Feminism

Feminism is a range of political movements, ideologies, and social movements that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal, and social equality of sexes. Feminist movements have campaigned and continue to campaign for women's rights. This includes fighting gender stereotypes and seeking to establish educational and professional opportunities for women that are equal to those for men.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

Women’s movements have a special significance for the immediate future. These movements should be understood not as an assertion of supremacy, but as the establishment of justice. ~Agni Yoga

Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it's the latter, so I sign up. ~ Margaret Atwood

We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever. ~Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper

Feminism is a rebellion against the ruthless tyranny of the male, an attempt to dethrone his autocratic rule and revert to a more natural sexual equality. ~ Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff

Women who lust for wisdom become astonished/ astonishing, Wondering. As Muses of our own creation, Wonderlusters re-member our Original Powers. Unlike the frozen 'philosophy' that is packaged and stored within academic refrigerators, Wonderlust moves us always. Our vehicles are often Metaphors. Our destinations are Realms of Metabeing. ~Mary Daly

Glass ceiling feminism is grounded from the very outset in hierarchies. I mean, how else does that metaphor work? Those who are already high enough to reach the ceiling are probably white, and then if they're not white, they are already affluent. Because they're at the top. All they have to do is push through the ceiling. ~ Angela Davis

I am uncompromising in the matter of woman's rights. In my opinion she should labour under no legal disability not suffered by man, I should treat the daughters and sons on a footing of perfect equality. ~ Mohandas Gandhi

I always believed that the time inevitably must come when woman will be judged by the same moral standards applied to man. For it is not her specific feminine virtue that gives her a place of honor in human society, but the worth of the useful mission accomplished by her, the worth of her personality as human being, as citizen, as thinker, as fighter. ~ Alexandra Kollontai (1926)

I'm absolutely a feminist. The reason other feminists don't like me is that I criticize the movement, explaining that it needs a correction. Feminism has betrayed women, alienated men and women, replaced dialogue with political correctness. ~ Camille Paglia

Woman is a personification of nature, and it is nature that teaches man, not man nature. Therefore, may all women realize the grandeur of their origin, and may they strive for knowledge. Where there is knowledge, there is power. ~Helena Roerich

The most ancient Teachings always highly regarded the Feminine Principle, and even female divinities were considered by them to be the most sacred... Woman must accept the struggle against life's obstacles in order to temper her strength and manifest her true nature. ~Helena Roerich

Women's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man. Come what will, my whole soul rejoices in the truth that I have uttered. ~Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The more I have spoken about feminism the more I have realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating. If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop... Feminism by definition is: “The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.”
...No country in the world can yet say they have achieved gender equality. ~Emma Watson (2014)

Ancient legends actually attribute to woman the role of the guardian of sacred-knowledge... Let us develop primarily a sense of our own dignity and learn to lean courageously on our own strength and knowledge, in order to join in, as well as accept, responsibility for the great structure of General Good. ~Helena Roerich

Woman can ensure that new knowledge is properly applied. ~Agni Yoga

But then why in many ancient pre-Christian civilizations....were women respected and the feminine principle not feared but revered? What is it that suddenly made men feel threatened by the female? ~Eckhart Tolle

During a three hundred year period between three and five million women were tortured and killed by the “Holy Inquisition,“ an institution founded by the Roman Catholic Church... It was enough for a woman to show a love for animals, walk alone in the fields or woods, or gather medicinal plants to be branded a witch, then tortured and burned at the stake... If the balance between male and female energies had not been destroyed on our planet...We would not have declared war on nature, and we would not be so completely alienated from our Being. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The sacred feminine was declared demonic... Women's status was reduced to being child bearers and men's property... The rest is history or rather a case history of insanity. ~Eckhart Tolle

• I’ve been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. There are those who say I’m impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing. Whether I’m any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am — and this ought to be made very clear — I am a very serious woman.
  • Bella Abzug, in Bella! : Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington (1972) edited by Edited by Mel Ziegler, Introduction

• In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
  • Abigail Adams, in a letter to John Adams (31 March 1776), published in Familiar Letters of John Adams and his wife Abigail Adams (1875) edited by Charles Francis Adams, p. 147

• Today is the beginning of the feminine awakening. A new wave has reached Earth today, and new hearths have become alight; for the substance of the rays penetrates deeply. It is joyous to feel the approach of the New Epoch. 138.
  • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden II (1925)

• The Mother of the World appears as a symbol of the feminine Origin in the new epoch, and the masculine Origin voluntarily returns the treasure of the World to the feminine Origin. Amazons were the embodiment of the strength of the feminine Principle, and now it is necessary to show the aspect of spiritual perfection of woman... it is time to change conditions in the world. 150.
  • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden II (1925)

• Women’s movements have a special significance for the immediate future. These movements should be understood not as an assertion of supremacy, but as the establishment of justice. Much has been said about co-measurement and equilibrium; precisely for the realization of this principle must the full rights of women be strengthened. One should not think that this will benefit only women; it will promote world equilibrium, and thus is necessary for harmonious evolution.
  • Agni Yoga, Supermundane, 38. (1938)

• To all these insanities will be added the most shameful—the intensified competition between male and female. We insist upon equal and full rights for women, but the servants of darkness will expel them from many fields of activity, even where they bring the most benefit. We have spoken about the many maladies in the world, but the renewed struggle between the male and female principles will be the most tragic. It is hard to imagine how disastrous this will be, for it is a struggle against evolution itself! What a high price humanity pays for every such opposition to evolution! In these convulsions the young generations are corrupted. Plato spoke about beautiful thinking, but what kind of beauty is possible when there is hostility between man and woman? Now is the time to think about equal and full rights, but darkness invades the tensed realms.
  • Agni Yoga, Supermundane, 286. (1938)

• Keep in mind that the participation of a woman is particularly helpful... We have already spoken about the desirability of participation by women in scientific experiments. Ancient alchemists understood the full value of the feminine contribution, but today many scientists reject it. Because of this, the participation of women is frequently indirect, rather than direct. Nevertheless, the fundamental nature of things will attract women, and they will leave their mark in new discoveries. For this reason it is essential to change the status of women. The subtlety and refinement of women’s nature must be understood, so that they may achieve equal rights and the desired balance. It would be a sad mistake for women to replace soldiers on the battlefield, or perform heavy labor. When we are aware of the presence of valuable subtle energy we ought to be able to apply it accordingly. Thus, we once again come to the notion of true cooperation.
  • Agni Yoga, Supermundane, 458. (1938)

• We must find the right use for every ability. The era of the Mother of the World is not a return of the age of Amazons. A far greater, loftier, and more refined task is before us. One can observe that machines often function better, and plants can live longer, in the hands of women. Of course, I do not speak of all women, but of those exceptional ones who manifest the subtlest energy. Their abilities glorify the age of the Mother of the World, and relate closely to the realm of healing. And another quality belongs to woman—she manifests the highest degree of devotion. The greatest truths are revealed by her. Reality confirms this. Woman can ensure that new knowledge is properly applied.
  • Agni Yoga, Supermundane, 458. (1938)

• Every appeal for the renewal of life must address the needs of women and the young. Some people think that both of these aspects of life are secure, and are developing successfully, but in reality the position of woman and the education of the young are not at all in a satisfactory condition. Only a small number of women can assume equal rights in the conditions of life, and in most schools the foundations of a sound life are not taught. Evolution cannot proceed successfully when two pillars of support have not yet been made secure. It should not be thought that evolution proceeds under any conditions; it can be obstructed, and much precious energy will be wasted.
  
