Feminism Quotes

Women's liberation by women who are already liberated through channels that would mess them up further

~ Nikhil Sharda

Feminists who accept the claim made in The Book of Genesis, and, that God is a he, need to make their minds up.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth.

~ Germaine Greer

Women hold all the power. They should use it like a whip, not offer it up like a sacrifice.

~ Tarryn Fisher

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

~ Adrienne Rich

The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy....Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.

~ Phyllis Schlafly

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

~ Adrienne Rich

You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.

~ Margaret Atwood

The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Unwittingly, the feminists acknowledge the superiority of the male sex by wishing to become like men.

~ Alice Von Hildebrand

Feminism means finally that we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognise that the world they have described is not the whole world. Masculine ideologies are the creation of masculine subjectivity; they are neither objective, nor value-free, nor inclusively human. Feminism implies that we recognise for us, the distortion, of male-created ideologies, and that we proceed to think, and act, out of that recognition.

~ Adrienne Rich

Feminism is a tremendously underestimated force, viewed in the present context primarily as a woman's concern. The understanding has not yet percolated throughout society that the advancement of women is a program vitally connected to the survival of human beings as a species. The reason for this is simply that institutions take on the character of the atoms which compose them, and what we are most menaced by in the twentieth century are dehumanized institutions. If women played a major role in policy formation and execution on the part of these institutions, I think they would have a far more benign and ecologically sensitive kind of character. So I see feminism not as a kind of war between the sexes or any of these stereotypic images, but as actually a kind of effort to shift the ratios of our emphasis that is expressed through our institutions.

~ Terence Mckenna

Because you've got balls of steel.'I hated when people said that, like it assumed strength and being a male were synonymous. There was strength in being a woman. 'Spence, I don't have balls. Good thing, too, because they'd look terrible in the lingerie I'm wearing.

~ Cora Carmack

The feminist movement as we have come to know it in recent decades is fundamentally a con....As it is considered treasonous to criticise a sister feminist, no standards of accuracy or honesty are ever enforced. Hyperbole and deceit thus become the formula for success, peer review playing no role in reining in misinformation. Any would-be feminist who raises scholarly objections to the rampant misinformation is branded an 'enemy of women' and is drummed out of the movement.

~ Robert Sheaffer

One thing is certain: When the time has come, nothing which is man made will subsist. One day, all human accomplishments will be reduced to a pile of ashes. But every single child to whom a woman has given birth will live forever, for he has been given an immortal soul made to God's image and likeness. In this light, the assertion of de Beauvoir that 'women produce nothing' becomes particularly ludicrous.

~ Alice Von Hildebrand

I don't like rules, especially the unwritten ones that say I need to let myself be controlled by my man.

~ Stephanie Tyler

In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often women are represented as the perpetrators of violence, most of all when we are simply fighting in self-defense or for our children, or when we collectively attempt to change the institutions that are making war on us and our children.

~ Adrienne Rich

The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men?...Let us never cease from thinking--what is this civilisation in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?

~ Virginia Woolf

if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces.

~ Adrienne Rich

Women get more unhappy the more they try to liberate themselves.

~ Brigitte Bardot

Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.

~ Adrienne Rich

In all societies, women are in double jeopardy; on the one hand we are expected to conform to certain emotional standards in our relationships with others at the penalty of being declared insane; on the other, our political perceptions are labeled irrational and hysterical.

~ Adrienne Rich

There is absolutely nothing feminine about the colour pink, or, anything bad-luck'ish about the colour black — in itself.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy.

~ Tobsha Learner

I'd learned that the same internal voice that told me I wasn't good enough had a habit of judging other women, too. They fed into each other, so it was best to quell such thoughts before they gathered strength.

~ Kjerstin Gruys

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled wit it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -she was afreaid to ask even of herself the silent question- Is this all?

~ Betty Friedan

They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply.

~ Margaret Atwood

Funny thing, how much weaker boys are than girls.

~ Ari B. Goelman

I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men....They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of the pleasantries of life for their husbands, they demand the sort of continual attention that a charming fiancée might get....They are harridans and shrews who continually nag and scold until the men are driven idiotic.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

We need to stop telling [women], Get a mentor and you will excel. Instead, we need to tell them, Excel and you will get a mentor.

~ Sheryl Sandberg

All men should be feminists. If men care about women’s rights the world will be a better place. We are better off when women are empowered – it leads to a better society.

~ John Legend

If a woman enjoyed sex, or expressed her sexuality outwardly she was automatically a slut with no respect for herself. Sex was a favor you allowed your husband so angels wouldn't curse you until morning.

~ Michael Muhammad Knight

...it's technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism you wouldn't be allowed to have a debate on a woman's place in society. You'd be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor -- biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men's card game -- before going back to hoeing the rutabaga field.

~ Caitlin Moran

Now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done—occasionally what men have not done—thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action.

~ Amelia Earhart

blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books.

~ Cordelia Fine

Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.

~ Alice Sebold

While parenthood served as no disadvantage at all to men, there was evidence of a substantial motherhood penalty. Mothers received only half as many callbacks as their identically qualified childless counterparts.

~ Cordelia Fine

Women who display themselves as sex objects do not represent women as a gender anymore than the chippendales or Ron Jeremy represent you. Women are not a homogenous group who all get together to decide how or who they will be.

~ Anonymouse

I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

~ Virginia Woolf