Quotes about feminism

"The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed."

Angelou, Maya on feminism
5 fans of this quote   

"The true Republic: men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less."

Anthony, Susan B. on feminism   

"Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less."

Anthony, Susan B. on feminism
3 fans of this quote   

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

Bardot, Brigitte on feminism   

"When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior."

Beauvoir, Simone De on feminism
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"Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women's issues."

Bunch, Charlotte on feminism
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"The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact."

Burchill, Julie on feminism   

"A good part -- and definitely the most fun part -- of being a feminist is about frightening men."

Burchill, Julie on feminism   

"Just because we're sisters under the skin doesn't mean we've got much in common."

Carter, Angela on feminism   

"Let us rise in the moral power of womanhood; and give utterance to the voice of outraged mercy, and insulted justice, and eternal truth, and mighty love and holy freedom."

Chapman, Maria Weston on feminism   

"One of the reasons for the failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female behavior was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people's experience of the mutual interdependence of men and women."

Coward, Rosalind on feminism   

"The fundamental impulse of the movement is neither masturbatory nor concretely lesbian -- although it of course offers warm house to both these possibilities; it is an impulse to maidenhood -- to that condition in which a woman might pretend to a false fear or loathing of the penis in order to escape from any responsibility for the pleasure and well-being of the man who possesses it."

Decter, Midge on feminism
5 fans of this quote   

"The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself: That is not what I meant by freedom -- it is only social progress. "

Deutsch, Helene on feminism   

"Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating."

Dworkin, Andrea on feminism   

"Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not."

Dworkin, Andrea on feminism
3 fans of this quote   

"Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us."

Dworkin, Andrea on feminism   

"The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang."

Ehrenreich, Barbara on feminism   

"I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes, she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes."

French, Marilyn on feminism   

"Surely women's liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained."

Gilder, George on feminism   

"Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free."

Goldman, Emma on feminism   

"Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it."

Greer, Germaine on feminism   

"There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood what women want and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic."

Greer, Germaine on feminism   

"The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion."

Greer, Germaine on feminism   

"I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover."

Greer, Germaine on feminism   

"Thou art blind to the danger of marrying a woman who feels and acts out the principle of equal rights."

Grimke, Angelina on feminism   

"Movements born in hatred very quickly take on the characteristics of the thing they oppose."

Habgood, J. S. on feminism   

"Ah, I fancy it is just the same with most of what you call your emancipation. You have read yourself into a number of new ideas and opinions. You have got a sort of smattering of recent discoveries in various fields -- discoveries that seem to overthrow certain principles which have hitherto been held impregnable and unassailable. But all this has only been a matter of intellect, Miss West -- superficial acquisition. It has not passed into your blood."

Ibsen, Henrik on feminism   

"I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them."

James, Henry on feminism   

"The modern woman is the curse of the universe. A disaster, that's what. She thinks that before her arrival on the scene no woman ever did anything worthwhile before, no woman was ever liberated until her time, no woman really ever amounted to anything."

Johns, Adela Rogers St. on feminism   

"I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect."

Jordan, June on feminism
3 fans of this quote   

"I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist."

Kempton, Sally on feminism   

"Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman."

Kent, Sister Corita on feminism   

"The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen."

Key, Ellen on feminism   

"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition."

Leary, Timothy on feminism
3 fans of this quote   

"As a result of the feminist revolution, feminine becomes an abusive epithet."

Lewis, Wyndham on feminism   

"Feminism was recognized by the average man as a conflict in which it was impossible for a man, as a chivalrous gentleman, as a respecter of the rights of little nations (like little Belgium), as a highly evolved citizen of a highly civilized community, to refuse the claim of this better half to self-determination."

Lewis, Wyndham on feminism   

"The people I'm furious with are the Women's Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket."

Loos, Anita on feminism   

"Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out."

Luce, Clare Boothe on feminism   

"The suffering of either sex -- of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult -- this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change."

Mead, Margaret on feminism   

"Women's Liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It's the men who are discriminated against. They can't bear children. And no one's likely to do anything about that."

Meir, Golda on feminism