Feminism Quotes

I will have my serpent’s tongue - my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

~ Gloria E. Anzaldúa

... I firmly believe that a woman can be whatever she wants to be if she sets her mind to it.

~ Maya Banks

There are really not many jobs that actually acquire a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.

~ Gloria Steinem

When you want to join a prestigious social club, do you wonder if your race will make it difficult to join? If you do well in a situation, do you expect to be called a credit to your race? Or to be described as different from the majority of your race? If you need legal or medical help, do you worry that your race might work against you? If you take a job with an affirmative action employer, do you worry that your co-workers will think that you are unqualified and were hired only because of your race? Do you worry that your children will not have books and school materials that are about people of their own race?

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ifemelu thought about the expression sweet girl. Sweet girl meant that, for a long time, Don had molded Ranyinudo into a malleable shape, or that she had allowed him to think he had.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am all things, I am not your words. I am defined by me.

~ Maria Elena

Fighting for equality is often misunderstood as simply being offered the same terms as men on paper. In may ways we already have that. What we don’t have is emancipation: the opportunity to be free of social and external shackles that perpetuate inequality and women’s lower position.

~ Dawn Foster

Women, “the softer sex”, are expected to bare this emotional performance yet accept the fact it is undervalued, both classified as an intrinsic skill that accompanies living whilst female, and the belief that it cannot be taught formally, so is less valuable

~ Dawn Foster

Actually, the idea of economic man is an efficient way of excluding women. We have historically allocated women certain activities and said that she must do them because she is a woman. Then we create an economic theory that states that these activities have no economic meaning.

~ Katrine Marçal

Boys are given the universe in which to carve out their identities, the promise of infinite space for them to expand into and contract upon. Girls are allowed only enough room to be stars, and they must twinkle, twinkle if they want anyone to pay attention to them.

~ Clementine Ford

There is nothing innate, immutable or inevitable about boys or girls doing particularly well or badly in different subjects. Girls in Shanghai outperform western boys in math, the same boys that outshine the girls in the US. The variable factor is the educational system, the society and the parents.

~ Jamie Le Fay

I don't see how being handsome can possibly harm a man. It's just another cheap privilege that took zero effort to attain.

~ Jamie Le Fay

Pregnancy = the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity.

~ Julia Kristeva

Don't underestimate him, Morgan. Many, especially men, see the rise of minorities as a threat to their cultural and economic dominance. White men are losing their jobs to women, minorities and people at the other end of the supply chain in third world countries. Beleaguered voters will support him in the hope that he will restore their vanished status.People won't take him seriously. This is the man that said on national TV that a woman's place is in the kitchen.That may indeed be his biggest strength.

~ Jamie Le Fay

Feminism has been slandered as a way to give ugly women greater prominence in society. And, in a way, it is. Feminism is for ugly women. For beautiful women. For all women. Women of all colors, ages, and shapes. It's about giving people an equal chance regardless of their gender. Judging them for what they do and not for what they are.

~ Mara Wilson

Do you really think that Walter has a chance of becoming president in two years?Yes, I do. I believe that, in the next few years, we are likely to experience a war between a large population of disenfranchised, jobless, Western Caucasian men and everyone else. The status quo is being disrupted, and they don't like it. Don't expect them to give up power willingly. The forces you challenge are dangerous and don't play fair or clean.

~ Jamie Le Fay

Burning Woman is a powerful image. A role model. A metaphor. A warning. A source of power. She is Feminine power incarnate.

~ Lucy H. Pearce

The pursuit and preservation of purity can drive prejudice and hate. Many crimes against humanity have been committed in its name. Purity is best applied to water.

~ Jamie Le Fay

From then on, I vowed, I would never say anything negative about a woman's appearance. it had nothing to do with them as a person and it wasn't something they could easily change. If I didn't want looks to matter, I would have to stop talking and acting as if they did.

~ Mara Wilson

Those in the System, would like us to share their belief that all the changes [we are witnessing] are not connected: they are simply anomalies, isolated symptoms to be treated or preferably ignored, before the all-powerful Western capitalist patriarchal model goes on to ever greater heights and grander ejaculations. Most are numb to it, caught in fear, denial or resistance.But we, Burning Woman, know this process intimately. Amongst Burning Women and Men, there is a fierce, quiet knowing that these are both the death pangs of the old, and the birthing pangs of the new.

~ Lucy H. Pearce

And yet, despite this portrait of a self assured woman, Cindy seemed to have a near obsession with being where everyone was and doing what everyone was doing.

~ Imbolo Mbue

Seems a lot of men never saw one such as me. A girl what could keep up and fight and ride and curse with the best of them. A girl what ain’t trapped in some dress or some house or some bed. A girl what ain’t waiting on some man to do what she ought to her own damn self.

