Home > Work > Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World
21 " The fact that you have lived through every single one of your most awful days is legitimate proof that you can do it again. Statistics are on your side. You got this. "
― , Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World
22 " Feminism isn’t a glass slipper that fits only one perfect woman; it is an umbrella that has to become big enough to protect us all, even from one another. "
23 " But it was the women and the girls that blew me away. So many of them looked like me with wide noses, big saucer eyes, large breasts, short bodies, tiny hands, and hairy arms. "
24 " Maybe the “forever” in my valediction was a similar attempt to declare my unwavering selfhood even though I sensed change coming like a spring flood down a mountainside. "
25 " It was another feeling I didn’t know I missed until I felt it—feeling a part of something, feeling like you are not the odd one out, feeling like everyone else. And I would walk into shops with my curly hair cooperating beautifully in the thick, hot air, and the store owners would speak Spanish to me, and it was comfortable. And it was happy. And I felt like me. "
26 " It made me realize I never really wanted to look like my friends at all. They were beautiful, but it wasn’t any specific trait that made them beautiful: it was that I felt like they were the only definition of pretty. "
27 " When I was seventeen, to me a feminist was someone who lived life fully, who endured what came at her and triumphed over it. A feminist was someone who acted, who set her sights on a dream and made it come true. A feminist was someone who loved deeply, and who allowed that love to change her. She was complicated and sometimes contradictory, witty and full of integrity. A feminist, in my mind, was a woman at full potential. "
28 " Disavowing body obsession is also a political act because it refuses to pay money and time to a billion-dollar “beauty” industry that benefits directly from women’s insecurity "
29 " Feminism is about recognizing power and fighting to distribute it equally, regardless of race or class or ability or gender. Feminism is not static, and it never has been. In fact, feminism demands change. "
30 " Ask the young man in your life to prove his love for you twenty-first-century style, by embracing feminism. After all, feminism is no more than advocating for equal rights and opportunities for women everywhere . . . all women everywhere, no matter their race, religion, disability, or sexual orientation. "