Feminism Quotes

Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't.

~ Gloria Steinem

Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.

~ Gloria Steinem

You should never act against yourself.

~ Mya Robarts

Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot.See that purple Harley out there—that big gorgeous one? That's mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn't have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attach and totaling us both. I even put 'Ms.' on my license plate—and you should see my grandkids' faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I've walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear.What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up.I tell you this story because it's the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I've come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.We have only to discover it—and ride.

~ Gloria Steinem

The white feminist becomes the CEO. The black feminist becomes the exiled rebel. The white feminist speaks about teaching literacy like i should thank her, hold her hand, kiss her for teaching children of darker skin. The black feminist should be grateful. The black feminist wears her natural hair, she is called ‘too rebellious’. The white feminist cuts her hair, she is brave. The white feminist gets featured on TIME. The black feminist is the fine print.

~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo

What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.

~ Naomi Wolf

What every girl should know: Your vagina is disgusting. It smells like the underside of a kangaroo pouch and he doesn't want to touch you because of the grossness. But thankfully, NEW brand douche, perfected by a leading gynecologist, gently cleanses and refreshes, making you feel feminine and special. Because what's more special than a vage filled with vinegar and chemical daisies? Also available in SPICY CINNAMON TACO, for the girl adventurer.

~ Kelly Sue Deconnick

One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I've struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I'm weird, because I live in my head.

~ Roxane Gay

...you see what you wantand you want what you see,but if I have anything to say about it, that willnever beme.

~ Holly Bodger

I no longer want to believe these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.

~ Roxane Gay

...when 'empowering women' becomes 'overpowering women' not only is it the polar opposite of feminism, it is the opposite of ‘right.’ Empowering women begins by respecting their individual choices.

~ Sharon Nir

When they play MARRY/FUCK/KILL, you'll never be KILL again!

~ Kelly Sue Deconnick

if people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and injust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they will never be afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should- so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again

~ Charlotte Brontë

The grief of widowhood, of losing a husband and only to be harassed by his brothers, remained pressed on her.

~ Panashe Chigumadzi

The house may have been impressive in stature, but having gasped as they drove up the driveway, she had been disappointed by the interior. It was so bare. Lacking in things. She was mystified by this invisible wealth and the austerity of the house.She didn’t understand Mrs Zvobgo, she was rich but chose to live, in Tsitsi’s opinion, like a pauper. She was clearly uninterested in buying things. Maybe it was because she had never known poverty. Tsitsi on the other hand felt she was well versed in it.Tsitsi, unlike Mrs Zvobgo, wasn’t above noveau riche vulgarities. She didn’t want any sort of English boarding school minimalism. She wanted more. She wanted things. Things . Things. Things. Many of them. That much she was willing to admit. She made a private decision then that she would change this when she became the woman of this household. She knew they said wealth whispered and rich shouted, but what good was having all that they did if she had to keep it like some sort of secret?

~ Panashe Chigumadzi

Meanings with no purpose are useful for meaningless debates on what the meaner meant. And that's what #politics is all about - misreading.

~ Will Advise

Under the whole personal is political motto of feminism, I feel that personal kindness, treating people decently, is political-is punk.

~ Beth Ditto

This is where we should start focusing this conversation: how men (as readers, critics, and editors) can start to bear the responsibility for becoming better, broader readers.

~ Roxane Gay

I still feel like teenage girls are not taken seriously by the culture at large, especially not their darker or more complicated feelings—of aggression, desire, ambition. To me, these feelings and drives are so fundamental to girlhood and to womanhood, and I love exploring them. And trying to give voice to them as best I can. I think women are always trying to figure out their own adolescence. We never stop.

~ Megan Abbott

Same thing now; my freedom had to be paired with availability, or else it became a disorder.

~ Sophie Fontanel

If there was a party, everyone in turn would come sit next to me to regale me with how he or sh thought I should live and what I deserved to have. What it boiled down to was that I should live like them. Elvire, one half of a tightly knit couple would forget that her husband was clinically depressed. Guillaume, married to a harpy, maintained that if one laid low and said amen to everything, things worked out. Maria, fed up to the teeth with her children, wanted me to have my own. Assia loved women but it was killing her mother. Patrizio had bruises on his shoulders from his chronically jealous wife. Not one of them could stand my singleness, because it could have been theirs.

~ Sophie Fontanel

My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself We need more dissent and less dogma.

~ Camille Paglia

People didn't call blacks names anymore, at least not to their faces. Italians weren't wops or dagos, and there were no more kikes, Japs, chinks, or spics in polite conversation. Everybody had a group to protest and stick up for them. But women were still being called names by men. Why? Where was our group? It's not fair.

~ Fannie Flagg

The idea of common oppression was a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women's varied and complex social reality. Women are divided by sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege, and a host of other prejudices. Sustained woman bonding can occur only when these divisions are confronted and the necessary steps are taken to eliminate them.

~ Bell Hooks

Tell me, who is behind a great woman? That's right. No one. She has to get there herself.

~ Lynn Cullen

I am not a Damsel In Distress who needs a Prince Charming. I am more of Rani Laxmi Bai who rides a Sturdy Horse.

~ Nikita Dudani

Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.

~ Sheryl Sandberg

After the boy at the supermarket had called her those names, Evelyn Couch had felt violated. Raped by words. Stripped of everything. She had always tried to keep this from happening to her, always been terrified of displeasing men, terrified of the names she would be called if she did. She had spent her life tiptoeing around them like something lifting her skirt stepping through a cow pasture. She had always suspected that if provoked, those names were always close to the surface, ready to lash out and destroy her.

~ Fannie Flagg

There are as many violent women as men, but there's a lot of money in hating men, particularly in the United States -- millions of dollars. It isn't a politically good idea to threaten the huge budgets for women's refuges by saying that some of the women who go into them aren't total victims.

~ Erin Pizzey

However benevolent men may be in their intentions, they cannot know what women want and what suits the necessities of women's lives as well as women know these things themselves.

~ Millicent Garrett Fawcett

How far we claim to have come - accepting all men as created equal. Gender being the requisite qualifier, as women are not reviewed in the same fashion - their fashion hopefully better suited to the bedroom than the boardroom. And, you know, homosexuals not really being 'men,' cannot be judged equivalent to their stiffer-wristed brethren. On religion, well, some Christians are willing to make room for a Jew or two in their inner circles. But Mecca-facing prayer must be met with flaming crosses. Close your eyes to the details, the big picture can still be viewed through rose-colored glass. But go any distance beyond the rhetoric, truth becomes a shadowed lens.

~ Ellen Hopkins

Too many women are afraid to be labeled feminists, afraid to stand up and say, “Yes, I am a feminist,” for fear of what that label means, for fear of how to live up to it, for fear of feminism as something essential, for fear of the punishments—both obvious and indirect—that come with openly owning feminism or doing feminism wrong.

~ Roxane Gay

We could talk about the retraction of re-productive rights in North Carolina and Texas and Ohio, or we could conjure up a lot of statistics about domestic and sexual violence or women living in poverty. If the patriarchy is dead, the numbers have not gotten the memo.

~ Roxanne Gay

Independent radical women often live lonely lives if they expect equality.

~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. ‘I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn’t tell him to stop . . .’ My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, ‘No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?’ And I didn’t have any answer for that.

~ Louise O'neill

For some reason, people repeatedly have asked RBG when she thought there would be enough women on the court. The question is asinine, her answer effective: 'When there are nine.

~ Irin Carmon

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren't likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and there's no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as you - or else I pretended to. I am really not quite sure which - I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other.

~ Henrik Ibsen

It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family. It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence come from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.

~ Rebecca Solnit