top of page
.png){kind=small}
Feminism Quotes
"Women will only be truly sexually liberated when we arrive at a place where we can see ourselves as having sexual value and agency irrespective of whether of not we are the objects of male desire."
29
"Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation."
21
"We got the vote, which we should've been born with, in 1920. Everything we've had to struggle for - it's ridiculous."
14
"Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across."
13
"Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue."
13
"A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes. I believe that this would be a better world."
12
"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."
12
"Women emerging like aliens in a hesitant future, in a men's world with impervious codes, may feel like dots in an uncharted territory. Discovering the crucial points, which don't line up with the unbearability of reality, may be a key to the right compass in life. ['Terra incognita']"
10
"I got more and more politically active and just followed the course of feminism and sexual liberation."
8
"There is not an issue that a woman cannot bring a perspective to."
8
"Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.''And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead."
8
"Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt."
8
"Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever."
8
"The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation."
7
"An educated woman is seen as a human being with a vagina. An uneducated woman is seen as a vagina with a human being."
6
"Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women."
5
"I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.""Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything."
5
"I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me."
4
"Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics."
4
"If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for feminist movement in conjunction with efforts to obtain better paying jobs for women and finding jobs for unemployed women of all classes, feminism would have been seen as a movement addressing the concerns of all women."
4
"The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard."
4
"Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality."
4
"I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels."
4
"Feminists who accept the claim made in The Book of Genesis, and, that God is a he, need to make their minds up."
3
"Even though the advocates of feminism gladly use the term to refer to equality between man and woman, the common human brain is not capable of perceiving such equality beyond the gender bias of the very word. It'll be same as using Man to refer to both genders. Hence, the only words suitable in this scenario are Humanism and Human, rather than Feminism and Man."
3
"Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an, other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once."
3
"I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly ! I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick.... When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!"
3
"We're comfortable with women in certain roles but not comfortable with women expressing anger or fully accepting their power. The most daring question a woman can ask is, 'What do I want?'"
3
"The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man's life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian--an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own .... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization."
3
bottom of page