Women's chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy.
Estelle RameyRead
Those who are so eager for women and girls to go back to the kitchen might think again about just what it is we might be up to in there. You can plan a lot of damage from a kitchen. It’s also where the knives are kept.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote critiques the notion that women should be confined to traditional roles in the home, suggesting there is more power and potential in women's spaces than typically acknowledged.
Laurie Penny's quote challenges the reductive view that women's roles should be limited to domestic tasks. By emphasizing that the kitchen can be a space of empowerment and even rebellion, she highlights the potential for women to orchestrate significant change. The mention of 'knives' symbolizes both the tools of domesticity and the power women can wield when they reclaim their spaces, thus urging society to reconsider its stereotypes regarding women's capabilities and aspirations.
Themes
WomenKitchenPowerGenderRoles
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech promoting gender equality, a leader could use this quote to challenge stereotypes about women’s roles.
Similar quotes
For here lies the corner stone of all the injustices done woman, the wrong idea from which all other wrongs proceed. She is not acknowledged as mistress of herself. For her cradle to her grave she is another's. We do indeed need and demand the other rights of which I have spoken, but let us first obtain OURSELVES.
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When a woman is exhorted to be compliant, cooperative, and quiet, to not make upset or go against the old guard, she is pressed into living a most unnatural life- a life that is self-blinding.. . without innovation. The world-wide issue for women is that under such conditions they are not only silenced, they are put to sleep. Their concerns, their viewpoints, their own truths are vaporized.
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Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let's stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices.
Stephanie CoontzRead
I was always longing to do, emotionally and physically, what my male counterparts always got to do. I just felt envious, every time I saw a movie that I was in awe of, and it was usually a male lead. And those kinds of roles weren't available. They just weren't being written.
Sandra BullockRead
Women of all classes are awakening to the necessity of self-support, but few are willing to do the ordinary useful work for which they are fitted.
Elizabeth Cady StantonRead