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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the detrimental effects of societal expectations on women's voices and innovation.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes highlights the societal pressures placed upon women to conform to traditional roles of compliance and quietness. This suppression not only silences their perspectives and truths but also stifles their potential for innovation and progress, leading to a life that lacks authenticity and fulfillment. The message conveys the importance of allowing women to express themselves fully and to challenge the status quo.
In practice
This quote can be used in women's rights advocacy speeches to highlight the need for female empowerment.
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
I've said this before, and I'm sure there are people who disagree, but I feel like one of the reasons there aren't a lot more women in stand-up - and there are many more now; it's not parity, but it's getting there - is that women are not socialized to look stupid or silly. They're socialized to be pretty and precious.
When women and men can shed an equal quantity of tears in public, that's when we'll have equal power.
What's interesting about the wizarding world is when you take physical strength out of the equation, a woman can do magic just as powerfully as a man can do magic. A woman can fight just the same as a man.
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman.
Women's chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy.
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