Mae Jemison

It’s work having a vagina. Guys don’t think that it’s work but it is. You think it shows up like that to the event? It doesn’t. Every night it’s like getting it ready for its first Quinceanera, believe me.

Do not live someone else’s life and someone else’s idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that’s inside of you.

It’s about being alive and feisty and not sitting down and shutting up. Even if people would like you to.

Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.

I feel there are certain people who are systematically ripping (feminism) down because of their lack of regard and their ignorance about what the women before us had to go through.

Until we’re in those rooms as equally as men are, it can’t shift.

We can never be complacent and think that we’ve arrived now as women. Because I hear this from young women. Some of you young women who aren’t feeling the pains that many of our predecessors have felt – you think, well, there aren’t any problems, women’s rights, we’ve got this all figured out, I’m already equal, I’m good – I’m just like, oh, just you wait, you’ll feel it. So the work continues.

It is very important that women of this country be made aware of the dangers of osteoporosis in the sense that it is a silent and invisible disease with no symptoms whatsoever.

The truth is that male religious leaders have had – and still have – an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the later. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.

I never identified with the feminist movement in a strong way. I just kind of lived it. I didn’t politicize it. I didn’t follow any written rules to what it meant to be a feminist. I had my own sense of what was right and wrong.

Little girls think it’s necessary to put all their business on MySpace and Facebook, and I think it’s a shame… I’m all about mystery.

I will be phenomenal to the women. I mean, I want to help women.

If we want our daughters to dream bigger than we did we still have work to do.

If you look up feminist in the dictionary, it just means someone who believes men and women have equal rights …