Feminism Quotes

Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.

~ Maggie Nelson

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides. But the understood incentive on the woman's part was wanting here. Besides, Bathsheba's position as absolute mistress of a farm and house was a novel one, and the novelty had not yet begun to wear off.

~ Thomas Hardy

Take my heart and squeeze it out over the face of Your Bride, the Church.

~ Catherine Of Siena

Oh, let us lose our milk teeth and cut instead the strong teeth of hate and love.

~ Catherine Of Siena

Ladies, when you write a poem for Feminism because that is what we sometimes do, remember that it's never about them. It's only about you.

~ Danielle Valenilla

Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man.

~ Oscar Wilde

If you can't tell from my rap lyrics already, yes I am a feminist. And when I'm saying hoe or bitch I am actually referring to men. ...That sounded bad, in someway. But at the end of the day, I'm sick of rappers using bitches and hoes as terms towards women. Feminists are NOT a hate group. Feminists are not all female. Nor has it got an anti-male agenda. It's about equality! I've had a weird, special bond with women since I was a kid. And it's just a shame really that I'm gay.

~ Scott Mcgoldrick

All men think that a woman walking alone at night is a whore.

~ Tamara Faith Berger

Centuries of social conditioning has created a generational fear among women of being perceived as masculine.This is where all the shaming and labels come into play, which perpetuate the oppression of girls and women. As a society we shame girls with deep voices or masculine features and we shame boys with soft voices or effeminate gestures. Girls get called too manly and boys get called too girly. The only solution I can think of is to be unashamedly you. If that means challenging stereotypes and gender norms, go right ahead!

~ Miya Yamanouchi

I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone's noticing me.

~ Kim Gordon

I can’t remember the moment I was labeled bitch for the first time, but it sure wasn’t in the blogosphere of 2008. It was well before the blogosphere, let alone the World Wide Web, existed. The first time I was called a bitch, the home computer of choice was a Vic 20, capable of playing Pong and calculating to eight decimal points but not much else.

~ Shannon Drury

Today we tell girls to grow up to be or do whatever they want. But the cultural pressure to become a mother remains very strong; rare is she who doesn’t at least occasionally succumb to the nagging fear that if she remains childless, she’ll live to regret it.

~ Kate Bolick

The question I’d long posed to myself—whether to be married or to be single—is a false binary. The space in which I’ve always wanted to live—indeed, where I have spend my adulthood—isn’t between those two poles, but beyond it. The choice between being married versus being single doesn’t even belong here in the twenty-first century.

~ Kate Bolick

All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.

~ Alice Walker

EVERYTIMEA GIRL WISHESTOBE A BOY BADLY, IT'S A SIGNAL THAT OUT SOCIETY FAILED IN ITS DEEDS SOMEWHERE.

~ Ameya Agrawal

The lipstick is a dark, dark red. The kind Hollywood stars wear. Not a shade good girls in Davisburg wear to the movies. I try it on anyway and gaze at my reflection in the mirror.I don't look sick. I certainly don't look like that kind of girl.What does that kind of girl look like, anyway?

~ Robin Talley

I can be totally feminine and totally feminist. The two are not mutually exclusive.

~ Patricia V. Davis

Language has everything to do with oppression and liberation. When the word victory means conquer vs. harmony and the word equality means homogenization vs. unity in/through diversity, then the liberation of a people from a minority class to communal stakeholders becomes much more difficult. Oppression has deep linguistic roots. We see it in conversations which interchange the idea of struggle with suffering in order to normalize abuse. We are the creators of our language, and our definitions shape the perceptions we have of the world. The first step to ending oppression is finding a better method of communication which is not solely dependent on a language rooted in the ideology of oppressive structures.

~ Cristina Marrero

Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence, regardless of where she was raised or what religion she does or doesn’t practice. She may grow up to love women instead of men, or to decide she simply doesn’t believe in marriage. No matter. These dual contingencies govern her until they’re answered, even if the answers are nobody and never.

~ Kate Bolick

We are not really senseless, and we are not angels, too,But very human beings, human just as much as you.It's hard upon occasions to be forceful and sublimeWhen you're treated as incompetents three-quarters of the time.

~ Alice Duer Miller

Behind us are two or three dozen country people from the outlying towns. With them are cages of chicken and goats, sheep, even cattle. That’s where we fit on market day. Between the executions and the livestock sales.