  • Agni Yoga, Supermundane, 700. (1938)

• The Thinker said, “O, ye wise men, your efforts will be fruitless if woman does not stretch out her hand to you, and if you do not raise a generation of heroes!”
  • Agni Yoga, Supermundane, 700. (1938)

• I have feminist bones and when I hear things or see people react to women in certain ways I have very little tolerance.
  • Gillian Anderson, Glamour "I have a healthy appreciation of Ryan Gosling" (August, 2014)

• We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.
  • Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper in History of Woman Suffrage (1886), p. 34

• If all Men Are born Free, how is it that all women are born Slaves?
  • Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage

• It should not prejudice my voice that I'm not born a man, if I say something advantageous to the present situation. For I'm taxed too, and as a toll provide men for the nation.
  • Aristophanes in Lysistrata (411 BC), line 649-651, [as translated by Jack Lindsay, (1925), at Perseus online

• Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it's the latter, so I sign up.
  • Margaret Atwood, as quoted in Women Know Everything! : 3,241 Quips, Quotes, & Brilliant Remarks (2007) by Karen Weekes, p. 156

B

• The subjection of women in Western lands is wholly due to Christianity. Among the Teutons women were honoured, and held a noble and dignified place in the tribe; Christianity brought with it the evil Eastern habit of regarding women as intended for the toys and drudges of man, and intensified it with a special spite against them, as the daughters of Eve, who was first "deceived." Strangely different to the *general Eastern feeling and showing a truer and nobler view of life, is the precept of Manu: Where women are honoured, there the deities are pleased; but where they are dishonoured, there all religious acts become fruitless.
  • Annie Besant, in Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History

• People feel much more comfortable with the 50 Shades of Grey version of women’s liberation: possibly feeling life would be much simpler if the suffragettes hadn’t wanted the vote and just really enjoyed chaining themselves to railings.
  • Frankie Boyle, writing in the Guardian, 7 April 2015.

• Woman herself, long conscious of complete humanity, today desires only that others shall recognize it and honestly accept the implications of such recognitions....The Word "Feminism", a much maligned word, which has come to stand for many irrelevancies, such as dowdiness and physical abnormality, still adequately expresses her true desire, a desire that might well be summed up in one sentence addressed to mankind: 'Recognize our full humanity, and we will trouble you no more".
  • Vera Brittain, "Why Feminism Lives', pamphlet published by the Six Point Group in 1927. Reprinted in Maggie Humm, Feminisms: A Reader ,Routledge, 2014.
• A women in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. A woman attempting the role of leadership was, to my proud black Brothers, making an alliance with the "counter-revolutionary, man-hating, lesbian, feminist white bitches." It was a violation of some Black Power principle that was left undefined. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of black people.
  • Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power (1992)

C

• ... Within a span of thirty-five years, a visionary feminism has managed to challenge, if not transform, world consciousness. Feminist ideals are battling patriarchal institutions and ideology, the world over. For example, rape as a weapon—not a spoil—of war is now viewed as an international human rights violation. Feminists have also mounted brave and determined battles against such local practices as honor killings, dowry burnings, female genital mutilation, against the global trafficking in women as sexual slaves, and, more generally, against rape, incest, domestic violence, and economic inequality. Feminists have also campaigned for women's religious, medical, educational, and legal rights.
  • Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman. Chicago Review Press. May 2009. pp. 436–437. ISBN 978-1-56976-278-3.  p. 437 1st edition. 2001. ISBN 1560253517. 

D

• (Women's Liberation) ... is an ontological, spiritual revolution, pointing beyond the idolatries of sexist society and sparking creative action in and toward transcendence. The becoming of women implies universal human becoming. It has everything to do with the search for ultimate meaning and reality which some would call God. p. 6
  • Mary Daly in Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (1973)

• It requires a kick in the imagination, a wrenching of tired words, to realize that feminism is the final and therefore the first cause, and that this movement is movement. Realization of this is already the beginning of a qualitative leap in be-ing. For the philosophers of senescence 'the final cause' is in technical reason; it is the Father's plan, an endless flow of Xerox copies of the past. But the final cause that is movement is in our imaginative-cerebral-emotional-active-creative be-ing. p. 190
  • Mary Daly in Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (1973)

• Several meanings of the word Elemental converge for the conjuring of Elemental feminist philosophy. An 'obsolete' definition is 'material, physical.' The philosophy here unfolded is material/physical as well as spiritual, mending/transcending this deceptive dichotomy. p 11; Women who lust for wisdom become astonished/astonishing, Wondering. As Muses of our own creation, Wonderlusters re-member our Original Powers. Unlike the frozen 'philosophy' that is packaged and stored within academic refrigerators, Wonderlust moves us always. Our vehicles are often Metaphors. Our destinations are Realms of Metabeing. p. 26
  • Mary Daly in Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (1984)

• The symbol, God as Verb, was an essential step in my intellectual process to the Metaphor, Goddess as Verb. Often feminists try to eliminate this step, with the unfortunate result that 'The Goddess' functions as a static symbol, simply replacing the noun God. In writing Beyond God the Father, I also used the expression Power of Be-ing to refer to ultimate/ intimate reality. p. 423
  • Mary Daly in Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (1984)

• Glass ceiling feminism is grounded from the very outset in hierarchies. I mean, how else does that metaphor work? Those who are already high enough to reach the ceiling are probably white, and then if they're not white, they are already affluent. Because they're at the top. All they have to do is push through the ceiling. And as long as I have identified as a feminist, it has been clear to me that any feminism that privileges those that already have privilege is bound to be irrelevant to poor women, working class women, women of color, trans women, trans women of color. If standards for feminism are created by those who have already ascended economic hierarchies and are attempting to make the last climb to the top, how is this relevant to women who are at the very bottom? Revolutionary hope resides precisely among those women who have been abandoned by history and who are now standing up and making their demands heard.
  • Angela Davis, Angela Davis Criticizes "Mainstream Feminism" / Bourgeois Feminism

• This is a movement against suffering. So, in between the lines, when you hear people say that this is a movement for freedom, for justice, for equality - and all of that is entirely and deeply true - you must remember that we are trying to eliminate suffering too.
  • Andrea Dworkin, Feminism: An Agenda (1983)

• My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.
  • Flavia Dzodan, My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit

• Without anger and without righteous indignation and without the deep, relentless demand for change, my feminism, YOUR feminism, everyone’s feminism will fail. It will be bullshit.
  • Flavia Dzodan, My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit

F

• Feminism must concern itself with radical possibilities for our future, a future in which gender-based violence and harm is abolished, freeing us all to lead more joyful lives.
  • Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice. Allen Lane. 2021. ISBN 978-0-241-42314-1.  Chapter Seven

• Feminism, in truth, has a cyclical momentum all its own. In the historical interpretation we have espoused, feminism is the inevitable female response to the development of a technology capable of freeing women from the tyranny of their sexual-reproductive roles – both the fundamental biological condition itself, and the sexual class system built upon, and reinforcing, this biological condition.
  • Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. 1970. p. 31. 

