A woman with self-respect will die if she is raped or else try not to be sexually assaulted again. But every day she is telling she is raped by someone.

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.

You could be erased a little so that there was less of you, less confidence, less freedom, or your rights could be eroded, your body invaded so that it was less and less yours, you could be rubbed out altogether, and none of those possibilities seemed particularly remote. All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence

If a woman does not fit the shape of what you think a woman should, if a woman is not obedient, does not see things the way you do, if a woman is too independent to need anything more than herself, does she automatically become a threat filled with such terror to you?

We live in circumstances which not only restrict our freedom but physically threaten us if we step out of line: in this culture, the penalty for being a woman is sometimes death. Yet it is extraordinarily unacknowledged. I think sometimes you have to define a problem before you start to find a solution and for years and years I've felt as though I live in occupied territory. My interest is in finding a way of constructing a path out of that territory.

What you can achieve or what you are capable of is taken away simply because you are a woman.

All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence.

women have to almost die before we give ourselves permission to live how we want.

I can hurt you and get away with it. Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities — in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal.

I guess women have to almost die before we give ourselves permission to live how we want.

When a woman wants to do something on her own way, she is criticized, dubbed as a rebel. I (too) was stated an arrogant. However, I stuck to my guns and today I am at this place. We have to fight in order to move forward in this men's world.

Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or — and the outward semblance is the same — crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been a woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation.

I was told it's what will make me a woman. I didn't know that it's something that is done very... it's horrible, you are cut, your genitalia is cut, no anesthesia, you bleed and some people die out of it.

You are martyred, as woman is ever martyred, particularly if she seeks her own power.