Quotes About Equality

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.

Don't think about making women fit the world -- think about making the world fit women." 

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.

Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.

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

I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars and young women were treated like - well - young women. {...} I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one.

Even the dictionary defines adventurer as "a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures," but adventuress is "a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.

Anyone who believes we're living in a postfeminist age will learn that violence against females—from female infanticide and child marriage to honor killings and sex trafficking—has now produced a world with fewer females than males, a first in recorded history.

Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life--a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality-- then why, WHY should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act?

The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I've ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, "Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!

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.

We are so different, yet so much the same.

It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit.

At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I'm "passing the torch." I explain that I'm keeping my torch, thank you very much—and I'm using it to light the torches of others.

Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!

racism and sexism are intertwined [...] and cannot be uprooted separately.

Feminism is memory.

There are black doctors and doctors and women novelists and novelists. Any less powerful group gets the adjective, while the powerful group takes the noun. The less powerful group usually knows the more powerful one much better than vice versa. People of color have to understand white people in order to survive; women have had to know men. Only the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.

Close your eyes and pretend you are living with a woman—how would you divide the housework?

And I was angry because the media took racism seriously - or pretended to - but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.

We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful. p176

People now ask me if I'm passing the torch. I always explain that no, I'm keeping my torch, thank you very much. And I'm using it to light the torches of others. Because the truth is that the old image of one person with a torch is part of the problem, not the solution. We each need a torch if we are to see where we're going. And together, we create so much more light.

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.