• The goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution. Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.
  • Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. 1970. p. 31. 

• Freudianism and Feminism grew from the same soil. It is no accident that Freud began his work at the height of the early feminist movement. We underestimate today how important feminist ideas were at the time. [...] The culture reflected prevailing attitudes and concerns: feminism was an important literary theme because it was then a vital problem. For writers wrote about what they saw: they described the cultural milieu around them. And in this milieu there was concern for the issues of feminism. The question of the emancipation of women affected every woman, whether she developed through the new ideas or fought them desperately. Old films of the time show the growing solidarity of women, reflecting their unpredictable behaviour, their terrifying and often disastrous testing of sex roles. No one remained untouched by the upheaval. And this was not only in the West: Russia at this time was experimenting at doing away with the family. At the turn of the century, then, in social and political thinking, in literary and artistic culture, there was a tremendous ferment of ideas regarding sexuality, marriage and family, and women’s role. Freudianism was only one of the cultural products of this ferment. Both Freudianism and feminism came as reactions to one of the smuggest periods in Western civilization, the Victorian Era, characterized by its family-centredness, and thus its exaggerated sexual oppression and repression. Both movements signified awakening: but Freud was merely a diagnostician for what feminism purports to cure.
  • Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. 1970. pp. 43-44. 

• The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.
  • Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements and of the General Destinies (1808)

G

• I am uncompromising in the matter of woman's rights. In my opinion she should labour under no legal disability not suffered by man, I should treat the daughters and sons on a footing of perfect equality.
  • Mohandas Gandhi, 17th October 1929. Quoted in Gandhi: The Essential Writings. Judith M. Brown, Oxford University Press, 1998 (pp. 228-9). Also quoted in Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries, Institute of Social Studies, 1982.

• To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?
  • Mahatma Gandhi, Young India (4 October 1930)

• Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question; you will not deprive her of that right at least. Tell me, what gives you sovereign empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents?
  • Olympe de Gouges, "Declaration of Rights of Women", Postscript

• Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The flames of truth has dispersed all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion.
  • Olympe de Gouges, "Declaration of Rights of Women", Postscript

• ... My work speaks for the women who came before me but were denied and the girl who will succeed me and thrive ...
  • Quincia Gumbs-Marie, The Honourable Minister Quincia Gumbs-Marie

H

• The so-called granting of equal rights to women, which Marxism demands, in reality does not grant equal rights but constitutes a deprivation of rights, since it draws the woman into an area in which she will necessarily be inferior.
  • Adolf Hitler, Speech to the National Socialist Women's Congress, September 15th, 1935. Quoted in George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich. University of Wisconsin Press, 1966 (p.39); Karen M. Offen, European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History. Stanford University Press, 2000 (p.309).

• While the inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist and an Old Feminist, with the motto Equality First.
  • Winifred Holtby, "Feminism Divided" (1926) 26th July 1926, Yorkshire Post. Reprinted in Maggie Humm, Feminisms: A Reader, Routledge, 2014.

• My thoughts have been shaped by the conviction that feminism must become a mass based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society.
  • bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface, p. xiii.

• Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.
  • bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 1.
• 'Bloody men! sometimes I feel I hate them all.'
  'Your God slipped up. She should have created just one sex, women, and arranged for reproduction by cloning.'
  • Susan Howatch, The Wheel of Fortune
• Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men.
  • Arianna Huffington, The Female Woman. London: Davis-Poynter. 1973. pp. 134-135. ISBN 0706700988. 

K

• The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labour. Surely we must free men and women together before we can free women. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands -- the ownership and control of their lives and livelihood -- are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind are ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease. How can women hope to help themselves while we and our brothers are helpless against the powerful organizations which modern parties represent and which contrive to rule the people? They rule the people because they own the means of physical life, land, and tools, and the nourishers of intellectual life, the press, the church, and the school.
  • Helen Keller, Out of the Dark: Essays, Lectures, and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision (1913), p. 118

• I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist.
  • Sally Kempton, as quoted in Witty Words from Wise Women: Quips, Quotes, and Comebacks (2001) by B. J. Gallagher, Andrews McMeel Publishing

• When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women.
  • Sally Kempton, as quoted in Notes for Participants, National Forensic League's Lincoln-Douglas Debate on Feminism and Gender Equality (November 11, 1995) by Twiss Butler, National Organization for Women

• We all grow in a culture in which women's bodies are constantly turned into things, into objects. [...] Of course these affects female self-steem. It also does something even more insidious. It create a climate in which there is wide-spread violence against women. [...] Turning a human being into a thing is the first step towards justified violence against that person.
  • Jean Kilbourne, as quoted in Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose, p. 71. Editors Tara Prescott, Aaron Drucker. Editorial McFarland, 2012. ISBN 1476600929.

• I always believed that the time inevitably must come when woman will be judged by the same moral standards applied to man. For it is not her specific feminine virtue that gives her a place of honor in human society, but the worth of the useful mission accomplished by her, the worth of her personality as human being, as citizen, as thinker, as fighter.
  • Alexandra Kollontai, The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926), Translated by Salvator Attanasio, Herder and Herder, 1971.

• The time has come when all human beings will be equally appraised according to their activity and their general human dignity.
  • Alexandra Kollontai, The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926), Translated by Salvator Attanasio, Herder and Herder, 1971.

• Only the fresh revolutionary storms were strong enough to sweep away hoary prejudices against woman and only the productive-working people is able to effect the complete equalization and liberation of woman by building a new society.
  • Alexandra Kollontai, The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926), Translated by Salvator Attanasio, Herder and Herder, 1971.

L

• What! still retaining your Utopian visions of female felicity? To talk of our happiness! — ours, the ill-used and oppressed! You remind me of the ancient tyrant, who, seeing his slaves sink under the weight of their chains, said 'Do look at the indolent repose of those people!'
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Romance and Reality (1841), Vol. II, Chapter 12
  • As an example of prejudicial absurdity, Miss Landon has a man say, on the same page:
    • That preference of white sauce to brown is a singular proof of female inferiority.

• Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
  • Timothy Leary, as quoted in Sometimes Being the Queen is All We Have to Hold Onto (2005) by Connie Cash, p. 35

• Who needs consciousness-raising and equal pay, when you’re an Amazon with an invisible plane?
  • Jill Lepore; as quoted in "Her Past Unchained 'The Secret History of Wonder Woman,' by Jill Lepore", by Dwight Garner, New York Times, Oct. 23, 2014.

