Quotes

Women’s and gender studies quotes

To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.  ~ bell hooks.

If I can’t dance…I don’t want to be part of your revolution. ~ Emma Goldman

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. ~ Maria Weston Chapman

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

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. ~ Midge Decter

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. ~ Andrea Dworkin

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. ~ Rebecca West

Well behaved women rarely make history ~ Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

If they don’t call you a lesbian, you’re probably not accomplishing anything. ~ Chris Kramarae and Paula Treichler, The Feminist Dictionary

Women are all female impersonators to some degree. ~ Susan Brownmiller

Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We’re not inherently anything but human. ~ Robin Morgan

Whatever women must do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. ~ Charlotte Whitton

I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb—and I'm also not blonde. ~ Dolly Parton

If high heels were so wonderful, men would still be wearing them. ~ Sue Grafton

When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. ~ Elayne Boosler

In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman. ~ Margaret Thatcher

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career. ~ Gloria Steinem

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who never owned a car. ~ Carrie Snow

The phrase "working mother" is redundant. ~ Jane Sellman

You [men] are not our protectors. …If you were, who would there be to protect us from? ~ Mary Edwards Walker; physician and POW of the Confederate Army

Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody. ~ bell hooks

A natural response is to change the word feminist to a word with fewer stigmas attached. But inevitably the same thing will happen to that magical word. Part of the radical connotation of feminism is not due to the word, but to the action. The act of a woman standing up for herself is radical, whether she calls herself a feminist or not. ~ Paula Kamen, feminist

We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever. ~ Susan B. Anthony, 19th- & early 20th-century leader of the Women's Movement

Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less. ~ Susan B. Anthony

I used to go on college campuses 25 years ago and announce I was a feminist, and people thought it meant I believed in free love and was available for a quick hop in the sack. ... Now I go on college campuses and say I'm a feminist, and half of them think it means I'm a lesbian. How'd we get from there to here without passing "Go"? ~ Molly Ivins

Feminism is a recognition of the domination of men over women and attempts by women to end male privilege.... It is a theory, a method, and a practice which seeks to transform human relations. ~ Cynthia Orozco, writing in the anthology Chicano Voices: Intersections of Class, Race & Gender, 1993

Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings. ~ Cheris Kramerae, author of A Feminist Dictionary, 1996.

Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions.. for safety on the streets... for child care, for social welfare...for rape crisis centers, women's refuges, reforms in the law." (If someone says) 'Oh, I'm not a feminist,' (I ask) 'Why? What's your problem?' ~ Dale Spender, author of For the Record: The Making & Meaning of Feminist Knowledge, 1985

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men. ~ Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine, leader of the Women's Movement

A feminist is a person who answers "yes" to the question, "Are women human?" Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. And it's certainly not about trading personal liberty--abortion, divorce, sexual self-expression--for social protection as wives and mothers, as pro-life feminists propose. It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range of human experience. It's about women consulting their own well-being and being judged as individuals rather than as members of a class with one personality, one social function, one road to happiness. It's about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others: fetuses, children, the "family," men. ~ Katha Pollitt

I'm not a feminist, but... I appreciate the right to help choose my government representatives. I enjoy the option of wearing pants or shorts if I want. I'm pleased that I was allowed to learn to read and write. It can be very convenient to control how many babies I want to have. It's awfully useful to be able to open a bank account and own property in my name. I like knowing that my husband or boyfriend cannot legally beat me. It's really swell to keep the money that I earn. ~ poster from One Angry Girl

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source. ~ Lucretia Mott

If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination. ~ Mary Daly

Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse. ~ Mary Daly

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. ~ Mary Daly

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are -- to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence. ~ Wangari Maathai

If I had to characterize one quality as the genius of feminist thought, culture, and action, it would be the connectivity. ~ Robin Morgan

We are the women men warned us about. ~ Robin Morgan

My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it's very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do. ~ Ani DiFranco

I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included. ~ Adrienne Rich

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the shamanesses, the fierce marketwomen of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silkworkers of prerevolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe. ~ Adrienne Rich