“If men
could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the
cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not
read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil:
their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman
almost always a fiend.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
“It is
in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must
have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are
condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt
against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political
rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. 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, to 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 Brontë
“I do
not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon
woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But
perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."
"Perhaps
I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have
had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs
in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow
books to prove anything.”
― Jane Austen
“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if
they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in
calm waters all our lives.”
― Jane Austen
“He is a
gentleman, and I am a gentleman's daughter. So far we are equal.”
― Jane Austen,
“Responsibility
to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming
for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts;
hence, grappling with hard work.”
― Adrienne Rich
“Responsibility
to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming
for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to
purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be
treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that
those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind.
It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an
inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous
delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
Responsibility
to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy
solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real
decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It
means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in
turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be
nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget
about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It
means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as
meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the
courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived
actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an
immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible
to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”
― Adrienne Rich
“I think
being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice,
but you take second place all the time.”
― Iris Murdoch
“Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, once
asked a group of women at a university why they felt threatened by men. The
women said they were afraid of being beaten, raped, or killed by men. She then
asked a group of men why they felt threatened by women. They said they were
afraid women would laugh at them.”
― Molly Ivins,
“Feminism has never been about getting a job
for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not
about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's
about baking a new pie.”
― Gloria Steinem
“There is no female mind. The brain is not an
organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
“If any female feels she need anything beyond
herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away
her power to be self-defining, her agency.”
― Bell hooks,
“Wherever you find a great man, you will find
a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say.
It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and
husbands behind them.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers,
“I myself have never been able to find out
precisely 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,
“To
terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior
creation—is that good for the world?”
― Christopher Hitchens
“You must give everything to make your life as
beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.”
― Roman Payne
“She talks like you. It’s not every day you
hear a four-year-old say Prince Charming is a douchebag who’s only holding
Cinderella back.”
"That’s
my girl.”
― Emma Chase
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make
themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much.
You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would
threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I
am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the
most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support
but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the
same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or
accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of
men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys
are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“A woman
knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment,
solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he
respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the
rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
― Virginia Woolf
“The
history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps
than the story of that emancipation itself.”
― Virginia Woolf
“Women
have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and
delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
― Virginia Woolf
“As long
as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf
“A woman without a man is like a fish without
a bicycle.”
― Irina Dunn
“I myself have never been able to find out
precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever
I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West
“Why do people say "grow some
balls"? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a
vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”
― Sheng Wang
“Feminism is the radical notion that women are
human beings.”
― Cheris Kramarae
“I hate men who are afraid of women's
strength.”
― Anaïs Nin
“One is not
born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
― Simone de Beauvoir,
“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too
resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows
me or loves me completely. I have only myself”
― Simone de Beauvoir
“No one
is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is
anxious about his virility.”
― Simone de Beauvoir
“I know enough to know that no woman should
ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
― Martha Gellhorn
“What’s the worst possible thing you can call
a woman? Don’t hold back, now.
You’re
probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to
hold back!), skank.
Okay,
now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy.
I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”
Notice
anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you
can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me
that’s not royally fucked up.”
― Jessica Valenti
“It's not my responsibility to be beautiful.
I'm not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you
find me.”
― Warsan Shire
“She is free in her wildness, she is a
wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing
for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life
flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.”
― Roman Payne
“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
“He - and if there is a God, I am convinced he
is a he, because no woman could or would ever fuck things up this badly.”
― George Carlin
“She was free in her wildness. She was a
wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city”
― Roman Payne
“There is a special place in hell for women
who don't help other women."
― Madeleine K. Albright
“Equality is not a concept. It's not something
we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need
it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every
culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance,
and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman
who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.”
― Joss Whedon
“We need to reclaim the word 'feminism'. We
need the word 'feminism' back real bad. When statistics come in saying that
only 29% of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42%
of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What
part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right
not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? 'Vogue' by
Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just
DRUNK AT THE TIME OF THE SURVEY?”
― Caitlin Moran
“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I
treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating
graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood,
unable to stand alone.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft
“Men should think twice before making
widowhood women's only path to power.”
― Gloria Steinem
“A
feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and
men.”
― Gloria Steinem
“Women
may be the one group that grows more radical with age.”
― Gloria Steinem
“Any
woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the
armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She
will need her sisterhood.”
― Gloria Steinem
“It is easier to live through someone else
than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is
frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman
finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the
voice inside herself.”