• I believe myself that appointing women with their history is the single most important thing we can do to raise feminist consciousness. And feminist consciousness means for women to understand that they have a grievance in this world. That the grievance is not individual, that to change their grievance, they need to ally with other women. They need to define for themselves what their goals are. They need then, to form alliances with men and women to attain their goals, and that when their goal is attained, we will have a better society for all of us. Men and women.
  • Gerda Lerner Speech (1998)

• Feminist consciousness begins with self-consciousness, an awareness of our separate needs as women; then comes the awareness of female collectivity-the reaching out toward other women, first for mutual support and then to improve our condition. Out of the recognition of communality, there emerges feminist group consciousness a set of ideas by which women autonomously define ourselves in a male-dominated world and seek to substitute our vision and values for those of the patriarchy. The two aspects of my own consciousness, that of the citizen and that of the woman scholar, had finally fused: I am a feminist scholar.
  • Gerda Lerner "Autobiographical Notes" in The majority finds its past (1979)

• Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.
  • Rush Limbaugh, in "35 Undeniable Truths of Life," Sacramento Union (1988), also quoted at "The "Truth" according to Limbaugh: Feminism established "to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society" at Media Matters (16 August 2005)

• I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are: feminazis. Tom Hazlett, a good friend who is an esteemed and highly regarded professor of economics at the University of California at Davis, coined the term to describe any female who is intolerant of any point of view that challenges militant feminism. … There are not many of them, but they deserve to be called feminazis. A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed.
  • Rush Limbaugh, in The Way Things Ought To Be (1992), p. 193

• The Great Mother archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many traditional cultures today. But this archetype has been violently repressed in the West for at least 5,000 years starting with the Indo-European invasions - reinforced by the anti-Goddess view of Judeo-Christianity, culminating with three centuries of witch hunts - all the way to the Victorian era.
  In Victorian times - at the apex of the repression of the Great Mother - a Scottish schoolmaster named Adam Smith noticed a lot of greed and scarcity around him and assumed that was how all "civilized" societies worked. Smith... created modern economics, which can be defined as a way of allocating scarce resources through the mechanism of individual, personal greed... If a society is afraid of scarcity, it will actually create an environment in which it manifests well-grounded reasons to live in fear of scarcity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy!
  • Bernard Lietaer, Beyond Greed and Scarcity, YES! A Journal of Positive Futures , (Spring 1997)

• The Great Mother... specifically symbolizes planet Earth - fertility, nature, the flow of abundance in all aspects of life. Someone who has assimilated the Great Mother archetype trusts in the abundance of the universe. It's when you lack trust that you want a big bank account. The first guy who accumulated a lot of stuff as protection against future uncertainty automatically had to start defending his pile against everybody else's envy and needs. If a society is afraid of scarcity, it will actually create an environment in which it manifests well-grounded reasons to live in fear of scarcity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy!...
  We have been living for a long time under the belief that we need to create scarcity to create value. Although that is valid in some material domains, we extrapolate it to other domains where it may not be valid. For example, there's nothing to prevent us from freely distributing information. The marginal cost of information today is practically nil. Nevertheless, we invent copyrights and patents in an attempt to keep it scarce. So fear of scarcity creates greed and hoarding, which in turn creates the scarcity that was feared. Whereas cultures that embody the Great Mother are based on abundance and generosity.
  • Bernard Lietaer, Beyond Greed and Scarcity, YES! A Journal of Positive Futures , (Spring 1997)

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• The emancipation of women is not an act of charity, the result of a humanitarian or compassionate attitude. The liberation of women is a fundamental necessity for the Revolution, the guarantee of its continuity and the preconditions for its victory.
  • Samora Machel, "The Emancipation of Women" (1973)
• The only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity.
  • William Moulton Marston, "Noted Psychologist Revealed as Author of Best-Selling "Wonder Woman,' Children's Comic," press release, typescript [June 1942], WW Letters, Smithsonian.

• There are many excellent feminist speakers and writers in the atheist movement, men and women who bring the same critical eye to sexism that they apply to religion. Most of them, however, are mostly known only within atheist circles.
• If atheists believed in the afterlife, they would have to assume that Simone de Beauvoir and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are looking down upon us in horror, wondering how the good name of atheism has been so poisoned by rampant sexism. But since they are no longer around to judge us, it’s up to living atheists to strive to be more than a bunch of people who simply don’t believe in God, but stand up to irrationality in all its forms, including sexism.
  • Amanda Marcotte "Atheism's shocking woman problem: What's behind the misogyny of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?", Salon (October 3, 2014)
  • Marcotte accuses male atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Michael Shermer of sexism and of making negative statements about women.

• The next 100 years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy- a nation of amazons in the psychological rather than the physical sense. In 500 years there will be a serious sex battle. And in 1000 years women will definitely rule this country.
  • William Moulton Marston as quoted in "Neglected Amazons to Rule Men in 1000 yrs., Says Psychologist"; Washington Post, (November 11, 1937)

• A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child's ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary power to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing-love. It's smart to be strong. It's big to be generous. But it's sissified according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving affectionate, and alluring. "Aw, that's girl's stuff!" snorts our young comics reader. "Who wants to be a girl?" And that's the point. Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.
  • William Moulton Marston, quoted om The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore, (2014), p. 187.

• As a woman, I completely reject Hillary’s brand of bourgeois feminism because it leaves out millions of immigrant women, poor women, and the women under her bombs around the world.
  • Abby Martin, TeleSUR, April 17, 2016

• Given the dismal failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists were forced to change their agenda: they left behind the class struggle based on the economic system and replaced this with other supposed social conflicts, which are just as harmful to life and to economic growth. The first of these new battles was the ridiculous and unnatural fight between man and woman. Libertarianism already provides for equality of the sexes. The cornerstone of our creed is that all humans are created equal and that we all have the same inalienable rights granted by the Creator, including life, freedom and ownership. All that the radical feminism agenda has led to is greater state intervention to hinder economic process, giving jobs to bureaucrats who have not contributed anything to society. Examples are ministries of women or international organisations devoted to promoting this agenda.
  • Javier Milei, Special Address to the World Economic Forum, 18 January 2024

• I hate this waaaah-I'm-a-poor-sensitive-weak-woman-protect-me shit. This kind of stuff generates more contempt for women. So fuck niceness!
  • Jude Milhon, 1995 inteview in Wired

• No one appeared to wonder whether this S-M proliferation was a lesbian copy of a faggot imitation of patriarchal backlash against feminism.
  • Robin Morgan, "The Politics of Sado-Masochistic Fantasies", in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p. 235.

• My notion of woman's role in the state is utterly opposed to feminism. Of course I do not want women to be slaves, but if here in Italy I proposed to give our women votes, they would laugh me to scorn. As far as political life is concerned, they do not count here.
  • Benito Mussolini, 1932 interview with Emil Ludwig. Quoted in Karen M. Offen, European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History. Stanford University Press, 2000 (p.309), and Pietro Frassica, Her Maestro's Echo: Pirandello and the Actress who Conquered Broadway in One Evening. Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2010 (p.69).

