Quotes About Feminism

Woman has relied heretofore too entirely for her support on the needle - that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays thousands annually; that evil genius of our sex, which, in spite of all our devotion, will never make us healthy, wealthy, or wise.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion that has breathed upon this earth, has degraded women. There is not one that has not always made her subject to man.

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.

Woman's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.

I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.

Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible.

Did I not feel that the time has come for the questions of women's wrongs to be laid before the public? Did I not believe that women herself must do this work, for women alone understand the height, the depth, the breadth of her degradation. - Seneca Falls Convention, 1848

We cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.

He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God. He has endeavored in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

The canon and civil law; church and state; priests and legislators; all political parties and religious denominations have alike taught that woman was made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior being, subject to man. Creeds, codes, Scriptures and statutes, are all based on this idea. The fashions, forms, ceremonies and customs of society, church ordinances and discipline all grow out of this idea.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Within her the core of rebellion hardened. She would dress as she chose, because clothes and appearance were part of a woman's armor in this world

Sozialistin oder Feministin?' 'Ich könnte doch beides sein. Der Wunsch, dass es für Frauen gerechter zugeht, gehört doch zum Wunsch dazu, dass es für alle gerechter zugeht. Oder nicht?

We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us baby.

You have my best wishes, Mr. Douglas; still I cannot consent to be your wife. I shall become Mrs. President, or I am the victim of false prophets, but it will not be as Mrs. Douglas.

The basic belief of feminism is not that women are right and men are wrong; It is merely that women are people and therefor their voices matter, their values matter and their stories matter. It's time for women to tell their versions of what it means to be fully human. It is time for men to respect those insights and it is time for all of us to integrate them into a new story of power.

Women are at the forefront of that kind of revolution now—a paradigm shift away from a gendered value system where the male experience is at the center of reality and all other ways of being, thinking, feeling, and doing are at the periphery.

It was tempting to believe that if you made yourself small and light, beneath notice, you might be allowed to persist nearly anywhere. But meek women were tossed out and forgotten: that was something she had learned from Bertha Truitt herself. What women needed to do was take up space. Become unbudgeable.

What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed ...

No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.

The bible and the church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.

society's been drugging its women for years