Though we tremble before uncertain futures

may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength

may we dance in the face of our fears.

Gloria Anzaldúa

Tags: feminism, inspirational, mestiza, poetry

 Like 
  Likes: 148

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion
that women would eventually become just like men.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Tags: feminism, gender, men, women, women-s-liberation

 Like 
  Likes: 146

the only thing

required
to be
a woman
is to
identify
as one.

- period, end of story.

Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in This One (Women Are Some Kind of Magic, #1)

Tags: amanda-lovelace, feminism, poetry

 Like 
  Likes: 146

Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced
sexual violence; if a girl's only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap
images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly
erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult,
 "need" beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were
represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or
forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their
measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with
no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to
exist--then a real young man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a
failing heart.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Tags: advertising, aging, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, doub
le-standards, eating-disorders, equality, fashion-industry, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, m
ass-culture, objectification, plastic-surgery, pornography, self-esteem, sexual-violence, sexuality, socie
ty

 Like 
  Likes: 134

Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to
make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't.
Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug.
Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Tags: feminism, god, man, religion

 Like 
  Likes: 133

Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any
woman who both thinks and feels deeply.

Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer

Tags: feminism, feminist, women

 Like 
  Likes: 133
I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we
had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just
as if nothing special had happened.

Nancy Mitford

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 131

Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.

Pierre Bourdieu

Tags: bourdieu, feminism, gender, psychology-quotes

 Like 
  Likes: 131
...One of the reasons so many women say "I'm not a feminist but..." (and then put forward a feminist
position), is that in addition to being stereotyped as man-hating Amazons, feminists have also been cast
as antifamily and antimotherhood.

Susan J. Douglas

Tags: feminism, motherhood

 Like 
  Likes: 129

Of all creatures that can feel and think,

we women are the worst treated things alive

Euripides, Medea

Tags: feminism, greek-tragedy, patriarchal-society

 Like 
  Likes: 127

I draw a line down the middle of a chalkboard, sketching a male symbol on one side and a female symbol on
the other. Then I ask just the men: What steps do you guys take, on a daily basis, to prevent yourselves
from being sexually assaulted? At first there is a kind of awkward silence as the men try to figure out if
 they've been asked a trick question. The silence gives way to a smattering of nervous laughter.
Occasionally, a young a guy will raise his hand and say, 'I stay out of prison.' This is typically followed by
another moment of laughter, before someone finally raises his hand and soberly states, 'Nothing. I don't
think about it.' Then I ask women the same question. What steps do you take on a daily basis to prevent
yourselves from being sexually assaulted? Women throughout the audience immediately start raising
their hands. As the men sit in stunned silence, the women recount safety precautions they take as part
of their daily routine. Here are some of their answers: Hold my keys as a potential weapon. Look in the
back seat of the car before getting in. Carry a cell phone. Don't go jogging at night. Lock all the windows
when I sleep, even on hot summer nights. Be careful not to drink too much. Don't put my drink down
and come back to it; make sure I see it being poured. Own a big dog. Carry Mace or pepper spray. Have
an unlisted phone number. Have a man's voice on my answering machine. Park in well-lit areas. Don't
use parking garages. Don't get on elevators with only one man, or with a group of men. Vary my route
home from work. Watch what I wear. Don't use highway rest areas. Use a home alarm system. Don't
wear headphones when jogging. Avoid forests or wooded areas, even in the daytime. Don't take a first-
floor apartment. Go out in groups. Own a firearm. Meet men on first dates in public places. Make sure
to have a car or cab fare. Don't make eye contact with men on the street. Make assertive eye contact
with men on the street.

Jackson Katz, The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help

Tags: feminism, gender-bias, macho, rape, rape-culture, sexism, sexual-assault

 Like 
  Likes: 125

Marriage is supposed to be a union between two equals who love and support each other, not a master-slave
relationship in which the man commands a docile woman.

Robert Thier, Storm and Silence (Storm and Silence, #1)

Tags: courage, equality, feminism, marriage, romance

 Like 
  Likes: 123

My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Tags: feminism, girl-power, self-love

 Like 
  Likes: 122
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

Audre Lorde

Tags: audre-lorde, campaigning, feminism, issue, life, political-activism, struggle

 Like 
  Likes: 446

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Tags: double-standards, empowerment, feminism, freedom, gender, hypocrisy, independence, misogy
ny, morality, self-determination, social-norms, virtue, women

 Like 
  Likes: 254

For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free
speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy
boots to our own revolution.

Naomi Wolf

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 176

It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through
Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the Christian religion.

Pope Benedict XVI

Tags: catholicism, christianity, feminism, mary, women

 Like 
  Likes: 156
Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework.

Françoise Sagan

Tags: feminism, whisky

 Like 
  Likes: 155

It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past ... entangling themselves in what they
were pleased to call the "problem" of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and
astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was
the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was
deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution.
Only recently has it occrurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after
all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

Tags: abilities, achievements, career, clichés, double-standards, feminism, gender, good-governance, g
overnment, history, hypocrisy, misogyny, queen-elizabeth-i, reign, skills, stereotypes, success, women

 Like 
  Likes: 150

Why have I spent so long settling for less when I know damn well the world expects more?

Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Tags: feminism, inspirational-attitude, inspiring, women

 Like 
  Likes: 149

Whatever is deeply, essentially female--the life in a woman's expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of
her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin--is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as
disease. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being
recast as a diminution of power. At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of
her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women
will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about
women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not exist on the woman's
body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?
 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Tags: advertising, aging, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, doub
le-standards, equality, fashion-industry, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, mass-culture, objec
tification, plastic-surgery, self-esteem, sexuality, society

 Like 
  Likes: 129

Feminism is hated because women are hated. Antifeminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the
political defense of woman hating.

Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

Tags: antifeminism, feminism, misogyny, women

 Like 
  Likes: 126

What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force
of nature’s course.

Roman Payne, The Wanderess

Tags: adventure, adventuress, bravery, courage, dance, dancing, dreameress, europa, exploration, exp
lore, explorer, female, female-beauty, female-characters, female-empowerment, female-hero, female
-liberation, females, feminine, femininity, feminism, freedom, girl, girl-power, girl-quotes, girls, growin
g, growth, happiness, imagination, imaginative, inspiration, inspirational, inspirational-attitude, inspir
ational-life, inspire, life-and-living, life-change, life-philosophy, literary, living-life-to-the-fullest, loving
-life, passion, passionate, passionate-life, passionate-living, revitalize, revitalizing, roman-payne, seize-
the-day, self-love, self-value, self-worth, strength, the-value-of-life, the-wanderess, wander, wandere
r, wanderess, wandering, wanderlust, wayfaring, wild-woman, wildness, woman, woman-
empowerment, woman-s-strength, womanhood, women, women-s-inspirational, women-s-liberation, 
women-s-motivational, women-s-power

 Like 
  Likes: 124

For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be
the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.

Anaïs Nin
 Tags: fearless, feminism, independent, inspirational, muse

 Like 
  Likes: 121

Very early on in writing the series, I remember a female journalist saying to me that Mrs Weasley, 'Well, you
know, she’s just a mother.' And I was absolutely incensed by that comment. Now, I consider myself to
be a feminist, and I’d always wanted to show that just because a woman has made a choice, a free
choice to say, 'Well, I’m going to raise my family and that’s going to be my choice. I may go back to a
career, I may have a career part time, but that’s my choice.' Doesn’t mean that that’s all she can do. And
as we proved there in that little battle, Molly Weasley comes out and proves herself the equal of any
warrior on that battlefield.

J.K. Rowling

Tags: choices, feminism, mothers

 Like 
  Likes: 116

This is the underside of my world.

Of course you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You
don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t
want me to despise myself; you only want the flattering deference to you that you consider a
spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don’t want me to lose my soul; you only want what
everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot
chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come for comfort, women to
wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to
work when you need the money and stay home when you don’t, women to be enemies when you want
a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don’t complain, women who
don’t nag or push, women who don’t hate you really, women who know their job and above all—
women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I
should be wretched and so full of venom in this the best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the
matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn.

As my mother once said: the boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.

Joanna Russ, The Female Man

Tags: feminism, misogyny, sexism
  Like 
  Likes: 115

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their
faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint,
too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer, and it is narrow-minded in their more
privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting
stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at
them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Charlotte Bronte

Tags: equality, feminism, women

 Like 
  Likes: 110

The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the
company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.

Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 108

Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for
all women.

Maya Angelou

Tags: feminism, woman, women-s-rights

 Like 
  Likes: 221

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between
the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy's encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of
the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could
 never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female
had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always
there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No
wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.

Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

Tags: feminism, humor, men, sexism, women

 Like 
  Likes: 191

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Tags: feminism, wisdom, women

 Like 
  Likes: 176

Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don't think power is in
the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children.

Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the
Taliban

Tags: feminism, inspirational

 Like 
  Likes: 154

blessed be
she
who is
both
furious
and
magnificent

Taylor Rhodes, calloused: a field journal

Tags: feminism, human-condition, nonfiction, strong-women, womanhood, women-s-strength
  Like 
  Likes: 150

And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling
babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows
to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry.
Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want
to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the
other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't.

Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light

Tags: authors, feminism, gender-roles, loneliness, writing

 Like 
  Likes: 132

There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-
educated few.

bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Tags: classism, education, feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 128

Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears
wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her
story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability
to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

Tags: feminism, women-s-stories

 Like 
  Likes: 120
Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those
who don't.

Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 112

As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, "Hate generalizes, love specifies". Thats what makes going on the road so
important. It definitely specifies.

Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 111

Teach her about difference. Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Teach her not to attach value
to difference. And the reason for this is not to be fair or to be nice but merely to be human and practical.
Because difference is the reality of our world. And by teaching her about difference, you are equipping
her to survive in a diverse world.
She must know and understand that people walk different paths in the world and that as long as those
paths do no harm to others, they are valid paths that she must respect. Teach her that we do not know –
we cannot know – everything about life. Both religion and science have spaces for the things we do not
know, and it is enough to make peace with that.
Teach her never to universalise her own standards or experiences. Teach her that her standards are for
her alone, and not for other people.
This is the only necessary form of humility: the realisation that difference is normal.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Tags: diversity, equality, feminism, inspirational

 Like 
  Likes: 107

all of the oceans

& galaxies
did not
 conspire together to
create me
just so i could
reproduce for
you.

-Startling Fact #1

Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in This One (Women Are Some Kind of Magic, #1)

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 105

A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter,
explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting
to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason,
you are NOT strengthening her prosocial sense, you are damaging it--and the first person she will stop
protecting is herself.

Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

Tags: feminism, gender-roles, psychology

 Like 
  Likes: 101

We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle.
When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had
happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a night where they
were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories
with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period
cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common:
shame. ‘I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I
didn’t tell him to stop . . .’ My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported
what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and
said, ‘No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?’ And I didn’t have any answer for
that.