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• "Women's Problems" are not just women's problems. They are major problems for human beings. They pose issues that both men and women must think about. But men use traditional customs as shields. Relying on a large number of adherents, they brandish overhead the real power they hold over society and suppress the assertions of serious people, jeering at them an relying on unjust cowardly means to get rid of them.
  • Ito Noe, "Women's Problems" (1914)

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• Feminism is the result of a few ignorant and literal-minded women letting the cat out of the bag about which is the superior sex. Once women made it public that they could do things better than men, they were, of course, forced to do them.
  • P. J. O'Rourke, Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People (1983), Ch. 10

• Feminism is a laudable theory. I like how it raises our awareness of the discrimination against women, and I sanction the equality of men and women, girl and boy that it advocates.
  • Ifeoma Okoye Talking about her view on feminism.

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• Feminism, coveting social power, is blind to women’s cosmic sexual power
  • Camille Paglia, Rape and Modern Sex War, p. 52

• Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.
  • Camille Paglia, The Quotable Bitch: Women Who Tell It Like It Really Is (2007)

• I suppose I am a feminist if I believe that women should be able to do anything they want to. And when I say a feminist, I just mean I don't have to, for myself, get out and carry signs ... I just really feel I can live my femininity and actually show that you can be a woman and you can still do whatever you want to do... It's just that there's a group of people that kind of fit into that category more than me. I just always say I don't really go for titles or this or that. But I'm all for all our gals. I think everybody has the right to be who they are.
  • Dolly Parton, Dolly Parton clears her stance on feminism Asia News International (31 May 2020)

• Girls are also human beings, a point often overlooked.
  • George Herbert Palmer, Harvard Philosophy A lecture (1911)

• As the us-versus-them opposition is replicated within the original grouping, policing actions get under way. This is a form of behavior that, in addition to allowing some people to be censorious and aggressive toward others, reflects a presumption of rights and wrongs: We are right. You are wrong. Many feminists have trouble swallowing this. As a political science professor from Texas (who has a bumper sticker on her pickup truck saying FEMINIST REDNECK) wrote to us: "At 50 years of age, I have not thrown off the yoke of one master to have it replaced by another, even if its name is feminism."
  • Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies (2003), chapter 8, "Cults, Communes, and Clicks", p. 195. ISBN 0-7391-0455-1. Retrieved 18 October 2019.

• There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
  • Paul of Tarsus, Galatians 3:28, The Holy Bible.

• The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you’re making a 'feminist’ story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That’s not feminist, that’s macho. Unfortunately, there are still not that many girls going into science, engineering and technology.
  • Natalie Portman, "Natalie Portman interview for Thor: 'A woman kicking ass isn't feminist. That's macho'", Elaine Lipworth, The Telegraph, 29, Oct 2013.

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• The mainstream feminist movement is correct in identifying prostitution as a patriarchal institution; they conveniently miss that policing is, too. Attempting to eradicate commercial sex through policing does not tackle patriarchy; instead, it continues to produce harassment, arrest, prosecution, eviction, violence, and poverty for those who sell sex.
  • Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights (2018)

• Rush Limbaugh has made feminazi a household word. Right-wing politicians like Ollie North say they are running against "an army of feminists" who are destroying family values, and those messages get widespread coverage.
  • Caryl Rivers, in Slick Spins and Fractured Facts : How Cultural Myths Distort the News (1996), p. 12

• Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
  • Pat Robertson "Pat Robertson", "GLAAD.org"

• Could the terrors and crimes of today be possible if both Origins had been balanced? In the hands of woman lies the salvation of humanity and of our planet. Woman must realize her significance... she should be prepared to take responsibility for the destiny of humanity. Mother, the life-giver, has every right to direct the destiny of her children. The voice of woman, the mother, should be heard amongst the leaders of humanity. The mother suggests the first conscious thoughts to her child. She gives direction and quality to all his aspirations and abilities. But the mother who possesses no thought of culture can suggest only the lower expressions of human nature.
  But in her striving toward education, woman must remember that all educational systems are only the means for the development of a higher knowledge and culture. The true culture of thought is developed by the culture of spirit and heart. Only such a combination gives that great synthesis without which it is impossible to realize the real grandeur, diversity, and complexity of human life in its cosmic evolution. Therefore, while striving to knowledge, may woman remember the Source of Light and the Leaders of Spirit—those great Minds who, verily, created the consciousness of humanity. In approaching this Source, this leading Principle of Synthesis, humanity will find the way to real evolution.
  • Helena Roerich Letters I, (1 March 1929)

The New Epoch must manifest due respect to the Mother of the World, to the Feminine Element. “The bird of the spirit of Humanity cannot fly with only one wing” —these are words of Vivekananda... woman, fighting for her cosmic rights, will acquire the knowledge of her power. ~ Helena Roerich

• It is also said: "As the Teacher creates through his disciples, even so woman creates through the masculine principle. Therefore woman uplifts man." Hence, woman must raise herself to such a degree, spiritually, morally and intellectually, that it will enable her to carry man with her. Remember the painting by N. K., "She who Leads." Thus woman must occupy the place destined for her. She must become not only an equal cooperator in the management of the whole life, but also an inspirer. The greatest task is to spiritualize and to restore the health of humanity by filling it with aspiration toward great deeds and beauty. But woman must first of all change herself! Therefore, the call to woman must be primarily the call to self-perfection, for the realization of her dignity and her great destiny and to lay the foundation of Beness and for the awakening of the impulse toward creativeness and beauty. It is said: "The Equilibrium of the world cannot be established without true understanding of the First Causes. . . . Therefore, let us be affirmed in consciousness upon the power of Equilibrium, as the stimulus of Existence, of the First Causes, and of Beauty. Hence it is so indispensable to affirm in the spirit the Feminine Principle." (Fiery World III)
  • Helena Roerich Letters I, (17 August 1934)

• The great decisive Battle between the Forces of Light and darkness... was predicted in all the ancient scriptures, and the name, "Armageddon" as well as the description of it, can be found in the Apocalypse.... It is interesting to note that these calculations are also found in the pyramid of Cheops. Thus, today we find ourselves in the midst of this Battle, which will increase... As it is said, "The hostile elements of the race refuse to submit to destiny. The departing race seeks to destroy the chosen successors, but we must save them.... Yes, the New Epoch requires spiritual cognition. The New Epoch must manifest due respect to the Mother of the World, to the Feminine Element. “The bird of the spirit of Humanity cannot fly with only one wing” —these are words of Vivekananda, who meant to affirm the great significance of the Feminine Principle. Man does not willingly give full rights to woman. However, this opposition but intensifies the forces; and woman, fighting for her cosmic rights, will acquire the knowledge of her power. (LHR I, p 325) (10 September 1934)
  • Helena Roerich, Letters of Helena Roerich, I: 1929-1935

