Feminism Quotations

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Women's issues have always been a part of my life. My goal is to bring the word 'feminism' back into the zeitgeist and reframe it.

Environmental concerns and feminism are locked together. Generally, women have closer connections to the organic nature of our lives.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

If feminism has receded in visibility and prestige, it is precisely because its vision of life's goals and rewards has become too narrow and elitist.

Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women's issues.

One of the greatest gifts of Black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to be Black and female.

Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

Feminism isn't about hating men. It's about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.

Feminism is not just about women; it's about letting all people lead fuller lives.

The struggle of democratic secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom and feminism against authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture and morality is going on all over the world - including the Islamic world, where dissidents are regularly jailed, killed, exiled or merely intimidated and silenced.

Feminism is doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Feminism is for all women and girls, not a privileged few or one ethnicity, religion, age, sexual preference, ability, region or hemisphere.

I came from this very traditional background and I benefited hugely from feminism. I felt privileged going to university and doing a PhD. Most people of my background don't get to do that.

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

He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.

If feminism wasn't powerful, if feminism wasn't influential, people wouldn't spend so much time putting it down.

I really don't care what people say. It's amazing that feminism continues to exist at all, considering how much counter-feminism is out there.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

My feminism is humanism, with the weakest being those who I represent, and that includes many beings and life forms, including some men.

My generation fought very hard for feminism, and we fought very hard to not be labeled as you had to have a husband or you had to be in a relationship, or you were somehow not a cool chick.

Like many traditional feminists, I became one of the boys, only better. For a while it gave me a buzz to win at their game, but ultimately, that kind of power just goes nowhere. Traditional feminism excludes men and so perpetuates conflict. I am not interested in warring about power.

I got more and more politically active and just followed the course of feminism and sexual liberation

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

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

'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.

Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman's right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of 'Rosemary's Baby,' or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to 'Stepford Wives.'

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.

I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality.

First I would probably place men at the bottom of the food chain. On a grander scale, I would say they're reacting to change. Feminism has got to be part of that.

Obviously, the anti-ERA people are tickled about my ordeal because it proves that the ERA breaks up families. When they point out that feminism is a dangerous thing, I just say marriage is pretty precarious too.

It was critical to finding a way out. I had assumed young women knew the history of feminism and must have felt gratitude to the movement for the opportunities that the work we have done has afforded them.

I want women to be liberated and still be able to have a nice ass and shake it.

I think of feminism as more of a political ideology.

Feminism is just an idea. It's a philosophy. It's about the equality of women in all realms. It's not about man-hating. It's not about being humorless. We have to let go of these misconceptions that have plagued feminism for 40, 50 years.

Feminism is just about equality, really, and there's so much stuff attached to the word, when it's actually so simple. I don't know why it's always so bogged down.

No, feminism isn't 'over.' We need it not only to challenge injustice but because the whole gender expectations thing is bad for men, too.

You know, my mum's always encouraged me and never made my gender an issue, I guess. She brought me up to believe in equality, as opposed to feminism or sexism - so it just meant that my gender was not relevant to what I was capable of achieving.

The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.

Feminism is the ability to choose what you want to do.

Sadly, a lot of what passes for feminism these days is just moaning about men, congratulating ourselves on nothing in particular, and mocking them for being big kids while doing everything we can to keep them that way.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

It's an amusing idea to some, this feminism thing - this audacious notion that women should be able to move through the world as freely, and enjoy the same inalienable rights and bodily autonomy, as men. At least, that's the impression given when feminism and feminists are all too often the targets of lazy humor.

Feminism rotates between backlash and interest. And the cool thing about the Internet is that it's allowing women more access to their own history. Part of the problem before the Internet was that we didn't know which books to read. Someone had to tell you.

The word, and the concept of feminism, was a gift because it gave me a sense of identity and a way of defining how I wished to live my life.

There's a side of me that dislikes feminism. I think we surrendered something and women were unable to reveal any kind of vulnerability.

Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing relations of society.

Feminism is an attack on social practices and habits of thought that keep women and men boxed into gender roles that are harmful.

Women are not stupid, but they were not clever enough to realise that feminism did not bring freedom, but the opposite. That's why I'm glad feminism is dead.

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

The word feminism needs to be taken back. It needs to be reclaimed in a way that is inclusive of men.

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

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology

Since I loved underground music, I tried to carve a space for feminism within it. Those were my hopes.

The true meaning of feminism is this: to use your strong womanly image to gain strong results in society.

And the first commandment of feminism is: I am woman; thou shalt not tolerate strange gods who assert that women have capabilities or often choose roles that are different from men's.

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

Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.

Why are we not valuing the word 'feminism' when there is so much work to be done in terms of empowerment and emancipation of women everywhere?

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.

I think feminism means what it has always meant - women want to use all their gifts, all their talents and be judged impartially for them. I don't think feminism has ever meant anything else.

Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.

Men need to understand, and women too, what feminism is really about.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

Feminism is liberalism, and look at what it's doing, look at what it's promoting, look at what it's condoning. All the while, we have to live in this lie that there's some sort of Republican War on Women. We don't do this to women! We don't objectify women like this.

Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with.

In the name of feminism, we denied some essential aspects of our authentic selves. While feminism should have been nothing if not a celebration of our own unique characteristics, we insisted that we had no unique characteristics... that gender differences were hogwash, and a feminine woman was nothing more than a plaything for men.

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

There's many women now who think, 'Surely we don't need feminism anymore, we're all liberated and society's accepting us as we are'. Which is just hogwash. It's not true at all.

I've thought about what is an alternative word to feminism. There isn't one. It's a perfectly good word. And it can't be changed.

I would like to see the gay population get on board with feminism. It's a beautiful organisation and they've done so much. It seems to me a no-brainer.

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.

When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies.

Old school feminism, coveting social power, is blind to woman's cosmic sexual power.

Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its puerile, paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex.

Not a shred of evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time. [...] The matriarchy hypothesis, revived by American feminism, continues to flourish outside the university

Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women.

before feminism was, Paglia was!

Whiffle [whine and wheeze and snuff and sniffle]: The annoying scratchy sound made by weepy feminists as they lament the sufferings of women and, houndlike, sniff out evidence of male oppression.

I'm for a high libido president! I applaud him if he gets up and picks up women.

What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.

Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality.

Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition.

Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.

When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.

Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion! What feminism does not need, it seems to me, is an endless recycling of Doris Day Fifties clichés about noble womanhood.

Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.

Men threatened by feminism either don't understand it or don't like that they now have to modify their own shitty behavior.

It was the Spice Girls who messed it all up. And obviously, the appropriating of the phrase "girl power", which at that point overrode any notion of feminism, and which was a phrase that meant absolutely nothing apart from being friends with your girlfriends.

It's actually technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism, you wouldn't be allowed to have a debate on a woman's place in society. You'd be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor, biting down on a wooden spoon so as not to disturb the men's card game, before going back to hoeing the rutabaga field.

Feminism, as it stands, well... stands. It has ground to a halt.

Feminism means something - legislation, cultural change - but 'Girl Power' meant nothing more than being friends with your friends.

We need to reclaim the word feminism. We need to reclaim the word feminism real bad.

I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it's been a struggle.

But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well!

Third World feminism is about feeding people in all their hungers.