~ J.d. Jordan

The sex-based segregation of labour is the key, to maintaining not only the family, but also the economy, because the economy would collapse like a house of cards if this unpaid domestic labour had to be paid for by somebody, either by the husband or the employer. Consider this: the employer pays the employee for his or her labour in the workplace. But the fact that he or she can come back to the workplace, the next day, depends on somebody else (or herself) doing a whole lot of work the employer does not pay for—cooking, cleaning, running the home. When you have an entire structure of unpaid labour buttressing the economy, then the sexual division of labour cannot be considered to be domestic and private; it is what keeps the economy going. If tomorrow, every woman demanded to be paid for this work that she does, either the husband would have to pay her, or the employer would have to pay the husband. The economy would fall apart. This entire system functions on the assumption that women do housework for love. *

~ Nivedita Menon

A slut isn’t a person, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or an annoying eyelash. We decide who a girl is based on something she’s done (or even just rumoured to have done) and then brand her with it as if it’s a permanent part of her identity. Guys, on the other hand, get to wear their relationships and ‘conquests’ like medals or badges of honour, which are much easier to take off, and hurt a lot less.

~ Laura Bates

You are the most powerful army in the world; you are the future of this planet. You cannot, you will not spend one more minute of your time looking in a mirror wishing you looked different.

~ Jamie Le Fay

Because when you kiss your first boy or girl, you don't want to be so caught up in your lack of self-worth that you forget to enjoy the kiss, that you forget that you deserve the pleasure of that moment. You don't want to be so caught up in your lack of self-worth that you become an object of his or her desire, a grateful unworthy slave to his or her attention.

~ Jamie Le Fay

Manhood is, today, an uncertain, frail status that is easily threatened. Insecure men attempt to affirm their manliness physically and symbolically. Zanus's appeal speaks to the insecurities of men raised with traditional values; men trapped in a world that is pulling the rug under their feet and challenging everything they believe in.

~ Jamie Le Fay

Sometimes I want to quit - not performing, but being a woman altogether. I want to throw my hands in the air after reading a mean Twitter comment and say, All right, you got me. You figured me out. I'm not pretty. I'm not thin. I don't deserve love. I have no right to use my voice. I will start wearing a burka and move to a small town upstate and wait tables at a pancake house.So much has changed about me since I was that confident, happy girl in high school. In the years since then, I've experienced a lot of desperation and self-doubt, but in a way, I've come full circle. I know my worth. I embrace my power. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story. I will. I'll speak and share and fuck and love, and I will never apologise for it. I am amazing for you, not because of you. I am not who I sleep with. I am not my weight. I am not my mother. I am myself. And I am all of you.

~ Amy Schumer

I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.“Yes,” said Kate. “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

~ Doris Lessing

I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.“Yes,” said Kate. “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

~ Doris Lessing

Younger woman says, “I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.”“Yes,” [older woman responds] “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

~ Doris Lessing

When feminist women told the world that patriarchy promotes woman-hating, the response was that feminists were being too extreme, exaggerating the problem. Yet when men who knew nothing about feminism claimed that feminists were man-hating, there was no response from the nonfeminist world saying that they were being too extreme. No feminists have murdered and raped men. Feminists have not been jailed day after day for their violence against men. No feminists have been accused of ongoing sexual abuse of girl children, including creating a world of child pornography featuring little girls. Yet these are some of the acts of men that led some feminist women to identify men as woman-hating.

~ Bell Hooks

But by far the worst thing we do to males--by making them feel they have to be hard--is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Desperate, lonely, cut off from the human community which in many cases has ceased to exist, under the sentence of violent death, wracked by desires for intimacy they do not know how to fulfil, at the same time tormented by the presence of women, men turn to logic.

~ Andrea Nye

And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are. If we have sons, we don’t mind knowing about their girlfriends. But our daughters’ boyfriends? God forbif. (But we of course expect them to bring home the perfect man for marriage when the time is right.)

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are. If we have sons, we don’t mind knowing about their girlfriends. But our daughters’ boyfriends? God forbid. (But we of course expect them to bring home the perfect man for marriage when the time is right.)

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an ‘essence’ of gender, a psychology and pattern of behaviour, which is suited to persons with particular bodies and identities.This is the opposite of the feminist view, which is that the idea of gender is the foundation of the political system of male domination. ‘Gender’, in traditional patriarchal thinking, ascribes skirts, high heels and a love of unpaid domestic labour to those with female biology, and comfortable clothing, enterprise and initiative to those with male biology. In the practice of transgenderism, traditional gender is seen to lose its sense of direction and end up in the minds and bodies of persons with inappropriate body parts that need to be corrected. But without ‘gender’, transgenderism could not exist. From a critical, feminist point of view, when transgender rights are inscribed into law and adopted by institutions, they instantiate ideas that are harmful to women’s equality and give authority to outdated notions of essential differences between the sexes. Transgenderism is indeed transgressive, but of women’s rights rather than an oppressive social system.

~ Sheila Jeffreys

All women live

~ Nussbaum

All women live in sexual objectification the way fish swim in water.

~ Nussbaum