• The most ancient Teachings always highly regarded the Feminine Principle, and even female divinities were considered by them to be the most sacred. We can now find traces of these most ancient cults among the American Indians, whose priesthood is headed by women; women also head the clan, and the whole line of inheritance is considered as coming from the woman's side. Likewise, there is no distinction between the two Origins in the Teaching of Buddha, and woman, as well as man, can reach the state of Arhatship. And even now in India, in spite of the fact that the later Brahmins humiliated woman because of greed and self-interest, the cult of the Goddess Kali is nevertheless spread most widely.
  The last of the known sages of India, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, were worshippers of the Divine Origin in its aspect of the Mother of the World. Indeed, it is the ignorant and avaricious distortion of the cosmic law that has placed woman in a subjugated position.
  Certainly it would be wrong to blame the Masculine Principle alone for the situation created; woman, too, is at fault. Many women welcomed being constantly in custody as wards, and precisely this weakened their strength and dulled their abilities. Therefore, nowadays a reverse order is necessary. Woman must accept the struggle against life's obstacles in order to temper her strength and manifest her true nature.
  • Helena Roerich, in Letters of Helena Roerich II, (1937)

• The famous philosophers' stone cannot be discovered or created without the participation of woman... The first task which faces women is to insist in all countries upon full rights and equal education with men; to try with all their might to develop their thinking faculties, and, above all, to learn to stand on their own feet without leaning altogether upon men. In the West there are many fields which are now available to women, and one must admit that they are quite successful in all of them.
  It is necessary to awaken in woman herself a great respect for her own Origin; she should realize her great destiny as a bearer of the higher energy. Indeed, it is woman's intuition which should again, as in the better periods of history, lead humanity on the path of progress...
  • Helena Roerich, in Letters of Helena Roerich II, (1937)

• The combinations of the luminaries are favorable for the awakening of women, and I believe that the new influx of psychic energy will be utilized by women for lofty tasks and in search of new achievements for the good of humanity. Let the fire of achievement in the name of great service be truly kindled in woman. The quality of self-sacrifice is fundamental in woman, but she should learn not to limit her self-sacrifice to the narrow concept of home life, which is often nothing more than encouragement of the family's egotism—she should apply it on a world scale. I believe that woman should be even more educated and cultured than man, for indeed it is she who instills in her family the first concepts of knowledge, culture, and understanding of statesmanship.
  • Helena Roerich, in Letters of Helena Roerich II, (1937)

• In all domains of science, art, social work, and government, woman has proved to be capable of reaching the greatest heights when circumstances were favorable... And the many other talented women—actresses, painters, poets, among all nationalities! So many wise leaders, warriors, and great saints among women! The image of St. Theresa, the Spaniard, is not less than that of St Francis of Assisi... It would be well to also remember the slandered image of Aspasia. Socrates used to call her his teacher, and the great Plato mentioned her reverently in his writings. Also, through her many useful reforms the reign of the woman-Pharaoh, Hatsepsut, far surpassed that of many Pharaohs. And was she not the one who, by her wise rule, paved the way for the latter victories of Tethmosis III?
  • Helena Roerich, in Letters of Helena Roerich II, (1937)

• According to the Sacred Teaching, the fall of humanity began from the time of the abasement of the Feminine Principle. Therefore, with the beginning of the Epoch of the Mother of the World woman should realize that she herself contains all forces, and the moment she shakes of the age-old hypnosis of her seemingly lawful subjugation and mental inferiority and occupies herself with a manifold education, she will create in collaboration with man a new and better world. Indeed, it is essential that woman herself refute the unworthy and profoundly ignorant assertion about her passive receptivity and therefore her inability to create independently. But in the entire Cosmos there is no passive element. In the chain of creation each manifestation in its turn becomes relatively passive or active, giving or receiving.
  • Helena Roerich, in Letters of Helena Roerich II, (9 August 1937)

• Cosmos affirms the greatness of woman's creative principle. Woman is a personification of nature, and it is nature that teaches man, not man nature. Therefore, may all women realize the grandeur of their origin, and may they strive for knowledge. Where there is knowledge, there is power. Ancient legends actually attribute to woman the role of the guardian of sacred-knowledge. Therefore, may she now also remember her defamed ancestress, Eve, and again harken to the voice of her intuition in not only eating of but also planting as many tree, bearing the fruits of the knowledge of good and evil as possible. And as before, when she deprived Adam of his dull, senseless bliss, so let her now lead him on to a still broader vista and into the majestic battle with the chaos of ignorance for her divine rights.
• Women must without delay begin to perfect themselves in all fields, and this is not done at a moment's notice. First of all, we women have so much to outlive. Let us develop primarily a sense of our own dignity and learn to lean courageously on our own strength and knowledge, in order to join in, as well as accept, responsibility for the great structure of General Good.
  • Helena Roerich, in Letters of Helena Roerich II, (1937)

• Let us also recall the ancient times when, in spite of the fact that masculine egoism always attempted to suppress the achievements of women, there were always some illumined minds that did not submit to this shameful weakness.
  • Helena Roerich, in Letters of Helena Roerich II, (1937)

• With the demeaning of woman the coarsening and degeneration of humanity was unavoidable. There exists a most ancient saying, "Where women are revered and safeguarded, prosperity reigns and the gods rejoice." The New Epoch... will bring the renaissance of woman. The Epoch of Maitreya is the Epoch of the Mother of the World.
  • Helena Roerich, in Letters of Helena Roerich II, (5 April 1938)

• I hasten to fulfill your request and to give my opinion regarding the Call to the Women of the Whole World. I do not see why you cannot put this thought into practice. Each reminder about woman's dignity and the importance of women in constructing new forms of life is highly useful and timely. The advancement of women in governmental circles and their successful execution of various public duties in many countries have so strongly affirmed the recognition of their equal abilities that only very backward consciousnesses can raise objections in principle to this statement and to the admittance of women to the most responsible positions. Your young country, now living in its springtime and aspiring toward the welfare and renascence of its people, of course can but harken to the steps of evolution; therefore it should rejoice at the possibility of strengthening its spiritual and intellectual power by elevating the level of consciousness and dignity of its women. "It is not possible for the bird of humanity to fly on only one wing."
  • Helena Roerich, in Letters of Helena Roerich II, (23 April 1938)

• If feminist psychology is correct, the very concept of scientific "objectivity" as a disciplined withdrawal of sympathy by the knower from the known, is a male separation anxiety writ large. Written, in fact, upon the entire universe.
  • Theodore Roszak, The Gendered Atom (1999)

• We're living through the most misogynistic period I've experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world's long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of grabbing them by the pussy, to the incel ("involuntarily celibate") movement that rages against women who won't give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.
  • J. K. Rowling, "J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues", J.K. Rowling's website (10 June 2020)

• There is no limit test for identifying a "feminist." Internationally and in the United States, feminism is a multifaceted social movement in the process of change and self creation.
  • Sara Ruddick , Maternal Thinking

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Action heroines born out of the second-wave feminist movement, however, often use their powers/abilities to help others or create meaningful change. For example, Sarah Connor of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991) uses her ultra-fit hardbody to prevent global nuclear annihilation. By contrast, postfeminist action heroine The Bride of Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2 (Tarantino, 2003 & 2004) uses her abilities as the world’s greatest samurai to hunt down and kill five people who have personally wronged her. ~ Alessia S.

