to win the right to vote. Without women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and my personal favorite, Ida B. Wells, who knows where the fight for equality would be today?
We may still have a long way to go, but we are certainly far from where we once were. Keeping our feminist predecessors in mind, let's celebrate women's equality with some old and new feminist quotes.
1. "I'm a feminist. I've been a woman for a long time. I'd be stupid not to stand on my own side."
— Maya Angelou
2. “A gender-equal society would be one where the word ‘gender’ does not exist: everyone can be themselves.”
— Gloria Steinem
3. “When God created man and woman, He was thinking, ‘Who should I give the authority to produce a human being?’ God chose women, which is important evidence of women’s power.”
—Malala Yousafzai
4. “Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a prerequisite for meeting the challenges of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance.”
— Kofi Annan
5. “We’re struggling to have a uniting word, but the good news is we have a uniting movement.”
- Emma Watson
6. “Achieving gender equality requires the participation of women and men, girls and boys. It is everyone’s responsibility.”
— Ban Ki-moon
7. “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.”
- Hillary Clinton
8. “The liberation of women is the liberation of man’s femininity and woman’s masculinity.”
— Coretta Kent
9. “Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.”
- Oprah Winfrey
10. “I measure the progress of a community by the progress its women have made.”
— BR Ambedkar
11. “I write for the women who don’t speak, for the women who are too afraid to speak up because we are taught to respect fear more than we respect ourselves. We are taught that silence can save us, but it won’t. "
— Audre Lorde
12. “I don’t want women to have power over men, but power over themselves.”
—Mary Shelley
13. “One child should never be elevated above another, even in casual conversation, let alone in global speech.”
— Alice Walker
14. “No matter what women do, they have to do it twice as well as men to be considered half as good. Fortunately, it’s not that difficult.”
— Charlotte Whitten
15. “Women, like men, should try to do the impossible. When they fail, their failure should become a challenge to others.”
— Amelia Earhart
16. “I demand more rights for women because I know what women have to endure.”
— Evita Peron
17. "Men, their rights are nothing more than that; women, their rights are nothing more than that."
— Susan B. Anthony
Image: Wikimedia Commons (2)
