Patriarchy Quotes

Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and preactice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.

~ Bell Hooks

The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin'.

~ Mary Daly

Patriarchy doesn't get yet that 'hope' is a powerful force that drives creativity. Otherwise words like 'false' and 'hope' would never be forced into this unconscious coupling....Hope is not false. And never has been... Rather, hope is part of the often forgotten feminine contribution to the creative process.

~ Deirdre Morris

Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. (Junot Diaz)

~ Carolina De Robertis

Feminism is not a one size fits all kinda thing but anyone can wear it.

~ Jess

No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.

~ Gloria Steinem

In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place - where males gives birth.Though this comparison was new to to me, it struck home like a rock down a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin - because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body.

~ Gloria Steinem

There will be great reason to suspect the Men of jealousy; and it cannot be rash to say, that their only reason for locking up from us all the avenues of knowledge, is the fear of our excelling them in it. (...) Had we the same advantages of study allowed us which the Men have, there is no room to doubt but we should at least keep pace with them in the sciences, and every useful knowledge. It can only then be a mean dastardly jealousy in them to exclude us from those advantages, in which we have so natural a right to emulate them.

~ Lady Sophia Fermor

Women are no sheep. Women are no fragile showpiece to be placed above the fire-place. Women of the thinking society are the builders of nations. Women of the sentient society are the builders of the world.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The representation of women in the society, especially through mass media has been the most delusional act ever done on the grounds of human existence.

~ Abhijit Naskar

How dare a person tell a woman, how to dress, how to talk, how to behave! Any being who does that, is no human.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Women of the thinking society are the builders of nations. Women of the sentient society are the builders of the world. And given the same honor and dignity as men, women can build a much better and more harmonious world. Harmony and conflict-solving run in their veins. Whereas men have evolved into more authoritarian creatures.

~ Abhijit Naskar

I am no feminist. Even though the term feminism is founded upon the basic principle of gender equality, it possesses its own fundamental gender bias, which makes it inclined towards the wellbeing of women, over the wellbeing of the whole society. And if history has shown anything, it is that such fundamental biases in time corrupt even the most glorious ideas and give birth to prejudice, bigotry and differentiation.

~ Abhijit Naskar

I am a scientist who studies the human mind, including the sexual differences in mental faculties, and I am telling you, ten female thinkers can teach humanity lessons equivalent to the teachings of a hundred male thinkers of history.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Remember, for a society to truly progress we don't need woman or man, we need a fully-fledged human - nothing short of that would do.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Given the same honor and dignity as men, women can build a much better and more harmonious world.

~ Abhijit Naskar

All the bloodsheds in human history have been caused by men, not women.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Gender equality is not a belief, it is not an idea - it is a key element of the society that will define whether we the humans shall march ahead towards glory and advancement, or sink into the abyss of an existential doom.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Women are no sheep.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Any book that spreads weakness in the heart of one gender, and authoritarianism in the other, must be burnt to ashes.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Any nation that does not learn to place women on the same pedestal of respect and dignity as men, will never in a thousand years attain greatness.

~ Abhijit Naskar

If he could not restore her to the status of a respectable woman, then Sohrab would make her into something else entirely, something hitherto unknown in their entire extended family, an educated woman, a professional woman.

~ Jasmin Darznik

The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.

~ Bell Hooks

Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.

~ Bell Hooks

There are moment of sadness and moment of joy. This is life.

~ Beth Cohen

Some men are so indoctrinated that they sincerely believe that other than cooking and cleaning the only thing that a woman can do better than them is being a woman.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Making God a man is the consolation prize that our forefathers gave themselves for not being the ones who were each blessed with a vagina.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Since men are not equals in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class structure, which men do women want to be equal to?

~ Bell Hooks

Until that moment I'd thought I could have it both ways; to be one of them, and also my husband's wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

I was lonely, desperate, and angry. At that moment, I truly understood what it meant to be a Saudi woman. It meant being confronted with every possible kind ofobstacle and discrimination. It meant being told that if you want to race with men, you’d have to do it with your hands and legs cut off. I started to wish I had been born somewhere—anywhere—else.

~ Manal Al-Sharif

Women are born to serve and breed, and when we fail at this, what else is there? What is it that we can do that men can't? We bring their screaming mouths into this world only to be told by those mouths, now grown, that we're lesser than. Only good for being on our knees, backs, or perched over stoves. We're told, You're smart for a woman, you're mouthy for a woman, you're brazen for a woman. They tell us we're dangerous and emotional, prone to hysterics like landmines, and I wonder, if this is true, why aren't they afraid?

~ Felicia C. Sullivan

A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.... If men occupy superior positions, it's a short leap to the idea that men must be superior...[and that] whatever men do will tend to be seen as having greater value.

~ Allan G. Johnson

And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. (...) almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. (...) [women in fiction were] not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that

~ Virginia Woolf

One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man

~ Virginia Woolf

Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women

~ Virginia Woolf

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. (...) Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own

~ Virginia Woolf

History is too much about wars, biography too much about great men

~ Virginia Woolf

While we avoid taking credit for success, women leap at the opportunity to take responsibility for failure. Men tend to externalize the reasons for their failure, putting it off on something or someone else. Not so women, who absorb blame as if they were born to be societys doormats. (Some women like to speak of their willingness to take blame as if it were a form of altruism. It isn't. Women take the blame because they find it scary to confront those who are actually culpable of wrongdoing.)

~ Colette Dowling

The psychological need to avoid independence - the wish to be saved - seemed to me an important issue, quite probably the most important issue facing women today. We were brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We were taught to believe that as women we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, needful of protection. So that now, in these enlightened days, when our intellects tell us to stand on our own two feet, unresolved emotional issues drag us down.

~ Colette Dowling