Quotes About Feminism

The true republic: men, their rights and nothing more: women, their rights and nothing less.

It would be ridiculous to talk of male and female atmospheres, male and female springs or rains, male and female sunshine.... how much more ridiculous is it in relation to mind, to soul, to thought, where there is as undeniably no such thing as sex, to talk of male and female education and of male and female schools. [written with Elizabeth Cady Stanton]

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.

woman must not depend on the protection of man, but must learn to protect herself

How unfair it seemed that boys could dream to grow into the tallest oaks, but girls were destined to be the vine that clings to the oak.

According to the doctor-historian Ann Dally, "Virchow, probably the greatest pathologist of the nineteenth century, wrote, 'Woman is a pair of ovaries with a human being attached; whereas man is a human being furnished with a pair of testes.' " The French physician Achille Chereau argued that "it is only because of the ovary that woman is what she is.

One estimate in 1906 was that for every one of the 150,000 doctors in the U.S. there was one castrated woman; some of these doctors boasted that they had removed from 1500 to 2000 ovaries apiece." Soon feminists and antivivisectionists protested against the credo "when in doubt, take them out.

how much room it would take to build a giant vagina

Breaking apart the forced unity of sex and gender, while increasing the scope of liveable lives, needs to be a central goal of feminism and other forms of social justice activism. This is important for everybody, especially, but not exclusively, for trans people.

We were all Wives of Bath – from the teachers who terrorized us with their bells and gatings to the overfed boarders and snobby day girls..but no matter how hard any of us struggled...Bath Ladies College was only a fiefdom in the kingdom of men. — The Wives of Bath

the administrator was known to be an extreme antichoice activist who insisted that a ball of cells the size of a garbanzo bean should supersede the will of a living, breathing woman.

He didn't believe in women's rights, but in controlling women.

Describing men, of course, I run into the same problems—aquiline nose, chiseled features, bullish neck, leonine hair, steely gaze, bronze tan—but somehow the arsenal of clichés and materials for describing men seems smaller. Many feminists are right to claim that the male is on the whole less objectified than the female; the male is treated more frequently as the subject rather than the object.

The basis for the feminist movement was a striving for equality between the sexes. Women can write erotica; therefore, men can write erotica. Or rather, we are allowed to; whether we can is a different issue.

So, why do you write these strong female characters? Because you're still asking me that question.

So, why do you write these strong female characters? Because you're still asking me that question." [ Equality Now speech, May 15, 2006]

Señora, inspector. Lo de señorita es machista.

Victoria Ocampo era por cierto una oligarca, pero no todas las oligarcas eran Victoria Ocampo. Las damas de la alta sociedad, como se decía entonces, no empleaban su dinero y su tiempo en la difusión de las letras ni abrazaban la causa del feminismo ni transgredían costumbres establecidas, ni se animaban a proclamar su agnosticismo; nada tenían en común con Victoria

I have never understood why a woman must have a man to take her into dinner.

If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.

Why doesn't anyone tell you we all wind up married to Henry the VIII?... ...My dear Anne Boleyn,...the only way a woman can avoid waking up next to Henry is to model herself after his daughter Elizabeth and sleep next to no one at all.

Women quickly learn that rape is only a crime in theory; in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is not set at the level of experience of women's violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

I explained to her how the international corporations and banks that came to my school refused to interview women for jobs because women, they said, could not be in business. She

Women were supposed to be seen and not heard.