Louise O'Neill, Asking For It

Tags: feminism, rape-culture, women-s-rights
  Like 
  Likes: 100

A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle
tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is
that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic
evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have
male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women
make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Tags: advertising, aging, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, doub
le-standards, equality, fashion-industry, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, mass-culture, objec
tification, plastic-surgery, pornography, self-esteem, sexual-violence, sexuality, society

 Like 
  Likes: 90

I'm going to ask you to remember the prostituted, the homeless, the battered, the raped, the tortured, the
murdered, the raped-then-murdered, the murdered-then-raped; and I am going to ask you to remember
the photographed, the ones that any or all of the above happened to and it was photographed and now
the photographs are for sale in our free countries. I want you to think about those who have been hurt
for the fun, the entertainment, the so-called speech of others; those who have been hurt for profit, for
the financial benefit of pimps and entrepreneurs. I want you to remember the perpetrator and I am
going to ask you to remember the victims: not just tonight but tomorrow and the next day. I want you to
find a way to include them -- the perpetrators and the victims -- in what you do, how you think, how you
act, what you care about, what your life means to you.

Now, I know, in this room, some of you are the women I have been talking about. I know that. People
around you may not. I am going to ask you to use every single thing you can remember about what was
done to you -- how it was done, where, by whom, when, and, if you know -- why -- to begin to tear male
dominance to pieces, to pull it apart, to vandalize it, to destabilize it, to mess it up, to get in its way, to
fuck it up. I have to ask you to resist, not to comply, to destroy the power men have over women, to
refuse to accept it, to abhor it and to do whatever is necessary despite its cost to you to change it.

Andrea Dworkin

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 140
Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny
which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.

Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

Tags: feminism, male-violence, radical-feminism, women

 Like 
  Likes: 140

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Tags: advertising, aging, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, doub
le-standards, eating-disorders, equality, fashion-industry, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, m
ass-culture, objectification, plastic-surgery, pornography, self-esteem, sexual-violence, sexuality, socie
ty

 Like 
  Likes: 137

A queen
offers her hand to be kissed,
& can form it into a fist
while smiling the whole damn time.

Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land

Tags: chess, feminism, fist, hand, inspiration, queen, strategy

 Like 
  Likes: 115

The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this
etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the
entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin'.

Mary Daly

Tags: carpe-diem, christianity, etymology, feminism, life, patriarchy, religion, sin
  Like 
  Likes: 109
There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.

Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Tags: feminism, gender-equality, stereotypes

 Like 
  Likes: 108

The bible and the church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women's emancipation.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Tags: atheism, feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 101

When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be
protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted
to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!

E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

Tags: equality, female, feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 101

While falling in love is fun, it's not everything, and it's not the antidote to an unfulfilled life, despite what
Reese Witherspoon movies may tell you.

Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism

Tags: feminism, love

 Like 
  Likes: 97
Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my
feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s
silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.

Thomas Sankara, Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle

Tags: feminism, liberation, revolution

 Like 
  Likes: 95

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why
you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once
too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."

Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because
you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly,
as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just
enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as
to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Tags: feminism, writing

 Like 
  Likes: 81

We are the blood

of the witches
you thought were dead.

We carry witchcraft in our bones

whilst magic still sings
inside out heads.

When the witch hunters

imprisoned out ancestors
when they tried to burn the magic away.

Someone should have

warned them
that magic cannot be tamed.
 Because you cannot burn away
what has always
been aflame.

Nikita Gill

Tags: feminism, poetry, women

 Like 
  Likes: 81

...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 80

We teach girls shame. Close your legs; cover yourself. We make them feel as though being born female,
they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who silence themselves. They
grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up--and this is the worst
thing we do to girls--they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.

Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie

Tags: chimamanda-ngozi-adichie, equality, feminism, gender, tedtalks

 Like 
  Likes: 76

Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a
man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions,
animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our
cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't
demand a choice between nesting and flight.

Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

Tags: feminism
  Like 
  Likes: 75

What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her "beauty" his sole target? He sabotages
himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been
chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition
impressive.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Tags: advertising, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, double-
standards, equality, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, mass-culture, objectification, plastic-
surgery, self-esteem, sexuality, society

 Like 
  Likes: 255

I love being single. It's almost like being rich.

Sue Grafton

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 231

If women want rights more than they got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it.

Sojourner Truth

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 201

He cried when I left, which I find to be standard male behavior.

Emilie Autumn

Tags: feminism, male
  Like 
  Likes: 166

You deserve to be here. You deserve to exist. You deserve to take up space in this world of men.

Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings, #2)

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 153

The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of
her own.

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

Tags: creative-work, feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 111

How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her,
exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a
high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d'Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her
export products, not her own identity.
Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power. Her name was poverty. His
was wealth. Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was
his, including her, and he thought be could take her without asking and without consequences. It was a
very old story, though its outcome had been changing a little in recent decades. And this time around
the consequences are shaking a lot of foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking.
Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we've been given?
...
His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was the same old story, but hers was a new one
about the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished, that includes all of us, that matters so
much, that we will watch but also make and tell in the weeks, months, years, decades to come.

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

Tags: colonization, fables, feminism, possibilities

 Like 
   Likes: 99

Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves.

Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle, #1)

Tags: anger, daughter, feminism, motherhood, women

 Like 
  Likes: 86

When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than
creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her,
but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It’s not about the
burqa. It’s about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one.
Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity,
a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as
moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble
under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems.

