Quotes About Equality

Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women's movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step.

Just because we all have wombs doesn't mean we have to be mothers, just like we all have vocal cords doesn't mean we're all opera singers.

When I'm traveling, I'm often confronted by a middle-aged white man who says something like "A black woman took my job." My answer is always "Who said it was your job?" The problem is his sense of entitlement.

One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is "I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart.

We are linked, not ranked.

In my own college life, I got through four years as a government major without learning that women were not just "given" the vote, that the real number of slave rebellions was suppressed because rebelling was contagious, or that the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy.

Not only had I never made any such complaints, but at political meetings, I had given my suggestions to whatever man was sitting next to me, knowing that if a man offered them, they would be taken more seriously. You white women, Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind, if you don't stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down with every year of higher education. We've been studying our own absence.

When people of color are in the majority instead of the minority, audiences are often the best education that white listeners can have.

for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.

As Dr. King once said, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied." If

one major way of ending the feminization of poverty is to attack the masculinization of wealth.

the idea of equality was so contagious that the right wing would soon rate feminism as a danger right up there with secular humanism and godless Communism. The

Many of these students have experienced the double discrimination of sex and race—not only in the mainstream but also by race in the women's movement, and by sex in the black power movement.

Looking at Barbados and Australia as relatively positive examples, one societal hallmark of self-esteem seems to be an ability to both give and demand fairness, an expectation that extends from the personal to the political.

But it was still the 1960s, and even my most open-minded editor explained that if he published an article saying women were equal, he would have to publish one next to it saying women were not—in order to be objective.

if you've experienced discrimination in one form, you're more likely to recognize it in another. Also

Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine," so we suppress

Women are always saying, 'We can do anything that men can do.' But men should be saying, 'We can do anything that women can do.

Six years after that, I went to the White House with Wilma and watched as President Clinton and Hillary Clinton presented her with a Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. As she stood there, strong, kind, and not at all intimidated by another chief of state, I was not the only one in the audience who thought, She could be president. I also thought, In a just country, she would be.

when God is depicted only as a white man, only white men seem godly. They

priests dressed in skirts try to trump women's birth-giving power by baptizing with imitation birth fluid, calling us reborn, and going women one better by promising everlasting life. Indeed

There are really not many jobs that actually acquire a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.

The personal is political. When