Though she be but little, she is fierce. ~ William Shakespeare

• Rikke Schubart coined the term “High Trash Heroine” to describe low-budget postfeminist action films from the early 2000s, which highlight their heroines’ bodies over everything else (291). One such film she discusses is Charlie's Angels (McG, 2000), featuring superstars Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu, and more importantly, their perfectly made-up and fit bodies. The angels wear skin-tight clothing to perform action, dress up as Swiss mountain girls, racecar drivers, and even strippers to complete their mission, jiggle their butts for the camera, and comment on their bodies’ appearance, effectively fulfilling straight male viewers’ desires. Women’s narratives in the postfeminist era, even in the action genre, focused heavily on the heroine’s bodies and her individual goals. Action heroines born out of the second-wave feminist movement, however, often use their powers/abilities to help others or create meaningful change. For example, Sarah Connor of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991) uses her ultra-fit hardbody to prevent global nuclear annihilation. By contrast, postfeminist action heroine The Bride of Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2 (Tarantino, 2003 & 2004) uses her abilities as the world’s greatest samurai to hunt down and kill five people who have personally wronged her.
  • Alessia S., "“What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger:” The Fallacy of Rape Narratives as Paths to Women’s Empowerment in Contemporary Television" (2020), p.14

• I’m an open and vocal feminist on the internet, so I’m no stranger to some level of sexist backlash.
  • Anita Sarkeesian, "Full IGN interview with Anita Sarkeesian", IGN, June 6, 2013.

• Feminism, or full and complete personhood for women, is an idea. And each human being has to do the work to explore it, build a relationship to it, and understand what their own changes must be in order to be part of it.
  • Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2016. ISBN 9781551526447. 

• And though she be but little, she is fierce.
  • William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595 or 1596), spoken by Helena in act 3, scene 2, referring to her friend Hermia.

• Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
  • Marie Shear, reviewing Kramarae and Treichler's A Feminist Dictionary in the news journal New Directions for Women, volume 15, issue 3 (May/June 1986), page 6.

• I have repeatedly stressed that the rape of the Earth and rape of women are intimately linked - both metaphorically, in shaping world-views, and materially, in shaping women’s everyday lives. The deepening economic vulnerability of women makes them more vulnerable to all forms of violence,including sexual assault, as we found out during a series of public hearings on the impact of economic reforms on women organized by the National Commission on Women and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.
  • Vandana Shiva in Ecofeminism, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, 1993, 2014 Foreword (2014)

• When Maria Mies and I wrote Ecofeminism two decades ago, we were addressing the emerging challenges of our times. Every threat we identified has grown deeper. And with it has grown the relevance of an alternative to capitalist patriarchy if humanity and the diverse species with which we share the planet are to survive. Ecofeminism was first published one year after the Earth Summit, where two important treaties were signed by the governments of the world: the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. There was no World Trade Organization. However, two years after Ecofeminism, the WTO was established, privileging corporate rights, commerce and profits, and further undermining the rights of the Earth, the rights of women and the rights of future generations. We wrote about what globalization implied for nature and women. Every crisis we mentioned is deeper; every expression of violence more brutal.
  • Vandana Shiva in Ecofeminism, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, 1993, 2014 Foreword (2014)

• When we wrote Ecofeminism we raised the issue of reductionist, mechanistic science and the attitude of mastery over and conquest of nature as an expression of capitalist patriarchy. Today the contest between an ecological and feminist world-view and a worldview shaped by capitalist patriarchy is more intense than ever. This contest is particularly intense in the area of food. GMOs embody the vision of capitalist patriarchy.
  • Vandana Shiva in Ecofeminism, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, 1993, 2014 Foreword (2014)

• The national accounting systems which are used for calculating growth in terms of GDP are based on the assumption that if producers consume what they produce, they do not in fact produce at all, because they fall outside the production boundary. The production boundary is a political creation that, in its workings, excludes regenerative and renewable production cycles from the area of production. Hence all women who produce for their families, children, community and society are treated as ‘non-productive’ and ‘economically inactive’.... The devaluation of women’s work, and of work done in subsistence economies of the South, is the natural outcome of a production boundary constructed by capitalist patriarchy. By restricting itself to the values of the market economy, as defined by capitalist patriarchy, the production boundary ignores economic value in the two vital economies which are necessary to ecological and human survival: nature’s economy and the sustenance economy. In these economies, economic value is a measure of how the Earth’s life and human life are protected. The currency is life-giving processes, not cash or the market price. Second, a model of capitalist patriarchy which excludes women’s work and wealth creation in the mind deepens the violence by displacing women from their livelihoods and alienating them from the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend -their land, their forests, their water, their seeds and biodiversity.
  • Vandana Shiva in Ecofeminism, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, 1993, 2014 Foreword (2014)

• ...No doubt about it, ideas about what women can do, and do well, have changed. And what women mind has changed. Male behaviour, from the caddish to the outright violent, that until recently was accepted without demurral is seen today as outrageous by many women who not so long ago were putting up with it themselves and who would still protest indignantly if someone described them as feminists.
  • Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls: essays (2003). Also quoted in Brian McNair, Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratisation of Desire, Routledge, 2002 (p.19).

• Ought not every woman, like every man, to follow the bent of her own talents?
  • Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, Corinne (1807), Bk. XIV, ch. 1

• [W]hile the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the negro there is no such privilege.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton As quoted in Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012), by Allen C. Guelzo, Chapter One

• The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her... He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective to the franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she has no voice...
  Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise , thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, her has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls Convention (July 19-20, 1848).

• Resolved, That is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton First Woman's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, [July, 19-20, 1848]. Resolution IX.

• The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton Speech before the New York Legislature (1860-02-18).

• Women's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man. Come what will, my whole soul rejoices in the truth that I have uttered.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton Letter to Susan B. Anthony (1860-06-14).

• Our "pathway" is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning...We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1868-01-13).

• Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other... If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Letter to Lucretia Mott (1872-04-01).

• We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory. That function gives women such wisdom and power as no male can possess.
  • Diary of 27 December 1890. Published in Elizabeth Cady Stanton as revealed in her letters, diary and reminiscences By Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot Stanton Blatch. Harper & brothers, 1922. p 270. GoogleBooks URL accessed 18 September 2009.

• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton in First Woman's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, [July, 19-20, 1848]. Declaration of Sentiments.

