Quotes About Feminism

Male privilege is, in a word, violence.

The differences in the way men and women are treated are real. And the fact is this difference in treatment has no basis in the differences between men and women. I was the same person, and I was treated entirely differently. I got real interested in feminist theory--real fast.

There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.

I suppose this is what you would call unwomanly; but I have got into a habit of expressing myself. It doesn't matter to me, and you may think me unwomanly if you like.

there'll never be equality of the sexes till men can get pregnant;

it is not menopause itself that is the problem but menopause as its experienced under the patriarchy.

We don't like the idea that a man might be severely constrained for life by a single ejaculation. He has places to go and things to do. That a woman's life may be stunted by unwanted childbearing is not so troubling. Childbearing, after all, is what women are for.

They can't push women all the way back, but they can use women's bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.

Many feminist legal scholars, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have argued that the Supreme Court should have legalized abortion on grounds of equality rather than privacy.6 Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict women's ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.

What can that mean except that women's sexuality is what really defines them, not their brains and gifts and individuality and character, and certainly not their wishes or their ambitions or their will?

The editorial—written by a liberated man—suggested legal and social remedies but concluded that "perhaps we can begin with the ultra-radical notion that a woman is a human being.

My mother—who was well-educated, read widely, passably fluent in German, conversant with the works of Freud and Adler, married at twenty, and never received a dollar of wages in her life—was also a woman who took difference as a slight. Anyone not living a life that fit the mold of her own—wifedom, motherhood—constituted a personal affront, an implied rebuke, an argument against. I thought Sadie quite bold.

Since Pussy never had thought, nor would she think, that women shouldn't have abortions, she had to come to terms with the realization that to be human, and woman, includes the possibility and even the act of murder.

Simone de Beauvoir] provoked and disturbed feminists with her famous comment about her relationship with Sartre: 'There has been one undoubted success in my life: my relationship with Sartre.' I can almost understand. She adapts her whole being to the situation. She will not be hurt because she will change herself like a sculptor working in clay. She labors for it, sacrifices for it. It is an achievement, a consummately creative act: she invents herself in it.

Then he reached up and tore my shirtfront open. Not much to see, is there? I said, struggling to talk with a crushed windpipe. I know, I know, they can fix things like that these days. Call me a feminist, but I think a woman's worth should be defined not by the size of her bust, but - I rammed my fist up into his Adam's apple. He grunted and stumbled back. - by the strength of her right hook.

I don't know what a hard-ass feminist is. I'm a feminist, which only means that I think men and women deserve equal treatment. Hardly a groundbreaking concept. But I'm sure you're about to give an example of where I failed in that.

It was unladylike even to know the name of your lawyer, let alone to understand your rights under the law. No wonder women were mercilessly exploited.

In the struggle for female equality, Maud reflected, sometimes you had to fight women as well as men.

So perhaps we can learn to value the differences between the male and female value spheres. Those differences, even according to the radical feminists, appear to be here for good—but we can learn to value them with more equal emphasis. How to do so is one of the things we might want to talk about.

It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.

Who runs the world? Girls.

The reason the word Feminism has power is because the concept has power and the reason it has power is because people are still afraid of it.

I think Julia is defining a new feminism. It's the power of the open heart. And its ok to be sexual.