Best 1095 quotes in «feminist quotes» category

What bothers me the most about the way that people appropriate feminist language is that they are the same people who are - you know, anti-feminists - they're the same people who say that feminism is ruining the family, yet when it behooves them to, they'll say Sara Palin's a feminist - when all of a sudden it works in their favor.

Whatever feminists may say about their only advocating choices, everyone knows the truth: Feminism regards work outside the home as more elevating, honorable, and personally productive than full-time mothering and making a home.

What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be. Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.

What shocked me was three different anti-prostitution feminists asking me to justify that I had been a sex worker, to prove it. That either I hadn't done enough sex work by their standards, or I hadn't done the right kind in order to have the right to speak about it. I couldn't understand them. I'm not speaking for you. I'm not speaking "for" anyone. I'm trying to put together this picture of the different forces that are producing a result in the lives of sex workers. You can't contest the fact that tons of people are going to jail and experiencing violence.

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

What troubles me about the "hostile workplace" category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women.

When a feminist as strident as Garofalo is defending the Hussein regime, you have to wonder if her newfound sobriety has hit a rough patch.

When a woman behaves like a man why doesn't she behave like a nice man?

Whenever I talk about being a feminist or speaking out for equality, it's also about the idea that men are treated with respect. It's not just about treating women like people and not abusing them. You also can't abuse men and you can't say things like, 'Oh, he was just a man. He didn't know any better.' Or 'He's a man, what did you expect?' That's just as abusive and damaging to men, I feel.

When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.

When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.

When feminists become saints, we will become their pupils.

When I was much younger, I sometimes felt rejected by feminists because of an image that I sold because it paid the bills. Any fool could tell my hair is dyed.

When I learnt, however, that in 1911 there had been twenty-one regular feminist periodicals in Britain, that there was a feminist book shop, a woman's press, and a woman's bank run by and for women, I could no longer accept that the reason I knew almost nothing about women of the past was because there were so few of them, and they had done so little.

When I said I was born a feminist, I was born thinking woman are equal to men, if not stronger than men. That's the way I always was.

When I was at Baylor, I wasn't fully happy because I couldn't be all the way out. It feels so good saying it: I am a strong, black lesbian woman.

When I did get married, and specifically after I got married and the New York Times style section featured my wedding in the vows column, which is really traditionally kind of seen as an elitist column, and it is, but I was happy to be in it. I thought it was good that they were covering a feminist wedding.

When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.

When I was a baby feminist, leading feminist thinkers were insisting that if women ran the world, there would be no sadism or war.

When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. "This is often considered to be man's first attempt at a calendar" she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. 'My question to you is this - what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman's first attempt at a calendar. It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women's contributions?

When will American men learn how to stand up to the nagging by the intolerant, uncivil feminists whose sport is to humiliate men?

When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.

When you speak up about any sense of unfairness or injustice, you're told that you're overreacting, you're too angry, too silly-shut up already. It takes a tremendous amount of fortitude to be able to live in this world as a woman, let alone a woman who wants things to change.

When you say 'revolution' when you have only men outside, you know that something is going wrong. I'm not like a hardcore feminist, but I think that one of the things that makes the society advanced is equality between men and women. If half of the society is oppressed by the other half, it's not fine.

When you say you're not a feminist, if feminism hadn't existed, and you didn't live in a feminist world, you wouldn't be saying that, because you'd be too busy scrubbing out the toilets in back while cooking up your husband's tea and dying in childbirth at the age of 34.

Whiffle [whine and wheeze and snuff and sniffle]: The annoying scratchy sound made by weepy feminists as they lament the sufferings of women and, houndlike, sniff out evidence of male oppression.

With prodigious bravery and eviscerating humor, Roxane Gay takes on culture and politics in Bad Feminist-and gets it right, time and time again. We should all be lucky enough to be such a bad feminist.

While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order.

Women are all female impersonators to some degree.

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

Women can really be who they are. I'm about to say the F word, feminist. Often that word has such a negative connotation.

Women are feminist by default.

Women have seen that they have locked themselves up with feminist writing.

Women can't wait for equal pay. And I won't stop fighting to address this inequality.

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So, if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, just wait.

Women should not be suppressed because they are women, because they have children and because of men. Then I am a feminist. But when it comes to the African concept, for the moment, I say 'feminist plus'. We have so many other problems.

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

women used to be elected only when their husbands died and they became widows. The men found this was too hard on them. That's why they've become feminists.

Women, who are the prime victims of religion, and perhaps in some, stockholm syndrome effect, often form the most fervent advocates of the very thing that degrades them. I believe that in the end, it will be women who will turn this around. This should be the final stage of feminism. For a feminist to still believe in god is like a freed slave still living on the plantation.

Women now wield considerable power along political lines and I believe each succeeding year for some time to come will find them wielding that power more effectively.

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

Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.

You are not born racist. You are born into a racist society. And like anything else, if you can learn it, you can unlearn it. But some people choose not to unlearn it, because they're afraid they'll lose power if they share with other people. We are afraid of sharing power. That's what it's all about.

You are educated equally to boys. You're expected to go into equal employment with boys. In a marriage, you are legally equal. So, you know, you cannot deny we live in a feminist world.

You come to a point where you give up on holding yourself to a perfect feminist ideal — it just feels stifling.

You can't call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in the right to abortion.

You can't be a woman and not be a feminist, I don't think. If you care about the world and the world you exist in and your rights.

You can't really ever know what someone is like or what they're thinking. There are people who say they're feminists but who say really anti-feminist things, [and] other people who think they're one way but act another.

Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value.

Young women know that something is off; they know that the world is a messed-up place. They know that the world is a sexist place because they've had experiences in their own life; they see things happening to their friends, to their parents. But because feminism isn't widely accepted, because they don't necessarily have access to feminist thought or to feminist groups, they don't necessarily have a language to put behind the feelings and the thoughts that they're having. And they certainly don't have a support system to let them know like, hey, that's okay; you're right, that is screwed up.