Quotes About Feminism

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

Women are all vulnerable, and each of us is only as secure as those women that society puts on the "bottom," not as powerful as the token top.

Heterosexual privilege is the method by which women are given a stake in male supremacy--and ... it is therefore the method by which women are given a stake in their own oppression.

The initial tenets of feminism have already been established--the idea that power is based on gender differences and that men's illegitimate power over women taints all aspects of society, for instance. But now we face the arduous task of systematically working through these ideas, fleshing them out and discovering new ones.

What is being called the UN 'gender architecture' is more like a shack. Women need a bigger global house if equality is ever to become a reality.

I don't like to look out of the windows even--there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?

They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.

The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

I am, unfortunately, one of those much-berated New England women who have learned to think as well as feel; and to me, at least, marriage means more than a union of hearts and bodies--it must mean minds, too.

The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

Woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body

They say women have no conscience about laws, don't they?" Mrs. MacAvelly suggested. "Why should we?" answered her friend. "We don't make 'em—nor God—nor nature. Why on earth should we respect a set of silly rules made by some men one day and changed by some more the next?" (from According to Solomon)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this degradation found--the female capering and prancing before the male. It is absolutely and essentially his function, not hers.

they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere "instinct," a wholly personal feeling; it was—a religion.

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

She is held from within by every hardened layer of untouched instinct which has accumulated through the centuries; she is opposed from without by such mountain ranges of prejudice as would be insurmountable if prejudice were made of anything real.

I see that I have not remarked that these women had pockets in surprising number and variety. They were in all their garments, and the middle one in particular was shingled with them.

And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.

I don't like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper, as I did?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform.

What Diantha Did was first published in serialised form in Gilman's magazine The Forerunner between late 1909 and October 1910.

It took some time to make clear to those three sweet-faced women the process which robs the cow of her calf, and the calf of its true food; and the talk led us to further discussion of the meat business. They heard it out, looking very white, and presently begged to be excused.

We found a friendly nut-tree, those large, satisfying nuts we already knew so well, and filled our pockets. I see that I have not remarked that these women had pockets in surprising number and variety. They were in all their garments.