Arundhati Roy

Tags: feminism, france, gender, islam, women

 Like 
  Likes: 84

You can have it all, just not all at the same time.

Betty Friedan

Tags: betty-friedan, feminism, life, making-it, opportunity, success, women

 Like 
  Likes: 73

Her mother told her she could grow up to be anything she wanted be, so she grew up to become the
strongest of the strong, the strangest of the strange, the wildest of the wild, the wolf leading wolves.

Nikita Gill
 Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 73
I was the first woman to burn my bra - it took the fire department four days to put it out.

Dolly Parton

Tags: dolly-parton, feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 72

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient
pool, into man-made women.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Tags: advertising, aging, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, doub
le-standards, eating-disorders, equality, fashion-industry, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, m
ass-culture, objectification, plastic-surgery, pornography, self-esteem, sexuality, society

 Like 
  Likes: 71

Well, speaking as a feminist, I'm glad that women can lead--uh, groups of unspeakable magical evil."

"Yes," Alan said gravely. "It'd be shoking if the evil magicians were sexist. For one thing, that would
mean they were stupid, and having stupid enemies would be a terrible blow to my manly pride.

Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon's Covenant

Tags: feminism, humor, stupidity

 Like 
  Likes: 69

Me as a woman liking myself, is an act of social defiance!

Hannah Witton

Tags: feminism, political-statement, women
  Like 
  Likes: 67

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house

Audre Lorde

Tags: feminism, inequality, power

 Like 
  Likes: 355

I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on
earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.

Susan B. Anthony

Tags: feminism, self-reliance, suffrage

 Like 
  Likes: 290

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Tags: advertising, aging, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, doub
le-standards, eating-disorders, equality, fashion-industry, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, m
ass-culture, objectification, plastic-surgery, pornography, self-esteem, sexuality, society

 Like 
  Likes: 118

When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving,
beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical,
weak, vain, empty.

Stevie Nicks

Tags: contradictory, equality, feminism, gender-norm, inspirational, social-norm
  Like 
  Likes: 95

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until
she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

Margaret Sanger

Tags: feminism, human-rights, motherhood

 Like 
  Likes: 84

I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 78

Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women
and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as
oppressive and callous exploiters.

Camille Paglia

Tags: bias, feminism, gender, gender-roles, misandry, patriarchy, reality, relationships, self-
knowledge, sexes, sexism, socialism, statism, stereotypes, truth, useful-idiots

 Like 
  Likes: 78

I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I,
too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst-burst with forms much more beautiful than
those which are put up in frames and sold for a fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I
didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I
swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves,
these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient infinite woman who...hasn't been ashamed of her
 strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to
believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ...divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a
monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to
bring out something new), hasn't thought that she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she
resists death, that she makes trouble.

Hélène Cixous

Tags: feminism, laugh-of-the-medusa

 Like 
  Likes: 74

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the
notion that a head is a man.

Toni Morrison

Tags: family, feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 73

We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were.
We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it.

Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that
sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.

Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires
what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses
that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing
characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater
than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the
opposite moral.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Tags: advertising, aging, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, doub
le-standards, eating-disorders, equality, fashion-industry, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, m
ass-culture, objectification, plastic-surgery, pornography, self-esteem, sexuality, society

 Like 
  Likes: 73
Teach your daughters their battle cries are needed far more than their silence and hear them deafen the
world with their fearlessness.

Nikita Gill

Tags: daughters, feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 64

Then, people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being
that simple- When in actuality, women ARE complicated. Women are multifaceted. Not because women
are crazy  . But because people are crazy, and women happen to be people.

Tavi Gevinson

Tags: feminism, womens-inspirational

 Like 
  Likes: 63
Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can’t take charge of this most personal
aspect of our lives, we can’t take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but
a fundamental human right.

Faye Wattleton

Tags: abortion, feminism, freedom, reproductive-rights, women-s-rights

 Like 
  Likes: 62

That is the fastest way to ruin a woman’s reputation, after all—to imply that she has not adequately threaded
the needle that is being sexually satisfying without ever appearing to desire sexual satisfaction.

Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 58
I'm afraid I've already found my Ever After, Hort," said Sophie.

"What? With who?" Hort asked, aghast.

"On my own," she said, her voice sure and clear. "I'm happy on my own."

And for the first time, she knew it was true.

Soman Chainani, The Last Ever After (The School for Good and Evil, #3)

Tags: feminism, happy-ending, self-love, sophie

 Like 
  Likes: 56

If you make some comment even obliquely alluding to menstruation or menopause and its effect on my
judgment," Murphy interrupted, "I will break your arm in eleven places.

Jim Butcher, Changes (The Dresden Files, #12)

Tags: feminism, humor, karrin-murphy

 Like 
  Likes: 154

The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's
condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that
PREVENTS teenage pregnancy.

Sonya Renee Taylor

Tags: abortion, catholic, feminism, feminist, motherhood, organized-religion, pregnancy, vatican, wom
en

 Like 
  Likes: 125

Only stupid men would want stupid wives!

Robert Thier, Storm and Silence (Storm and Silence, #1)

 Tags: equality, feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 124

Your body is yours to protect and to enjoy.” She raises both eyebrows at me meaningfully. “Whoever you
should choose to partake in that enjoyment, that is your choice, and choose wisely. Every man that ever
got to touch me was afforded an honor. A privilege.” Stormy waves her hand over me. “All this? It’s a
privilege to worship at this temple, do you understand my meaning? Not just any young fool can
approach the throne. Remember my words, Lara Jean. You decide who, how far, and how often, if ever.”
“I had no idea you were such a feminist,” I say.
“Feminist?” Stormy makes a disgusted sound in her throat. “I’m no feminist. Really, Lara Jean!”
“Stormy, don’t get worked up about it. All it means is that you believe men and women are equal, and
should have equal rights.”
“I don’t think any man is my equal. Women are far superior, and don’t you forget it. Don’t forget any of
the things I just told you.

