Feminism Quotes

I felt guilty all of a sudden, as if just by existing and talking to him I was leading him on.

~ Meredith Russo

And, why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great -that is, for great men; and it's silly. Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because, you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty -so as to be forgiven; or to forgot, to bury it until next time.

~ Hélène Cixous

I’m using beauty to subvert the system.

~ Georgia Clark

As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely bu condemning its government or by saying three times As a woman my country is the whole world. -Notes Towards a Politics of Location.

~ Adrienne Rich

This FEMINIST Goes Hard.

~ Stephanie Lahart

She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she'd been proven right.

~ Margaret Atwood

If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never know how many other women shared it.

~ Betty Friedan

Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand.

~ Combahee River Collective

Today's feminism infantilizes women. If feminism is not about freedom, then what the heck is it for? It just becomes a grievance lobby of victimhood games.

~ Janet Albrechtsen

In truth, to go for a walk with one's eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

She was a professional. A professional who didn’t need five inches of makeup and f*ck-me cleavage to do her job.

~ Georgia Clark

What do you think Amy Poehler is doing right now?

~ Georgia Clark

My voice is strong and imposing, and my legs are powerful enough to hold up its weight. I wake up every day assured of my right to not only participate in the world as an equal part of it, but to loudly reject the narrative that keeps trying to tell me to pipe down, fold in, shrivel up, simper, apologise and slink my way through life so as not to offend or upset anyone with the complicated, beautiful mess that is me. I have fought the odds to get here, empowered by the knowledge that every single woman who has come before me has fought her own battle in order to survive. We fight like girls. This is how we prevail. And this is why we're still standing.

~ Clementine Ford

Dex's mother knew she should be afraid for her daughter. This, she'd been told, was the tragedy of being a girl. To live in fear–it was the fate of any parent, maybe, but the special provenance of a mother to a daughter, one woman raising another, knowing too well what could happen. This was what lurked inside the luckiest delivery rooms, the ones whose balloons screamed It's a girl!: pink cigars and flowered onesies and fear.

~ Robin Wasserman

I think that's when I understood that you only ruined my life because my life needed ruining. Because the life you rejected demanded that I spend all my time telling my daughter to be less and my son to be more.

~ Courtney Milan

The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming.

~ Bell Hooks

Heightened awareness often gives the illusion that a problem is lessening. This is most often not the case. It may mean simply that a problem has become so widespread it can no longer remain hidden or be ignored.

~ Bell Hooks

Most feminist groups began with women talking about how we saw ourselves and other women, how we acted. We openly confessed our fears and hatred of other women. We talked about how to combat jealousy, the politics of envy, and so on.

~ Bell Hooks

If overthrowing some five thousand years of patriarchy seems like a big order, just focus on celebrating each self-respect step along the way

~ Eve Ensler

I want you to promise me that you'll stop comparing yourself to everyone else.' 'What?' I broke off the hug, not understanding. 'You. Evelyn. You're always like, 'I wish I coulld be like this' or 'I wish I could be more like so-and-so'. You're obsessed with being normal, but that's well boring, and you're extraordinary, Evie. Promise me you'll stop trying to stop stop being you'.

~ Holly Bourne

if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul,body and pride of man?

~ Sylvia Plath

Bad feminism seems like the only way I can both embrace myself as a feminist and be myself, and so I write. I chatter away on Twitter about everything that makes me angry and all the small things that bring me joy. I write blog posts about the meals I cook as I try to take better care of myself, and with each new entry, I realize that I'm undestroying myself after years of allowing myself to stay damaged.

~ Roxane Gay

Stop shoving things up me. Stop shoving and stop cleaning it up. My vagina doesn't need to be cleaned up. It smells good already. Not like rose petals. Don't try to decorate.

~ Eve Ensler

Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?In this style, argue tyrants of every denomination, from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to crush reason; yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

You are a goddess. You are a catch. You are, like, the outcome of every self-help book ever written.

~ Georgia Clark

It became a kind of passion. Discovering the key, unlocking the vagina's mouth, unlocking this voice, this wild song.

~ Eve Ensler

I think the most important thing I do in my professional life today is delivering public, impermeable nos and sticking to them. I say no to people who prioritize being cool over being good. I say no to misogynists who want to weaponize my body against me. I say no to men who feel entitled to my attention and reverence, who treat everything the light touches as a resource for them to burn. I say no to religious zealots who insist that I am less important than an embryo. I say no to my own instinct to stay quiet.

~ Lindy West

Deeds are stronger than words, and children are not biblical scholars. As long as they see girls and women treated as inferior by their faith, that's what they will learn, no matter what their holy book says.

~ Peter Wilkes

NORA: Yes; it is just so, Torvald. While I was still at home with father, he used to tell me all his views, and so of course I held the same views; if at any time I had a different view I concealed it, because he would not have liked people with opinions of their own. He used to call me his little doll, and play with me, as I in my turn used to play with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house.

~ Henrik Ibsen

NORA: No; only merry. And you were always so friendly and kind to me. But our house has been nothing but a nursery. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa's doll-child. And my children were, in their turn, my dolls. I was exceedingly delighted when you played with me, just as children were whenever I played with them. That has been our marriage, Torvald.

~ Henrik Ibsen

Eight or nine out of ten mothers in our society today believe that they have accomplished their duty if their daughters, once married, are not sent home in divorce. -Daughters in Boxes

~ Kishida Toshiko

The promise of Plath's work was that a woman could de-fang the charges of hysteria by owning them. Unlike Solanas, who seemingly never saw herself as flawed or sick, or Wollstonecraft and Bronte, who swept their flaws under the carpet so as not to compromise themselves, or even Jacobs, who was honest, but played a delicate game of apologizing for sins that were not her fault so as to reach her audience, Plath took her own flaws as her subject, and thereby made them the source of her authority. By detailing her own overabundant inner life, no matter how huge and frightening it was -- her sexuality, her suicidality, her broken relationships, her anger at the world or at men -- she could, in some crucial way, own that part of her story, simply because she chose to tell it. And, if she could do this, other women could do it, too.

~ Sady Doyle

I hear many young women say they can't find well-known feminists with whom they identify. That can be disheartening, but I say, let us (try to) become the feminists we would like to see moving through the world.

~ Roxane Gay

We've heard history for centuries. It's time for herstory.

~ Mommy Moo Moo

Frequently, I have been asked how I got to be this way. How did I, born black in a white country, poor in a society where wealth is adored and sought after at all costs, female in an environment where only large ships and some engines are described favourably by using the female pronoun-how did I get to be Maya Angelou?

~ Maya Angelou

There’s no such thing as ugly.

~ Georgia Clark

I ask my father to read an article about male entitlement and emotional labor.Can you just tell me what it says? he says.

~ Martha Grover

Economist Marvin Harris described women as a literate and docile labor pool, and therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries. The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.

~ Naomi Wolf

In India, a bride burning-- to punish a woman for inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry-- takes place approximately once every two hours, but rarely constitute news.

~ Nicholas D. Kristof

His shadow stretched out past mine. I remembered Mom telling me how frightening men were, all men really, how helpless it often felt to be a woman among men, and for the first time I understood what she meant.

~ Meredith Russo