Quotes About Society

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

We are all trained to be female impersonators.

If someone called me a lesbian—in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians—I learned just to say, "Thank you." It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh.

In most societies, a woman is encouraged to give birth to another person more than she is encouraged to give birth to herself.

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.

To transform inequality in the outside world, we have to start inside the home. We have to get rid of the old idea that what happens to men is political, and therefore subject to change, but what happens to women is cultural, and therefore can't, or shouldn't, be changed.

As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun.

Marriage has worked better for men than for women. The two happiest groups are married men and unmarried women.

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. In

Women are always saying, "We can do anything that men can do." But men are not saying, "We can do anything that women can do.

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine", so we suppress it-until it overflows.

I'm not black on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and a woman on Thursday, Friday and Saturday

Men are liked better when they win. Women are liked better when they lose. This is how the patriarchy is enforced every day.

The less gender-polarized the culture, the lower the degree of violence and the greater the degree of democracy.

The more polarized the gender roles, the more violent the society. The less polarized the gender roles, the more peaceful the society.

The truth was that I had internalized society's unserious estimate of all that was female - including myself.

In retrospect, the second cause for delay makes less feminist sense: the long popularity of assertiveness training. Though most women needed to be more assertive (or even more aggressive, though that word was considered too controversial), many assertiveness courses taught women how to play the existing game, not how to change the rules.

In the words of so many daughters who don't yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault

It was the 1950s, and I confused growing up with settling down.

Women are becoming the men we wanted to marry (But too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry).

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one. Yet one of the strongest, most thoughtful feminists I know still hides in one-piece bathing suits to conceal her two Cesarean scars. And one of the most hypocritical feminists I know (that is, one who loves feminism but dislikes women) had plastic surgery to remove the tiny scar that gave her face character.

In pre-Watergate, pre-sexual revolution times, such stories just weren't written.