Jenny Han, P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #2)

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 120

..the hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves-and encourage men to see us-as more than
just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in
relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities. But I know that this can't
happen as long as American culture continues to inundate us with gender-role messages that place
everyone-men and women-in an unnatural hierarchical order that's impossible to maintain without
strife. For women to move forward, and for men to break free, we need to overcome the masculinity
status quo-together.

Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

Tags: feminism, men, status-quo, women

 Like 
  Likes: 112

[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them,
nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white
 nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of
pique.

Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority
to Men

Tags: crows, dignity, empowerment, envy, feminism, gender, hypocrisy, imagery, inequality, jealousy, 
men, merits, misogyny, suppression, ugliness, women, worth

 Like 
  Likes: 106

When we consider that women are treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our
children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Tags: abortion, feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 84

Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to
hate us. One does does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior
and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-
ranging capacity for choice...

Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us?

Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

Tags: choice, feminism, freedom, men, morality, objectification, oppression, patriarchy, women

 Like 
  Likes: 84

As women gain rights, families flourish, and so do societies. That connection is built on a simple truth:
Whenever you include a group that's been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you're working
globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you're working to benefit all
members of every community. Gender equity lifts everyone. Women's rights and society's health and
wealth rise together.
 Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

Tags: empowering-women, feminism, gender-equity

 Like 
  Likes: 63

I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand -- they only.
Know this at last.

Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

Tags: choice, conscience, courtship, dignity, empowerment, feminism, gender, independence, integrity
, love, marriage, matrimony, self-determination, social-norms, women, wooing

 Like 
  Likes: 58

I have a rule of thumb that allows me to judge, when times is pressing and one needs to make a snap
judgment, whether or not some sexist bullshit is afoot. Obviously, it’s not 100% infallible but by and
large it definitely points you in the right direction and it's asking this question; are the men doing it? Are
the men worrying about this as well? Is this taking up the men’s time? Are the men told not to do this,
as it's letting the side down? Are the men having to write bloody books about this exasperating
retarded, time-wasting, bullshit? Is this making Jeremy Clarkson feel insecure?

Almost always the answer is no. The boys are not being told they have to be a certain way, they are just
getting on with stuff.

Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

Tags: feminism, jeremy-clarckson, misogyny, patriarchy, sexism

 Like 
  Likes: 58

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The
attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped
blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that
she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life.

Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and
 gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a
lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature.
When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Tags: advertising, beauty, body-image, consumer, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, 
double-standards, equality, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, mass-culture, objectification, pla
stic-surgery, pornography, self-esteem, sexuality, society

 Like 
  Likes: 56

Do you think it is fair that guy will make more money doing the same job as you? Does it piss you off and
scare you when you find out about your friends getting raped? Do you ever feel like shit about your
body? Do you ever feel like something is weong with you because you don't fit into this bizarre ideal of
what girls are supposed to be like? Well, my friend, I hate to break it to you, but you're hardcore
feminist. I swear.

Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism

Tags: feminism, inspirirational-quotes

 Like 
  Likes: 56

Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate
women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the
executants of their virile needs.

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Tags: feminism, women

 Like 
  Likes: 53
I think when it comes to females in the media you’ll see something that kind of upsets me which is that
females are pinned up against each other more so than men. You know, for example like you never see
online “vote for who has the better butt - this actor or this actor.” It’s always like this female singer and
this female singer. And you get to vote. I mean, it’s daily I see these things and these polls like “let us
know who’s sexier, who’s the hotter momma” and I just don’t see it like “who’s the hotter dad” you
know? I think that one thing that I do believe as a feminist is that in order for us to have gender equality
we have to stop making it a girl fight and we have to stop being so interested in seeing girls trying to tear
 each other down, it has to be more about cheering each other on as women. That’s just kind of how I
feel about it.

Taylor Swift

Tags: feminism, sexism, uniting, womens-rights

 Like 
  Likes: 21
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.

Marie Shear

Tags: equality, feminism, frequently-misattributed-quote, women, womens-rights

 Like 
  Likes: 180

In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the
job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is
passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

Tags: career, clichés, double-standards, empowerment, feminism, gender, hypocrisy, men, misogyny, 
passion-for-work, self-determination, social-norms, stereotypes, women

 Like 
  Likes: 106

I am done looking for love where it doesn’t exist. I am done coughing up dust in attempts to drink from dry
wells.

Maggie Young

Tags: abusive-parents, abusive-relationships, childhood-trauma, feminism, just-another-number-
author, maggie-young, strong-women

 Like 
  Likes: 88

When you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women. ... And I don't quite know
how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater
 license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny),
why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in
women brings only shame?

Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority
to Men

Tags: clichés, double-standards, empowerment, feminism, gender, hypocrisy, inequality, men-and-
women, misogyny, morality, preconceptions, self-perception, sin, social-norms, stereotypes, vice

 Like 
  Likes: 83

In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-
class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle,
uncomfortable discrimination--tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl
should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and
discrimination

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 77

I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I
had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the children were
small. But it was major in terms of my head. I always thought that women could do a lot of things. All
the women I knew did nine or ten things at one time. I always understood that women worked, they
went to church, they managed their houses, they managed somebody else's houses, they raised their
children, they raised somebody else's children, they taught. I wouldn't say it's not hard, but why
wouldn't it be? All important things are hard.