~ Kristen Simmons

At first I thought it was simply that the specter of the crazy bag lady has been branded so simply into the collective female consciousness that we’re stuck with her. Now I realized I was wrong. What is haunting about the bag lady is not only that she is left to wander the streets, cold and hungry, but that she’s living proof of what it means to not be loved. Her apparition will endure as long as women consider the love of a man the most supreme of all social validations.

~ Kate Bolick

Dear Men Everywhere,Please don't think that being a feminist means we hate you or don't need you. -We absolutely love you and couldn't live without you! ...We are just on a mission to be treated equally and with respect. No hard feelings. With love, Feminists of the World xoxoox P.S. Yes we do shave our legs!

~ Miya Yamanouchi

We don’t have no say, ‘cause we was an afterthought. He yanked us up out o’ man’s ribs, but He made man out the Earth. He made him out the dirt and the mud and made him out the world, so man is the world. Women…women just a part o’ men.” Elaine snubbed the cigarette out, tapped the dark leather case on the edge of the table and I watched as another slim, white stick slid free.

~ Laura A. Lord

The outrageous madonna/whore duality that we mock in Women’s Studies 101 has its subtle, and very insidious, expression in the good/bad mother paradigm that we grapple with every day of our lives.

~ Shannon Drury

What I am or am not wearing does not correlate with my competency as a professional, a mother, or a feminist role model. My clothes do not define me and nor does my nakedness. I define me.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.

~ Patricia Duncker

What I am or am not wearing does not correlate with my competency as a professional, a mother, or a feminist role model. My clothes don't define me and neither does my nakedness. I define me.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

Mother, what is a Feminist?A feminist, my daughter,Is any woman now who caresTo think about her own affairsAs men don't think she oughter.

~ Alice Duer Miller

When men in Congress come to blows at somemthing someone said,I always notice that it shows their blood is quick and red;But if two women disagree, with very little noise,It proves, and this seems strange to me, that women have no poise.

~ Alice Duer Miller

Is it true that the English government is calling on women to do work abandoned by men?Yes, it is true.Is not a woman's place the home?No, not when men need her services outside the home.Will she never be told again that her place is the home?Oh, yes, indeed.When?As soon as men want their jobs back again.

~ Alice Duer Miller

The Mommy Wars, as they stand today, serve as an effective check on the ambitions of the American mother. The phenomenon keeps women in a perpetual state of guilt, shame and inadequacy, and does so without involving anyone but wealthy white women.

~ Shannon Drury

There is a need for promoting women's sexual agency in today's society, because if it wasn't an issue, terms such as 'female sexual empowerment' would be made redundant. The fact that we merely have this vocabulary is indicative of that.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

I am everything what u see and I can be anything what I want to be.

~ Nandini Sharma

What had she been thinking, suggesting to Alicia, of all people, that a time-travel app was the solution to the problems of women in poverty? 'Are you talking about my community? You didn't even think highly enough of me to let me in on your little scheme, and now you think it will be God's gift to throw a bunch of poor women through a wormhole every day so they can take care of their children and collect their welfare checks at the same time? That's your solution? Time travel is easier than passing affordable child care? Jennifer said nothing. Alicia, of course, was right. Years ago she had chosen to name the center It Takes a Village because, from the beginning, she had hated the every-person-for-herself attitude that isolated and blame so many of the residents the agency worked with. Yet she had just suggested that the answer to the multiplying burdens face by single mothers, in particular, was not for the village to gather around them, but for these women to multiply themselves instead. The same answer, she thought, that she had applied to herself when her own burdens had seemed too much to bear.

~ Kamy Wicoff

That she was now more tired and forgetful, while able to do three times what she had been able to do when she was somewhat less tired and forgetful but also stressed, guilty, grouchy, and overwhelmed, seemed a small price to pay.

~ Kamy Wicoff

It is an extravagant gesture,' she said, turning to the torpedo, 'which is just the sort of gesture I like.

~ Kamy Wicoff

People are kinder to the unborn than they are to the women themselves, and soon I had my ticket.

~ Emily Schultz

I am a woman with thoughts and questions and shit to say. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story — I will. I will speak and share and fuck and love, and I will never apologize to the frightened millions who resent that they never had it in them to do it. I stand here and 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. (2014 Gloria Awards and Gala)

~ Amy Schumer

I can feel like a hag some days if I want! And I can tell everybody how insecure I am if I want! Or I can be pretty and pretend to think I'm a hag out of fake modesty –- I can do that if I want, too. Because you, Livingston, are not the boss of me and what kind of girl I become.

~ E. Lockhart