Woman's Sceptre

"Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."
~ Mary Wollstonecraft

This month, we consider the sceptres that women hold: sceptres of beauty in the forms of the pens and brushes that they use to represent their experiences as art, and literal sceptres of power, often wrested from the unwilling, that they use to establish justice for themselves and their sisters.

Each participant will receive a quote from a woman who has advanced the cause of women's rights or participation of women in the arts. Although we are offering this challenge alongside Legendarium Ladies April, your response does not have to be about a female character. (Also--please feel free to use your challenge quote in combination with this month's wonderful Legendarium Ladies April prompts, or write or include a poem as part of Poetry Month!) You may use all or part of your quote in any way that you choose in responding to the challenge.

This challenge opened in April 2017 .

Prompts

Choose your prompt from the collection below.

View Prompts

• "Weakness may excite tenderness, and gratify the arrogant pride of man; but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for respect, and deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship." ~ Mary Wollstonecraft
• "Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think." ~ Mary Wollstonecraft
• "So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me, that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles, when I see a man start with eager and serious solicitude to lift a handkerchief, or shut a door, when the lady could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two." ~ Mary Wollstonecraft
• "All the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience." ~ Mary Wollstonecraft
• "Justice and judgment lie often a world apart." ~ Emmeline Pankhurst
• "Note the difference between a right and a privilege. A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never. Privilege, in the abstract, does not exist; there is no such thing. Rights are recognized, privilege is destroyed." ~ Voltairine de Cleyre
• "Art and nature shall always be wrestling until they eventually conquer one another so that the victory is the same stroke and line: that which is conquered, conquers at the same time." ~ Maria Sibylla Merian
• "It breaks one's heart to think of man, the civiliser, wasting treasures in a few years to which savages and animals had done no harm for centuries." ~ Marianne North
• "Listen to my story and everything will come out true." ~ Bessie Smith
• "It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion." ~ Murasaki Shikibu
• "To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind." ~ Murasaki Shikibu
• "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them." ~ Maya Angelou
• "Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it." ~ Maya Angelou
• "Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it." ~ Maya Angelou
• "Not all men (and especially the wisest) share the opinion that it is bad for women to be educated. But it is very true that many foolish men have claimed this because it displeased them that women knew more than they did." ~ Christine de Pisan
• "This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it." ~ Nina Simone
• "I'll tell you what Freedom is to me. No fear." ~ Nina Simone
• "I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim." ~ Frida Kahlo
• "Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement." ~ Golda Meir
• "All revolutions must be social revolutions, based upon fundamental changes in society; otherwise it is not a revolution, but merely a change of government." ~ Song Qingling
• "Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack." ~ Song Meiling
• "I am convinced that we must train not only the head, but the heart and hand as well." ~ Song Meiling
• "Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge." ~Jeanette Winterson
• "To compose was as natural to me as to breathe; and this gift of nature, never having been suffered to fall into disuse, remains a source of the greatest consolation to this day." ~ Queen Lili’uokalani
• "The way to lose any earthly kingdom is to be inflexible, intolerant and prejudicial. Another way is to be too flexible, tolerant of too many wrongs and without judgment at all. It is a razor’s edge." ~ Queen Lili’uokalani
• "Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same." ~ Francesca Caccini
• "It has happened more than once that a composition has come to me, ready-made as it were, between the demands of other work." ~ Amy Beach
• "Life begets life. Energy begets energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich." ~ Sarah Bernhardt
• "There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. [...] There is less competition in the first group." ~ Indira Gandhi
• "We are starving for education. It’s like a precious gift. It’s like a diamond." ~ Malala Yousafzai
• "I work hard, I work late, I have nothing on my conscience. When I go to bed, I sleep." ~ Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
• "Anger is like liquid. You put it in a container and it takes the shape of that container. So many people you see in prison, unleashing war on their people, they are angry, and they take their anger and put it into a violent container." ~ Leymah Gbowee
• "Leadership is standing with your people. People say you have to live to fight another day, but sometimes you have to show that you are a true leader." ~ Leymah Gbowee
• "Mankind's feeling of responsibility to create a decent life and make it worth living with dignity has always been stronger than the will to kill life." ~ Tawakkol Karman