Feminism Quotes

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.

~ Gloria Steinem

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

~ Virginia Woolf

What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.

~ Jessica Valenti

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

~ Virginia Woolf

Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.

~ Rebecca West

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

~ Virginia Woolf

No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.

~ Margaret Sanger

Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.

~ Saddam Hussein

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.

~ Gloria Steinem

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.

~ Gloria Steinem

Woman's degradation is in mans idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.

~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

~ Adrienne Rich

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.

~ Iris Murdoch

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

Vaginas beat penises every time. They're like kryptonite.Penises are defenseless against them.

~ Emma Chase

Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

~ Zadie Smith

The emerging woman ... will be strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied...strength and beauty must go together.

~ Louisa May Alcott

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

~ Virginia Woolf

Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy.

~ Björk

I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.

~ Roxane Gay

Individual heterosexual women came to the movement from relationships where men were cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts.

~ Bell Hooks

Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.

~ Marie Shear

It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the Christian religion.

~ Pope Benedict Xvi

Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply.

~ Sena Jeter Naslund

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

..the hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves-and encourage men to see us-as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities. But I know that this can't happen as long as American culture continues to inundate us with gender-role messages that place everyone-men and women-in an unnatural hierarchical order that's impossible to maintain without strife. For women to move forward, and for men to break free, we need to overcome the masculinity status quo-together.

~ Jessica Valenti

[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique.

~ Moderata Fonte

The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that PREVENTS teenage pregnancy.

~ Sonya Renee Taylor

In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer, and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I would suggest that a feminism which does not also seek to alter the exploitation of poorer women is not feminism at all, but is simply a varient for of upper-class politics & self-privileging.

~ Jack D. Forbes

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I deserve better —such a dangerous, mad thought for a woman to entertain.

~ Meredith Duran

If you listen long enough to the whispers, you will hear the truth. Until then, I will tell you this: the world is made safe by a woman. She bound the monster up and cast him out, and the man who was left was saved.

~ E.k. Johnston