Feminism Quotes

When two people marry they become in the eyes of the law one person, and that one person is the husband.

~ Shana Alexander

The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.

~ Betty Friedan

Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.

~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value

~ Ralph Nader

I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.

~ Ariel Levy

As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaidlabor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, wage slavery

~ Has Been Built

When you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about or if you went away.

~ Sara Ahmed

We have to imagine something before we can build the infrastructure that will allow it to exist. We have failed here on both fronts: in imagination and in reality. Our great weirdos, from Emily Dickinson to Simone Weil to Coco Chanel, are seen as outliers, as not relevant to the way we think through what we want out of life. It's the same way we discuss radical feminist writers like Dworkin and Firestone. Dworkin is unhinged, Firestone is too eccentric to be taken seriously.

~ Jessa Crispin

Men and women in their very essence -in their souls if you wish- have natural parity. (...) This was a relatively new idea at the time [of Shakespeare]. It ran counter to the teaching in the Bible -Eve's being made out of Adam's rib to be his helpmate -which was the basis for the idea, held for so long, that women do not have souls of their own but are dependent on their fathers' and husbands' .

~ Tina Packer

She [Cressida] knows it is men's sexual desire that makes women angels before they have been able to possess them; once possessed, women are things [Troilus and Cressida I.2, 225-28, 233-34].

~ Tina Packer

If we are serious about change, we have to dig - preferably with plenty of company and with a full appreciation of the fact that although we did not start the fire, it belongs to us now.

~ Allan G. Johnson

life's better with girls. boys need girls.

~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

~ Betty Friedan

you tell me i am not like most girlsand learn to kiss me with your eyes closedsomething about the phrase - something abouthow i have to be unlike the womeni call sisters in order to be wantedmakes me want to spit your tongue out like i am supposed to be proud you picked meas if i should be relieved you thinki am better than them

~ Rupi Kaur

i want to apologize to all the womeni have called prettybefore i've called them intelligent or bravei am sorry i made it sound as thoughsomething as simple as what you're born withis the most you have to be proud of when yourspirit has crushed mountainsfrom now on i will say things likeyou are resilient or you are extraordinarynot because i don't think you're prettybut because you are so much more than that

~ Rupi Kaur

The structural foundations of traditional manhood--economic independence, geographic mobility, domestic dominance--have all been eroding. The transformation of the workplace--the decline of the skilled worker, global corporate relocations, the malaise of the middle-class manager, the entry of women into the assembly line and the corporate office--have pressed men to confront their continued reliance on the marketplace as the way to demonstrate and prove their manhood.

~ Michael S. Kimmel

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

~ Virginia Woolf

I know formidable women, dozens of them, women who fight and who win... Noble women. Heroic ones.

~ Lyndsay Faye

It will take you long, lonely years, but one day you will grow tired. Tired of boys, tired of contempt, and then where will you be? All these girls around you with their stories and their lives, the solace of one another, and you will be as far away from them as an anthropologist among a foreign people, curious but unable to make contact. Have faith: you will learn.

~ Sarah Mccarry

How are we ever going to understand what happens when a civilization comes apart at the seams, as it did in Germany, if we fail to see the most glaring distinctions, such as the gender gap?

~ Ruth Klüger

Teach her about difference. Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Teach her not to attach value to difference. And the reason for this is not to be fair or to be nice but merely to be human and practical. Because difference is the reality of our world. And by teaching her about difference, you are equipping her to survive in a diverse world. She must know and understand that people walk different paths in the world and that as long as those paths do no harm to others, they are valid paths that she must respect. Teach her that we do not know – we cannot know – everything about life. Both religion and science have spaces for the things we do not know, and it is enough to make peace with that. Teach her never to universalise her own standards or experiences. Teach her that her standards are for her alone, and not for other people. This is the only necessary form of humility: the realisation that difference is normal.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If a guy is put off by you being a feminist, you need to ask yourself how put off you are by someone who doesn't believe in equality for women.

~ Laura Bates

Let's be real: if women were naturally anything, societies wouldn't spend so much time trying to police every aspect of their lives

~ Kameron Hurley

Once established, the young girl's dependency is systematically supported as she proceeds through childhood. For being nice - nonchallenging, nonconfronting, noncomplaining - she's rewarded with good grades, the approval of her parents and teachers, and the affection of her peers. What reason is there for her to turn deviant or nonconformist? The going is good, so she conforms. Increasingly, she patterns herself after what's expected of her.

~ Colette Dowling

Studies show that girls - especially smarter ones - have severe problems in the area of self-confid

~ Colette Dowling

Hold still we're going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away.

~ Hélène Cixous

The Singularity is at once an escape and a birth fantasy. I said to him: A Zeus dream that avoids the organic body altogether. Brand-new creatures burst forth from men's heads. Presto! The mother and her evil vagina disappears.

~ Siri Hustvedt

...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs. Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'. Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Women’s marches are a clever progressive divide and conquer strategy that not only turns women against men, but also turns women against each other in the guise of peace and solidarity. It is a brilliant tactic to employ media propaganda to make privileged women feel oppressed and then program them to think that vulgarity, exhibitionism and emasculation is empowering.

~ Dawn Perlmutter

Feminists are incapable of crafting a coherent argument using their words. It almost always involves menstrual blood or some sort of reference to ladyparts.

~ Hannah Bleau

This is just another reason for these “women” (and I use the term loosely) to be gross and obscene and call it a “political statement.” It’s not helpful. If anything, it’s demeaning and insulting to women who think with more than our genitals and who are concerned with issues bigger than our ladyparts. But by all means, keep acting the fool. All you’re doing is exposing yourselves for what you really are. The rest of us want no part of your nonsense.

~ Chrissie Johnson

I began to see that while equality often entailed women crossing the sexual divide between women's work and men's work, equality rarely meant that men crossed over the divide to the women's side: our side – women's – the side where work was largely, though not exclusively, unpaid or poorly paid care of dependents.

~ Eva Feder Kittay

The disparity, however, between the rewards offered in the labor market and the vital interest to have good dependency care makes it clear that market forces have not been relied upon to supply adequate dependency work. Indeed, a clear-eyed look at the nearly universal twin features of female caregiving and female subordination indicates: 1) that a certain class of persons has been subjected to and socialized to develop the character traits and the volitional structure needed for dependency work; 2) that certain sexual behaviors commensurate with forming attachments, being submissive to another's will, and so forth have been made compulsory for women; and 3) that poor women and women of color have been forced into paid employment as dependency workers by the scanty financial resources and limited employment opportunities available to them, and middle-class women have been forced out of paid employment not commensurate with their (largely unpaid) duties as dependency workers. It has not merely “happened” that women have consistently “chosen” to make dependency relations and dependency work central to their vision of the good life, while men have chosen a wider variety of options.

~ Eva Feder Kittay

History is full of lady engineers and spies and scientists. But history is also written by the victorious, and it may not surprise you that thus far the overwhelming winners have been straight white dudes. That hasn't worked out so well for everyone else.

~ Sam Maggs

I spent a great deal of my ilfe trying to be quiet and nice and not piss anyone off. I was misereable. It served no purpose. And they still came for me. It made me even easier to dismiss, to overlook, to assume I was just somebody else everybody could roll over and spout off ridiculously sexist, racist crap without dissent.But nodding and smiling gets old. It makes it easier for people to box you up and ship you off, I'm only really alive when I'm pissing people off anyway

~ Kameron Hurley