Feminist Quotes

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

I’m a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.

I am basically a feminist. I think that women can do anything they decide to do.

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

Our religion has defined a position for women (in society): motherhood. Some people can understand this, while others can't. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don't accept the concept of motherhood.

IT IS TIME THAT WE ALL SEE GENDER AS A SPECTRUM INSTEAD OF TWO SETS OF OPPOSING IDEALS.

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

Feminism means revolution and I am a revolutionist.

I am tired of angry feminists. I like my women happy, gregarious... and bathed.

But one did not do feminist theory, as such, in those days, not only because male academic discourse did not recognize such a term, but especially because the womens movement did not either.

Feminists were psyched that I had armpit hair

Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

For women... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.

Sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure.

Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink . It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.

I would much rather be the obnoxious feminist girl than be complicit in my own dehumanization.

You become courageous by doing courageous acts...Courage is a habit.

I became a feminist because I wanted to help my daughters, other women and myself aspire to something more than a place behind a good man.

I would love to see more women directors because they represent half of the population and gave birth to the whole world. Without them the rest [of the world] are not getting to know the whole story.

I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive.

The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.

I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.

Feminists don't like me, and I don't like them.

No woman wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.

Let’s take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?

Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence.

Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.

The nuclear family must be destroyed... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.

We must recall the most important of humanity guidelines: Be polite. Being polite is possibly the greatest daily contribution everyone can make to life on Earth.

I consider the Chinese government's policy among the most intelligent in the world.

I've left Bethlehem, and I feel free. I've left the girl I was supposed to be, and some day I'll be born.

The critical principle of feminist theology is the promotion of the full humanity of women. Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is, therefore, appraised as not redemptive.

I suggest that Black feminist thought consists of specialised knowledge created by African-American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women. In other words, Black feminist thought encompasses theoretical interpretations of Black women's reality by those who live it.

I’d like every man who doesn’t call himself a feminist to explain to the women in his life why he doesn’t believe in equality for women.

The most alluring thing a woman can have is confidence.

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue

My parents divorced when I was born, and my mother is a political science professor, like a feminist Mormon, which is sort of an oxymoron.

I am also very proud to be a liberal. Why is that so terrible these days? The liberals were liberatorsthey fought slavery, fought for women to have the right to vote, fought against Hitler, Stalin, fought to end segregation, fought to end apartheid. Liberals put an end to child labor and they gave us the five day work week! What's to be ashamed of?

It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it.

Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.

I strongly believe that no one can be a true feminist without being an atheist. All religions are anti-women. No one can be pro-woman while supporting anti-woman dogmas.

If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.

Women are all female impersonators to some degree.