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Feminism Quotes
"Feminism has had exactly the same problem that "political correctness" has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means."
8
"She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political--for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)"
7
"How silly men were! Their part in procreation was so unimportant; it was the woman who carried the child through long months of uneasiness and bore it with pain, and yet a man because of his momentary connection made such preposterous claims. Why should that make any difference to him in his feelings towards the child?"
7
"Batman doesn't want a baby in order to feel he's 'done everything'. He's just saved Gotham again! If this means that Batman must be a feminist role model above, say, Nicola Horlick, then so be it."
7
"Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires."
6
"But, of course, you might be asking yourself, 'Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don't know! I still don't know what it is! I'm too knackered and confused to work it out. That curtain pole really still isn't up! I don't have time to work out if I am a women's libber! There seems to be a lot to it. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?'I understand. So here is the quick way of working out if you're a feminist. Put your hand in your pants.a) Do you have a vagina? andb) Do you want to be in charge of it?If you said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist."
6
"You can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, 'And are the men doing this, as well?' If they aren't, chances are you're dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as 'some total fucking bullshit'."
6
"In the 21st century, wedon't need to march against size zero models, risible pornography,lap-dancing clubs and Botox. We don't need to riot, or go on hungerstrike. There's no need to throw ourselves under a horse, or even adonkey. We just need to look it in the eye, squarely, for a minute,and then start laughing at it. We look hot when we laugh. Peoplefancy us when they observe us giving out relaxed, earthy chuckles."
6
"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."
5
"To exemplify, -a beautiful glossy nut, which, blessed with original strength, has outlived all the storms of autumn. Not a puncture, not a weak spot any where. -This nut... while so many of its brethren have fallen and been trodden under foot, is still in possession of all the happiness that a hazel-nut can be supposed capable of."
5
"Feminists who accept the claim made in The Book of Genesis, and, that God is a he, need to make their minds up."
5
"They're not pro-life. You know what they are? They're anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don't like them. They don't like women. They believe a woman's primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state."
4
"Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims."
4
"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."
4
"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."
4
"Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive."
3
"I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that."
3
"You don't need princes to save you. I don't have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men."
3
"Single ladies, the only thing we need to be rescued from is the notion that we need to be rescued."
3
"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."
3
"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."
3
"Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being."
3
"In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up."
2
"Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel."
2
"Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger - and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn't usually mean including women."
2
"Madeleine Albright says, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women. I wonder what happens to women who bully other women."
2
"Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Window issues in our lives - I want a Zero Tolerance policy on "All the Patriarchal Bullshit."
2
"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."
2
"Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on."
2
"Feminist politics is losing momentum because feminist movement has lost clear definitions. We have those definitions. Let's reclaim them. We can share the simple yet powerful message that feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression."
2
"Women united can create movements. We can empower entire generations. We can build peace one action at a time. Together we rise. The time is now."
2
"Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence."
2
"When feminist women told the world that patriarchy promotes woman-hating, the response was that feminists were being too extreme, exaggerating the problem. Yet when men who knew nothing about feminism claimed that feminists were man-hating, there was no response from the nonfeminist world saying that they were being too extreme. No feminists have murdered and raped men. Feminists have not been jailed day after day for their violence against men. No feminists have been accused of ongoing sexual abuse of girl children, including creating a world of child pornography featuring little girls. Yet these are some of the acts of men that led some feminist women to identify men as woman-hating."
2
"Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on."
2
"Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It shows us that no matter how misguided feminist thinkers have been in the past, the will to change, the will to create the context for struggle and liberation, remains stronger than the need to hold on to wrong beliefs and assumptions."
2
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