No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin — because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of t… - Gloria Steinem

The Arab Spring did a great deal for women because the person who spread the word in the first place was a woman. Women participated in it; they were fully out there in the street. Nawal El Saadawi is a founding figure of Egyptian and Middle Eastern feminism who wrote a book opposing female genital mutilation (of which she is a victim). She’s been banned. She’s been in prison. She’s now in her eighties and during the Arab Spring she was like the wise woman of Liberation Square, sitting in the middle of it as young women and young men came to her for instruction, for blessings, and so on. But it’s very often the case with revolutionary moments that women are present but then they’re drummed out of it afterwards.

One day an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the Earth!

We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself — or will use military violence against another country — is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.