Quotes by Feminists

When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat

Women and men have to fight together to change society-and both will benefit.

Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.

Women's art though created in solitude wells up out of community. There is clearly both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused and an explosion of creative energy bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

Adrienne Rich

Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it for it is a faculty of the psyche.

Germaine Greer

Neither woman nor man lives by work or love alone.... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.

Betty Friedan

Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.

Germaine Greer

The moment of change is the only poem.

Adrienne Rich

Losing the future is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Marilyn French

It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself.

Betty Friedan

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

Adrienne Rich

Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

Adrienne Rich

The way in which we think of ourselves has everything to do with how our world sees us.

Arlene Raven

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

Betty Friedan

The only causes of regret are laziness outbursts of temper hurting others prejudice jealousy and envy.

Germaine Greer

While you don't need a formal written contract before you get married I think it's important for both partners to spell out what they expect from each other.... There are always plenty of surprises-and lots of give and take-once you're married.

Muriel Fox

A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck. ... [Breasts] are not parts of a person but lures slung around her neck to be kneaded and twisted like magic putty or mumbled and mouthed like lolly ices.

Germaine Greer

Old age believe me is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

Jane Harrison

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

Betty Friedan

The only causes of regret are laziness outbursts of temper hurting others prejudice jealousy and envy.

Germaine Greer

Muriel Fox

The way in which we think of ourselves has everything to do with how our world sees us.

Arlene Raven

Germaine Greer

Old age believe me is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

Jane Harrison

We couldn't possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.

Betty Friedan

The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.

Adrienne Rich

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time any place more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

Marilyn French

The genius of happiness is still so rare is indeed on the whole the rarest genius. To possess it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar but to treat it with the proud generosity of a prince to bring to its totality the deep understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment and ingenuousness of a child.

Ellen Key

When one paints an ideal one does not need to limit one's imagination.

Ellen Key

Friendship has splendors that love knows not. It grows stronger when crossed whereas obstacles kill love. Friendship resists time which wearies and severs couples. It has heights unknown to love.

Mariama Bâ

There are many excuses for the person who made the mistake of confounding money and wealth. Like many others they mistook the sign for the thing signified.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett

Whenever at an accusation blind rage burns up within us the reason is that some arrow has pierced the joints of our harness. Behind our shining armour of righteous indignation lurks a convicted and only half-repentant sinner ... [and] we may be almost sure some sharp and bitter grain of truth lurks within it and the wound is best probed.

Jane Harrison

The moment of change is the only poem.

Adrienne Rich

Catch courage.

Carolyn Heilbrun

There is at least one thing more brutal than the truth and that is the consequence of saying less than the truth.

Ti-Grace Atkinson

Love is moral even without legal marriage but marriage is immoral without love.

Ellen Key

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Ellen Key

Like many white liberals, Ken sees the “whiteness” of his social life as more an accident of circumstance than a choice. He would welcome greater diversity in the neighbourhood. However, he does not consciously do enough work either in his social life or in the larger community to make that diversity possible.

Bell Hooks

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.

Bell Hooks

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..

Bell Hooks

A lady decidedly. Fast? perhaps. Original? undoubtedly. Worth knowing? rather.

George Egerton

This book is written in blood.Is it written entirely in blood?No, some of it is written in tears. Are the blood and tears all mine?Yes, they have been in the past, but the future is a different ma

Joanna Russ

Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location

Adrienne Rich

Dignity is to have a dream, a strong one, which gives you a vision, a world where you have a place, where whatever it is you have to contribute makes a difference.

Fatema Mernissi

Women are prevented by the threat and reality of male violence from entering public space on equal terms with male citizens.

Sheila Jeffreys

..the struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.

Bell Hooks

S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter.

Marilyn French

Loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed

Bell Hooks

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,had certain ideals.You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,on horseback, one hand touching his gun.You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:he has access to machinery that could kill you.He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloudfrom between his unsmiling lips.And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs,your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confessto him, you are guilty of the crimeof having been forced.And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the familywhom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,his hand types out the detailsand he wants them allbut the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:he has taken down you worst momenton a machine and filed it in a file.He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.He has access to machinery that could get you put away;and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

Adrienne Rich

Another abstinence book claims, "A woman is far more attracted by a man's personality, while a man is stimulated by sight. A man is usually less discriminating about those to whom he is physically attracted.

Jessica Valenti

There's no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers -- the web is world-wide. In all of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one who will warn you of the dangers of the street, no one who will stand on street corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket, bitterly bitterly sure that you're a cheap floozy, hot and wild, who likes it, who can't say no, who's making a mint off it, who inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy.

Joanna Russ

So remember, this is definitely a screwed-if-you-do, screwed-if-you-don't situation. You just remember to say, "Screw them.

Jessica Valenti

But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers -- downers who don't realize how good we actually have it.Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop- a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or shellfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

Jessica Valenti

Yet despite all these things we know to be true- despite the preponderance of evidence showing the mental and emotional distress people demonstrate in violent and harassing environments- we still have no name for what happens to women living in a culture that hates them.

Jessica Valenti

Joanna Russ

Birds and periodic blood.Old recapitulations.The fox, panting, fire-eyed,gone to earth in my chest.How beautiful we are,he and I, with our auburnpelts, our trails of blood,our miracle escapes,our whiplash panic flogging us onto new miracles!They’ve supplied us with pillsfor bleeding, pills for panic.Wash them down the sink.This is truth, then:dull needle groping for the spinal fluid,weak acid in the bottom of the cup,foreboding, foreboding.No one tells the truth about truth,that it’s what the fox sees from his scuffled burrow:dull-jawed, onrushingkiller, being thatinanely single-mindedwill have our skins at last.

Adrienne Rich

The truth is, far too many people in our culture do not know what love is. And this not knowing feels like a terrible secret, a lack that we have to cover up.

Bell Hooks

If you want to live forever you are dreadfully dangerous because you're not living now.

Joanna Russ

The less obvious hurdle is that of preparing parents emotionally and putting forward realistic images of parenthood and motherhood. There also needs to be some sort of acknowledgement that not everyone should parent - when parenting is a given, it's not fully considered or thought out, and it gives way too easily to parental ambivalence and unhappiness.

Jessica Valenti

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Adrienne Rich

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