Feminism Quotes

When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.

~ Bell Hooks

Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a slave.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Few female characters get to be “the Chosen One” in science fiction and fantasy. Leia is as much the child of Darth Vader as Luke is, but only Luke gets to use the force, be recruited by his dad and ultimately save the day. We don’t get impossibly clever female sleuths or the sexy spies with the awesome gadgets. And on the rare occasions that we do get those characters, they’re denigrated as unrealistic Mary Sues.

~ Rhiannon Thomas

A man must claim responsibility for his own temptation, and not pin it on the woman who arouses him. It’s a gown, Sir Mark. Not even one of my more daring ones.

~ Courtney Milan

Dancing falls into the same category as poetry for a woman – it equals dreaming, which may inspire thoughts about such banned topics as love and desire.

~ Jenny Nordberg

I hated you,” she continued, “because you have done nothing more than abide by rules that every gentlewoman follows every day of her life. Yet for this prosaic feat, you are feted and cosseted as if you were a hero.” She felt nothing as she spoke, but still her voice shook. Her hands were trembling, too. “I hate that if a woman missteps once, she is condemned forever, and yet the men who follow you can tie a simple ribbon to their hats after years of debauchery, and pass themselves off as upright pillars of society.

~ Courtney Milan

So she did not replay, but played the strategist. She retained more power by withholding an answer.

~ E. Lockhart

It's more that they think about sexism in the same way people in London must think about bad weather: It's an omnipresent and unpleasant fact of life, but it shouldn't keep you from going about your business.

~ Hanna Rosin

Marriage is a core component of the patriarchal system. According to Gerda Lerner's research on ancient societies, a woman could achieve at least some status, and with that, better treatment and privileges, through preserving her only capital – her virginity – and eventually offering it to just one man.

~ Jenny Nordberg

Men touch their horses to calm them,” she said distantly. “They caress their falcons to remind them that they are bound. Touch smacks of ownership, and I am weary of being a possession.

~ Courtney Milan

But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.

~ Margaret Atwood

But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are.

~ Margaret Atwood

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.

~ Margaret Atwood

He says he'd like to kiss the ground you walk on-reminds me, did you wash them yesterday?- and after that you're his skivvy.

~ Bertolt Brecht

The responsibility for men's behavior, indeed for civilization itself rests entirely with women here, and in how they dress and behave. Men's animalistic impulses are presumed to be overwhelming and uncontrollable. And as men are brutal, brainless savages, women must hide their bodies to avoid being assaulted. In most societies, a respectable woman, to varying degrees, is expected to cover up. If she doesn't she is inviting assault.

~ Jenny Nordberg

There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for some absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance towards a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning though a dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial. While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if the attempt is not continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked within its own particularism.

~ Sheila Rowbotham

The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women.

~ Sandra Lee Bartky

What would one do if one were forced to choose between saving an innocent child’s life or engaging in unchaste behavior? This is, after all, the choice that some unfortunate women are put to—sell their bodies, or see their children starve.

~ Courtney Milan

It was common for my father to sit my sisters down and tell them things like, I saw a girl working in the bank in town, and she was a girl just like you. My parents had never completed primary school. They couldn't speak English or even read that well. My parents only knew the language of numbers, buying and selling, but they wanted more for their kids. That's why my father had scraped the money together and kept Annie in school, despite the famine and other troubles.

~ William Kamkwamba

In the 20th century- an age in thrall to the new- women turn out to be the newest thing of all; still packed up in cellophane, still folded up in the box, having played dead for the length of history. But now we are the new species!We are the tulip- America- the Hula Hoop- the moon shot- cocaine! Everything we do is going to be, implicitly,amazing.

~ Caitlin Moran

I like being a woman in a man's world. After all, men can't wear dresses, but we can wear the pants.

~ Whitney Houston

We must stand together and resist all such incursion! We must come together in brotherhood and toss out those like you—women who take a man’s job, who rob a man of the ability to feed his family.“Who is ‘we’?” Jessica peered at the empty green hedge behind him. “You appear to be alone.”“I speak for all working men!

~ Courtney Cole

Our culture is getting better and better at encouraging women to speak, but it’s not doing enough to listen to what they say when they do.

~ Lilit Marcus

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.

~ Rebecca Solnit

We are now dealing with a bizarre new morality where a woman cannot simply say, in one way or another, I'm on the pill because I like dick.

~ Roxane Gay

In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and evolved as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such. For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons. 79 Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to inform the women’s prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts.

~ Angela Y. Davis

Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowlegde of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper; outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of proptiety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.

~ Katha Pollitt

You can be any sex you like provided you act male. There's no men and women in the Watch, just a bunch of lads.

~ Terry Pratchett

The picture to my left, that’s me. My name is Stephanie M. Wytovich, and yes, I am a female horror writer. But am I? No, of course not. I mean, if you want to bring my vagina into the conversation, then yes, I guess that’s technically true, but seeing that I don’t write with it, I’m not sure why that would be appropriate.

~ Stephanie M. Wytovich

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

~ Bell Hooks

It is difficult to process the sacred masculine when your closest example has been a man smacking you around, verbally degrading you, lording over you, or otherwise proving a poor demonstration of the use of strength.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Having ascended to some spiritual strength by focusing on the power of the feminine, it is no doubt tempting to wield this strength against that which triggers memories of having once been weaker.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

There is a theory that men do not need Paganism because they have endless avenues of societal power available. Why use spells when one can get a bank loan with little trouble? The world already bends over backward to accommodate men, so why perfect the art of magickally shaping it?

~ Thomm Quackenbush

The way I figure it, here in New Earth, men's power has won out over women's power, just like it's done on Mainground. But men still fear women's power. No one ever forgets their mother's power to give them nourishment or withhold it. And men specially don't forget it, because they never grow into women themselves, and never lose a child's craving for the comfort of women's bodies.

~ Chris Beckett

People say to me, 'Has being a woman helped or hindered your career?' And the answer is yes.

~ Sallie Krawcheck

I see no reason that a man should have any issue with worshiping a goddess any more than a woman would in worshiping a male deity. It is undeniable that women, particularly in the Abrahamic faiths, have been doing just that for thousands of years, though they do like to sneak in the divine feminine under the cloak of the Virgin Mary.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

With the way a lot of men function, I'd say single womyn are a threat to society. In fact, I'd go as single womyn are a threat to the system. As a womyn, if you aren't spending all your time looking for what you were socialized to, you're doing something productive. I'd say that scares a hell of a lot of people.

~ Nocturnus Libertus

Women are seen as imperfect or unclean, because of a myth of a tempting apple, because they bleed monthly, because they lack equivalent upper body strength.

~ Thomm Quackenbush