― Betty Friedan
“No woman can call herself free who does not
control her own body.”
― Margaret Sanger
“I am a
Woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal
Woman,
that's
me.”
― Maya Angelou
“Women make up one half of society. Our
society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated,
enlightened and educated.”
― Saddam Hussein
“Now,
should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of
course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don’t
get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped
because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped
them.”
― Jessica Valenti
“Do you
really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about
women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories
have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.”
― Moderata Fonte
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even
when her shackles are very different from my own.”
― Audre Lorde
“Each suburban wife struggles with it alone.
As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate
peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and
Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of
herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?”
― Betty Friedan
“I was an adventurer, but she was not an
adventuress. She was a 'wanderess.' Thus, she didn’t care about money, only
experiences - whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the
same to her.”
― Roman Payne
“I'm not a concept. Too many guys think I'm a
concept or I complete them or I'm going to 'make them alive'…but I'm just a
fucked up girl who's looking for my own peace of mind. Don't assign me yours.”
― Charlie Kaufman
“Woman's degradation is in mans idea of his
sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that
woman was made for man.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments
that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we've fairly comprehensively
demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging
acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that,
whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble of efforts to
really treat human life as sacred.”
― Caitlin Moran
“A girl’s got to use what she’s given and I’m
not going to make a guy drool the way a Britney video does. So I take it to
extremes. I don’t say I dress sexily on stage - what I do is so extreme. It’s
meant to make guys think: ‘I don’t know if this is sexy or just weird.”
― Lady Gaga
“One life is all we have and we live it as we
believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief,
that is a fate more terrible than dying.”
― Jeanne d'Arc
“A man once asked me ... how I managed in my
books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by
themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot
of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had
practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about
twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a
woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied
that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as
possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to
surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over.
One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men,
when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers
“Never did the world make a queen of a girl
who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.”
― Roman Payne
“In
every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the
vampires the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer.”
― Joss Whedon
“Taught from their infancy that beauty is
woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt
cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft
“Women
who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.”
― Naomi Wolf
“Sadly,
the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them
are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman
who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she
is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the
alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its
movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she
will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been
boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not
see her, his real love, standing right before him.”
― Naomi Wolf
“Men are
visually aroused by women's bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by
women's personalities because they are trained early into that response, while
women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is
their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the
myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not
looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock
called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real
mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual
men and women together.”
― Naomi Wolf
“Most men fear getting laughed at or
humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.”
― Gavin de Becker
“But, of course, you might be asking yourself,
'Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don't know! I still don't know what it is!
I'm too knackered and confused to work it out. That curtain pole really still
isn't up! I don't have time to work out if I am a women's libber! There seems
to be a lot to it. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?'
I
understand.
So here
is the quick way of working out if you're a feminist. Put your hand in your
pants.
a) Do
you have a vagina? and
b) Do
you want to be in charge of it?
If you
said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist.”
― Caitlin Moran
“I'm not going to limit myself just because
people won't accept the fact that I can do something else.”
― Dolly Parton
“Ideally,
what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school
life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We
have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of
indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being
taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular
culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be.
You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to
a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating
system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be
encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own
judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they
are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of
this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing
“The
thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. ”
― Roseanne Barr
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood
“No woman gets an orgasm from shining the
kitchen floor. ”
― Betty Friedan
“Men are from Earth, women are from Earth.
Deal with it.”
― George Carlin
“Vaginas
beat penises every time.
They're
like kryptonite.
Penises
are defenseless against them.”
― Emma Chase
“You can tell whether some misogynistic
societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, ‘And are the
men doing this, as well?’ If they aren’t, chances are you’re dealing with what
we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total fucking bullshit’.”
― Caitlin Moran
“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the
mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is
not.”
― Simone Weil
“Female friendships that work are
relationships in which women help each other belong to themselves.”
― Louise Bernikow
“Whatever women do they must do twice as well
as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”
― Charlotte Whitton
“Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said
Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded
having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had
a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to
Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no
difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women
and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought
it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no
way to control it.”
― Zadie Smith
“When God made man she was practicing.”
― Rita Mae Brown
“I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser. ”
― Mary Harris Jones
“I want a Zero Tolerance policy on All The
Patriarchal Bullshit.”
― Caitlin Moran
“The emerging woman ... will be strong-minded,
strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied...strength and beauty must go
together.”
― Louisa May Alcott
“I'm
tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch,
okay.”
― Madonna
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