Toni Morrison

Tags: art, feminism, writing

 Like 
  Likes: 64
I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality,
the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

Toni Morrison

Tags: family, feminism, power

 Like 
  Likes: 62

Something that’s bothered me for a while now is the current profligacy in YA culture of Team Boy 1 vs Team
Boy 2 fangirling. [...] Despite the fact that I have no objection to shipping, this particular species of team-
choosing troubled me, though I had difficulty understanding why. Then I saw it applied to Suzanne
Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy – Team Peeta vs Team Gale – and all of a sudden it hit me that
anyone who thought romance and love-triangles were the main event in that series had utterly missed
the point. Sure, those elements are present in the story, but they aren’t anywhere near being the bones
of it, because The Hunger Games, more than anything else, is about war, survival, politics, propaganda
and power. Seeing such a strong, raw narrative reduced to a single vapid argument – which boy is cuter?
– made me physically angry.

So, look. People read different books for different reasons. The thing I love about a story are not
necessarily the things you love, and vice versa. But riddle me this: are the readers of these series really
so excited, so thrilled by the prospect of choosing! between! two! different! boys! that they have to boil
entire narratives down to a binary equation based on male physical perfection and, if we’re very lucky,
chivalrous behaviour? While feminism most certainly champions the right of women to chose their own
partners, it also supports them to choose things besides men, or to postpone the question of
partnership in favour of other pursuits – knowledge, for instance. Adventure. Careers. Wild dancing.
Fun. Friendship. Travel. Glorious mayhem. And while, as a woman now happily entering her fourth year
of marriage, I’d be the last person on Earth to suggest that male companionship is inimical to any of
those things, what’s starting to bother me is the comparative dearth of YA stories which aren’t, in some
way, shape or form, focussed on Girls Getting Boyfriends, and particularly Hot Immortal Or Magical
Boyfriends Whom They Will Love For All Eternity.

Blog post: Love Team Freezer

Foz Meadows

Tags: feminism, hunger-games, love-triangles, shipping, ya

 Like 
  Likes: 61
Men’s greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their facade of
weakness.

Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power

Tags: equality, feminism, men, men-s-rights, mra, women

 Like 
  Likes: 57

This business of womanhood is a heavy burden.

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tags: feminism, womanhood

 Like 
  Likes: 56

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm,
the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables.
It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

Tags: feminism, language

 Like 
  Likes: 49

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

Tags: feminism, silence

 Like 
  Likes: 48

Don't let a king

or a prince
 or a fairytale
tell you you are smaller than that or who you are meant to be.

Nikita Gill, Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty

Tags: feminism, inspirational, poem, poetry

 Like 
  Likes: 48

Man fucks woman; subject verb object.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 45

You're sexist. I'm so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting
women against sexual discrimination.

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

Tags: feminism, liberals, sexual-discrimination

 Like 
  Likes: 44

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

Susan Sontag

Tags: aesthetics, feminism, social-justice

 Like 
  Likes: 97

Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little
most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like
 'sunset' and 'Paris.' Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the
buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus

Emma Cline, The Girls

Tags: expectations, feminism, girls, sexism, social-commentary

 Like 
  Likes: 90

Some leaders are born women.

Geraldine Ferraro

Tags: feminism, leaders, leadership, politics, women

 Like 
  Likes: 83

If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it’s clear that the most frenzied moral panic
surrounding young women’s sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about
how promiscuous girls are, whether they’re acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera,
or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and stories generally fail to mention
that women are attending college at the highest rates in history, and that we’re the majority of
undergraduate and master’s students. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don’t make for
good headlines, it seems.

Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

Tags: feminism, non-fiction

 Like 
  Likes: 71

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy
eviscerating one another to take you on.

Anna Quindlen

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 66
When they (the men, the scavengers)
come for you, do not give yourself
to them so easily.

Wear your strength like armour,

fight like a beast.
Do not let them tell you that
you belong to them.

Be fearless.
Be a lion.
Be like lava.
Rip them apart,
and burn their bones.

And when you are done,

tell the world that
you belong to no man.
That you are a lady,
a warrior,
a tsunami,
and you belong only to yourself.

Zaeema J. Hussain, The Sky Is Purple

Tags: empowerment, empowerment-of-women, female-empowerment, females, feminism, patriarch
y, self-love, strength, tsunami, warrior, womanhood, women

 Like 
  Likes: 65

Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents
men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and
gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all
senses but the visual, and impairing even that.

Naomi Wolf

Tags: advertising, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, double-
standards, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, mass-culture, objectification, plastic-surgery, self-
esteem, sexuality, society

 Like 
  Likes: 61
What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture
of men?

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Tags: advertising, aging, beauty, body-image, cosmetic-surgery, cosmetics, culture, diet-industry, doub
le-standards, eating-disorders, equality, fashion-industry, feminism, images, magazines, marketing, m
ass-culture, objectification, plastic-surgery, pornography, self-esteem, sexual-violence, sexuality, socie
ty

 Like 
  Likes: 52

I would suggest that a feminism which does not also seek to alter the exploitation of poorer women is not
feminism at all, but is simply a varient for of upper-class politics & self-privileging.

Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Imperialism, Exploitation and
Terrorism

Tags: exploitation, feminism, poor, women

 Like 
  Likes: 43

but bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical
dilemma/ i havent conquered yet/ do you see the point
my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender/ my love is too delicate to have
thrown back on my face

my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face

my love is too beautiful to have thrown back on my face

my love is too sanctified to have thrown back on my face

my love is too magic to have thrown back on my face

my love is too saturday nite to have thrown back on my face

my love is too complicated to have thrown back on my face

 my love is too music to have thrown back on my face

Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

Tags: alive, ancient, black, colored, colored-girls, dilemma, feminism, love, metaphysical, ntozake-
shange, spirit, woman, women

 Like 
  Likes: 43

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

Phyllis Schlafly

Tags: anti-feminism, feminism, inspirational, victimhood, women

 Like 
  Likes: 42

I am a woman and a warrior. If you think I can't be both, you've been lied to.

Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

Tags: empowerment, femininity, feminism, feminist, heroism, inspirational, strength, women

 Like 
  Likes: 40

Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop
listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look
at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.

Hélène Cixous

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 39
Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men post more e-
mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the
behavior's origin. If men control society, why don't they just shut up and enjoy their supposed
prerogatives? The answer is obvious when you consider sexual competition: men can't be quiet because
that would give other men a chance to show off verbally. Men often bully women into silence, but this is
usually to make room for their own verbal display. If men were dominating public language just to
maintain patriarchy, that would qualify as a puzzling example of evolutionary altruism—a costly, risky
individual act that helps all of one's sexual competitors (other males) as much as oneself. The ocean of
male language that confronts modern women in bookstores, television, newspapers, classrooms,
parliaments, and businesses does not necessarily come from a male conspiracy to deny women their
voice. It may come from an evolutionary history of sexual selection in which the male motivation to talk
was vital to their reproduction.

Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

Tags: biology, feminism, psychology

 Like 
  Likes: 39

Being a woman, in this world, ultimately makes you crazy.

Holly Bourne, Am I Normal Yet? (The Spinster Club, #1)

Tags: feminism, mental-health, spinsters

 Like 
  Likes: 37

For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid,
and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a "good" (i.e. "moral) girl and therefore
worthy of praise.

Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

Tags: ethics, feminism, purity-myth, virginity

 Like 
  Likes: 148

நிமிர்ந்த நன்னடை நேர்கொண்ட பார்வையும்,

நிலத்தில் யார்க்கும் அஞ்சாத நெறிகளும்,
 திமிர்ந்த ஞானச் செருக்கும் இருப்பதால்
செம்மை மாதர் திறம்புவ தில்லையாம்;
அமிழ்ந்து பேரிரு ளாமறி யாமையில்
அவல மெய்திக் கலையின் றி வாழ்வதை
உமிழ்ந்து தள்ளுதல் பெண்ணற மாகுமாம்
உதய கன்ன உரைப்பது கேட்டிரோ!

Subramanya bharathi, mahakavi barathiyar kavithaikal

Tags: bharathi, feminism, feminism-identity, mahakavi, puthumaipen, tamil, ப-த-ம-ப-ப-ண

 Like 
  Likes: 104
If you consider a woman less pure after you’ve touched her
maybe you should take a looks at your hands.

Kaija Sabbah

Tags: education, feminism, sexism, sexuality, women

 Like 
  Likes: 90

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make
them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to
separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Tags: clichés, dignity, double-standards, empowerment, feminism, gender, hypocrisy, manners, misog
yny, morality, reform, social-norms, stereotypes, women

 Like 
  Likes: 88

Since a time has come, Mademoiselle, when the severe laws of men no longer prevent women from applying
themselves to the sciences and other disciplines, it seems to me that those of us who can should use this
long-craved freedom to study and to let men see how greatly they wronged us when depriving us of its
honor and advantages. And if any woman becomes so proficient as to be able to write down her
thoughts, let her do so and not despise the honor, but rather flaunt it instead of fine clothes, necklaces,
and rings. For these may be considered ours only by use, whereas the honor of being educated is ours
entirely.

Louise Labé
 Tags: education, feminism, learn, power, troubador

 Like 
  Likes: 69
My wish is to ride the tempest, tame the waves, kill the sharks. I will not resign myself to the usual lot of
women who bow their heads and become concubines.

Trieu Thi Choi

Tags: courage, feminism, sharks

 Like 
  Likes: 66

It's hard not to be a fighter when you're constantly under siege.

Cassandra Duffy

Tags: feminism, inspirational, lesbian, lgbt-rights

 Like 
  Likes: 60

I deserve better —such a dangerous, mad thought for a woman to entertain.

Meredith Duran, At Your Pleasure

Tags: feminism, women

 Like 
  Likes: 55

Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and
proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women
to fight for theirs.

Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story

Tags: feminism, history, politics, suffragette, women

 Like 
  Likes: 51
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

Tags: feminism, patriarchy, the-yellow-wallpaper

 Like 
  Likes: 43

The word feminism has become synonymous with man-hating when in fact it has more to do with women
than men.

Aysha Taryam, The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries

Tags: feminism, gender-equality, women-s-rights

 Like 
  Likes: 38

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been
accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Tags: existentialism, feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 36

I am a men's liberationist (or "masculist") when men's liberation is defined as equal opportunity and equal
responsibility for both sexes. I am a feminist when feminism favors equal opportunities and
responsibilities for both sexes. I oppose both movements when either says our sex is THE oppressed sex,
therefore, "we deserve rights." That's not gender liberation but gender entitlement. Ultimately, I am in
favor of neither a women's movement nor a men's movement but a gender transition movement.

Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power

Tags: feminism, gender, men

 Like 
  Likes: 35
you will rise.
and are you less of a woman for this? no
what is woman?
woman is this—enduring.
listen girl, you will survive this–you will.
but what fool said you had to do it silently?
here is a tip—scream

Salma Deera, Letters From Medea

Tags: feminism, medea, womanhood

 Like 
  Likes: 31

If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character
of the woman who's loved is described or matters.

Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld

Tags: feminism, greek-poetry

 Like 
  Likes: 30

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed
bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to
describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing
that, invent.

Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères

Tags: feminism, identity, slavery

 Like 
  Likes: 95
[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with
sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but
pretty rotten and feeble.

Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

Tags: conduct-of-life, double-standards, empowerment, feminism, gender, hypocrisy, inequality, men, 
misogyny, morality, sexuality, social-norms, women

 Like 
  Likes: 85

Now, it is frequently asserted that, with women, the job does not come first. What (people cry) are women
doing with this liberty of theirs? What woman really prefers a job to a home and family? Very few, I
admit. It is unfortunate that they should so often have to make the choice. A man does not, as a rule,
have to choose. He gets both. Nevertheless, there have been women ... who had the choice, and chose
the job and made a success of it. And there have been and are many men who have sacrificed their
careers for women ... When it comes to a choice, then every man or woman has to choose as an
individual human being, and, like a human being, take the consequences.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

Tags: career, choice, clichés, double-standards, empowerment, feminism, freedom, gender, inequality, 
misogyny, self-determination, stereotypes, women

 Like 
  Likes: 62

I realized that searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming.
We all grew up on the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty," which instructs young women that if they just wait
for their prince to arrive, they will be kissed and whisked away on a white horse to live happily ever
after. Now young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the
ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after. Once again, we are teaching
women to be too dependent on others.

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Tags: feminism, lean-in

 Like 
  Likes: 62
As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the
world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings

Tags: feminism, gender, religion

 Like 
  Likes: 51

Every time you rolled your eyes and every little smart remark you made about how silly it was for girls to care
about their looks. You refused to let me--or anyone!--like books and silks. Outdoors and cosmetics. You
stopped taking me seriously when I stopped being the kind of woman you thought I had to be to be
considered intelligent and strong. All those things you say make men take women less seriously--I don't
think it's men; it's you. You're not better than any other woman because you like philosophy better than
parties and don't give a fig about the company of gentlemen, or because you wear boots instead of
heels and don't set your hair in curls.

Mackenzi Lee, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings, #2)

Tags: feminism, internalized-misogyny, internalized-sexism, misogyny

 Like 
  Likes: 47

Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn't be that women are the exception.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Tags: feminism, inspiration, women-empowerment

 Like 
  Likes: 46

Men who are in prison for rape think it's the dumbest thing that ever happened... it's isn't just a miscarriage
of justice; they were put in jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the
time and call it sex. The only difference is they got caught. That view is nonremorseful and not
rehabilitative. It may also be true. It seems to me that we have here a convergence between the
rapists's view of what he has done and the victim's perspective on what was done to her. That is, for
both, their ordinary experiences of heterosexual intercourse and the act of rape have something in
common. Now this gets us into immense trouble, because that's exactly how judges and juries see it
who refuse to convict men accused of rape. A rape victim has to prove that it was not intercourse. She
 has to show that there was force and that she resisted, because if there was sex, consent is inferred.
Finders of fact look for "more force than usual during the preliminaries". Rape is defined by distinction
from intercourse - not nonviolence, intercourse. They ask, does this event look more like fucking or like
rape? But what is their standard for sex, and is this question asked from the women's point of view? The
level of force is not adjudicated at her point of violation; it is adjudicated at the standard for the normal
level of force. Who sets this standard?

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Tags: feminism, feminist-theory, intercourse, law, patriarchy, piv, rape, women

 Like 
  Likes: 42

At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.

Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

Tags: feminism, sociology

 Like 
  Likes: 38

You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head
and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever
forget it.

Margaret Atwood, Good Bones

Tags: feminism, humor-inspirational

 Like 
  Likes: 36

If you listen long enough to the whispers, you will hear the truth. Until then, I will tell you this: the world is
made safe by a woman. She bound the monster up and cast him out, and the man who was left was
saved.

E.K. Johnston, A Thousand Nights (A Thousand Nights, #1)

Tags: awesome, e-k-johnston, feminism, woman, women

 Like 
  Likes: 36

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was
Lilith
Eve
Hagar
Jezebel
Delilah
Pandora
Jahi
Tamar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called goddess and her name was
Kali
Fatima
Artemis
Hera
Isis
Mary
Ishtar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called queen and her name was
Bathsheba
Vashti
Cleopatra
Helen
Salome
Elizabeth
Clytemnestra
Medea
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called witch and her name was
Joan
Circe
Morgan le Fay
Tiamat
Maria Leonza
Medusa
and they had this in common: that they were feared, hated, desired, and worshiped.

Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating

Tags: feminism, history, women

 Like 
  Likes: 34
Besides, when I look around me at the men, I feel that God never meant us women to be too particular.

Marie Jenney Howe, An Anti-Suffrage Monologue

Tags: feminism, humor, women

 Like 
  Likes: 33

Fill your life with women that empower you, that help you believe in your magic and aid them to believe in
their own exceptional power and their incredible magic too. Women that believe in each other can
survive anything. Women who believe in each other create armies that will win kingdoms and wars.

Nikita Gill

Tags: feminism

 Like 
  Likes: 32
When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially
transformative insights.

Caroline Criado Pérez