• To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton address to the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Congress, (18 January 1892)

• The darkest page in history is the persecutions of woman.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Woman's Bible (1898)

• Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible. I would fain teach women that self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Woman's Bible (1898)

• The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Woman's Bible (1898)

• Accepting the view that man was prior in the creation, some Scriptural writers say that as the woman was of the man, therefore, her position should be one of subjection. Grant it, then as the historical fact is reversed in our day, and the man is now of the woman, shall his place be one of subjection?
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Woman's Bible (1898)

• In the criminal code we find no feminine pronouns, as "He," "His," "Him," we are arrested, tried and hung, but singularly enough, we are denied the highest privileges of citizens, because the pronouns "She," "Hers" and "Her," are not found in the constitutions. It is a pertinent question, if women can pay the penalties of their crimes as "He," why may they not enjoy the privileges of citizens as "He"?
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Woman's Bible (1898)

• My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism. Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures.
  • Starhawk, as quoted in Womanspirit Rising : A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979) by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow

• Once men realize that they are also deprived — not as much as women, just as whites are not as deprived as blacks — but there is a full circle of human qualities we all have a right to. And they're confined to the "masculine" ones, which are seventy percent of all of them, and we're confined to the "feminine" ones, which are thirty percent. We're missing more, but they're still missing a lot. If a man fights to be his whole self, to be creative, to express emotions men are not supposed to express, do jobs men are not supposed to do, take care of his own children — all of these things are part of the feminist movement.
  • Gloria Steinem, in an interview with Marianne Schnall (3 April 1995)

T

• Well, children, when there is so much racket there be must something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the Negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?
  • Sojourner Truth, as quoted in The Harbrace Guide to Writing, Concise, p. 50, by Cheryl Glenn. Editorial Cengage Learning, 2011. ISBN 113317146X.

• If the balance between male and female energies had not been destroyed on our planet, the ego's growth would have been greatly curtailed. We would not have declared war on nature, and we would not be so completely alienated from our Being... The suppression of the feminine principle especially over the past two thousand years has enabled the ego to gain absolute supremacy in the collective human psyche. Although women have egos, of course, the ego can take root and grow more easily in the male form than in the female. This is because women are less mind identified than men. They are more in touch with the inner body and the intelligence of the organism where the intuitive faculties originate. The female form is less rigidly encapsulated than the male, has greater openness and sensitivity toward other lifeforms, and is more attuned to the natural world.
  • Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2005)

• Nobody knows the exact figure because records were not kept, but it seems certain that during a three hundred year period between three and five million women were tortured and killed by the Holy Inquisition an institution founded by the Roman Catholic Church to suppress heresy. This sure ranks together with the Holocaust as one of the darkest chapters in human history. It was enough for a woman to show a love for animals, walk alone in the fields or woods, or gather medicinal plants to be branded a witch, then tortured and burned at the stake. The sacred feminine was declared demonic, and an entire dimension largely disappeared from human experience. Other cultures and religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism, also suppressed the female dimension, although in a less violent way. Women's status was reduced to being child bearers and men's property. Males who denied the feminine even within themselves were now running the world, a world that was totally out of balance. The rest is history or rather a case history of insanity.
  • Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose p. 96 (2005)

• Who was responsible for this fear of the feminine that could only be described as acute collective paranoia? We could say: Of course, men were responsible. But then why in many ancient pre-Christian civilizations such as the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Celtic were women respected and the feminine principle not feared but revered? What is it that suddenly made men feel threatened by the female? The evolving ego in them. It knew it could gain full control of our planet only through the male form, and to do so, it had to render the female powerless...
  We now have a situation in which the suppression of the feminine has become internalized, even in most women. The sacred feminine, because it is suppressed, is felt by many women as emotional pain. In fact, it has become part of their painbody, together with the accumulated pain suffered by women over millennia through childbirth, rape, slavery, torture and violent death.... But things are changing rapidly now. With many people becoming more conscious, the ego is losing its hold on the human mind. Because the ego was never as deeply rooted in woman, it is losing its hold on women more quickly than on men.
  • Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose p. 97 (2005)

W

• Feminism is a rebellion against the ruthless tyranny of the male, an attempt to dethrone his autocratic rule and revert to a more natural sexual equality.
  • Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff, "The Elimination of the Male", in The International, Vol. 7, no. 11 (November 1913), p. 319.

• The more I have spoken about feminism the more I have realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating. If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop. For the record, feminism by definition is: “The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.”
  I started questioning gender-based assumptions when at eight I was confused at being called “bossy,” because I wanted to direct the plays we would put on for our parents—but the boys were not. I decided I was a feminist and this seemed uncomplicated to me. But my recent research has shown me that feminism has become an unpopular word. Apparently I am among the ranks of women whose expressions are seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating, anti-men and, unattractive. Why is the word such an uncomfortable one?
  • Emma Watson, Gender equality is your issue too, Speech by UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson at a special event for the HeForShe campaign, United Nations Headquarters, New York, (20 September 2014)

• I am from Britain and think it is right that as a woman I am paid the same as my male counterparts. I think it is right that I should be able to make decisions about my own body. I think it is right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and decision-making of my country. I think it is right that socially I am afforded the same respect as men. But sadly I can say that there is no one country in the world where all women can expect to receive these rights. No country in the world can yet say they have achieved gender equality. These rights I consider to be human rights but I am one of the lucky ones. My life is a sheer privilege because my parents didn’t love me less because I was born a daughter. My school did not limit me because I was a girl. My mentors didn’t assume I would go less far because I might give birth to a child one day.
  • Emma Watson, Gender equality is your issue too, Speech by UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson at a special event for the HeForShe campaign, United Nations Headquarters, New York, (20 September 2014)

• Most of the terrible women one must meet, women with the blatant views and voices, women who have to be noticed, who shoulder one about, who can’t take life quietly, belong to this large percentage of women who have never made a sex adjustment.
  • John B. Watson in The Nation; as quoted in "The Last Amazon: Wonder Woman Returns" by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, September 22, 2014.

• I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
  • Rebecca West, in "Mr. Chesterton in Hysterics" in The Clarion, (14 November 1913)

• Interviewer: So, why do you write these strong female characters?
  

Joss Whedon Because you’re still asking me that question.

• Joss Whedon "Joss Whedon Equality Now Tribute Address", 15 May 2006

• This particular strand of feminism is characterized by two tenets: 1. men are jerks, and 2. women should strive by all means to become like them.
  • Douglas Wilson, "A Palin Critique" (2011-03-02), Blog and Mablog

• "Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still.
  • Robert Anton Wilson, in Everything Is Under Control : Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (1998), Genesis, p. 197

See also

• Ageless Wisdom teachings
• Anarcha-feminism
• Black feminism
• Ecofeminism
• Gender
• International Women's Day
• Misogyny
• Patriarchy
• Radical feminism
• Second-wave feminism
• Transfeminism
• Women
• Women's rights
• Gender bias on Wikipedia

External links

Find more information on Feminism by searching Wikiquote's sister projects
	Encyclopedia articles from Wikipedia
	Dictionary definitions from Wiktionary
	Textbooks from Wikibooks
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Images and media from Commons
	News stories from Wikinews
	Learning resources from Wikiversity

• Topics in Feminism at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Feminist.com
• National Organization for Women United States
• FemINist INitiative Canadian effort at building a political party, archived at the Internet Archive
• Sanctuary for Families
• International Women's Day is a slide show in English of the Brazilian Vinna Mara Fonseca
• Feminist Housewives Third wave domestic feminist site
• Gender Museum