Female Power Quotes
Most modern feminists would not agree with this quotation by one of the great early femonists.
The Greek culture was quite sexist. However, all cultures had observed strong women, some who ruled and others where wives or mistresses of rulers were very influential if not powerful.
This proverb doesn’t mean quite what it would appear to—that women will never be attacked in an act of revenge. It does mean that when relatives are selected for vengeance killing, or other acts of vengeance, women will not be selected. However in one tragic Pakistani case in 2003, a Muslim man had purportedly had an affair with a woman from another clan. That clan’s male relatives took revenge. A group of them gang raped a sister of the man who purportedly had committed the offense. The “logic” was that by raping the woman, they were destroying the honor of the brother’s family as they in their perception had had their family’s honor destroyed. The fact that it was the innocent woman who was brutalized didn’t enter into the equation—there was no direct intent to take vengeance on her; it was taken on her male relatives. Worse was the fact that a local “tribal court” had authorized the action as a “legal” act of “blood” or vengeance. The national government, embarrassed before the world, provided minor punishments to the rapists (death might have been a rapists penalty) and then honored the woman by naming a school after her. Unfortunately the family’s honor was destroyed and marriage for the woman was unlikely in that society. In addition to the great improvements and benefits brought to half the known world by the Islamic expansion out of Arabia, many of the less desirable Arab traditions went with them informally and formally as Sharia—Islamic Law.
