c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other...
— Jeffrey Eugenides
Why is this the "new feminism" and not what it looks like: the old objectification?
— Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
I wasn't born of a whistle or milked from a thistle at twilightNo I was all horns and thorns sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright.
— Joanna Newsom
When did you first feel like a grown woman and not a girl?” We wrote down our answers and shared them, first in pairs, then in larger groups. The group of women was racially and economically diverse, but the answers had a very similar theme. Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. “I was walking home from ballet and a guy in a car yelled, ‘Lick me!’” “I was babysitting my younger cousins when a guy drove by and yelled, ‘Nice ass.’” There were pretty much zero examples like “I first knew I was a woman when my mother and father took me out to dinner to celebrate my success on the debate team.” It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they’ve crossed into puberty? If so, it’s working.
— Tina Fey
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels 
— Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
If any of us had heard the word "feminist" we would have thought it meant a girl who wore too much makeup, but we were, without knowing it, feminists ourselves, bound together by the freemasonry that exists among intelligent women who know they are intelligent. It is the only kind of female bonding that works, which is why most men do not like intelligent women. They don't mind one female brain if they can enjoy it privately; it's the idea of two or more on the loose that upsets them. The girls in the college-bound group might not have been friends in every case--Sharon Cohen and I gave each other willies--but our instincts told us that we had the same enemies.
— Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
We've got a generation now who were born with semiequality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attache' cases and our three piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.
— Erma Bombeck
Do not define me by my gender or my socio-economic status, Noah Willis. Do not tell me who I am and do not tell me who society thinks I am and then put me in that box and expect me to stay there. Because, I swear to God, I will climb the hell out of that box and I will take that box you've just put me in and I will use that box to smash your face in until you're nothing more than a freckly, bloodied pulp. You got that, sweet cheeks?
— Megan Jacobson, Yellow
I've heard it said that God made all men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal.We'd see what Mr. Colt could do for a woman.
— Cherie Priest
Whatever my powers--feminine or the contrary--God had given them, and I felt resolute to be ashamed of no faculty of his bestowal.
— Charlotte Brontë
Nowadays it is seen as a shame, to marry a girl who is a mother, who has never been married. I want to get rid of that prejudice.
— Frederick the Great, Erster Diener Seines Staates: Friedrich Der Grosse In Ausgewählten Zitaten
We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society's job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for "femininity." Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?
— Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
My sister burns, and she does not burn for you.
— E.K. Johnston, A Thousand Nights
The demon got up. The demon said Fool. To think you can eat their food and not talk to them. To think you can take their money and not be afraid of them. To think you can depend on their company and not suffer from them.
— Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God
It is doubtful that real personal change can occur without the conscious and painful process of self-criticism that is required to reject power and ego.
— Janis Birkeland
Women and our right to choose were going to be challenged with Ashcroft around. When Bush appointed Ashcroft, I went out and got me four abortions. I stocked up. The doctor was like, 'Listen, you're not pregnant.' I said, 'Hey, just shut up and do your job. I'm exercising my right while I can, dammit.
— Wanda Sykes, Yeah, I Said It
Anytime there's a bad female stand-up somewhere, some dickhead Interblogger will deduce that “women aren't funny.” Using that same math, I can state: Male comedy writers piss in cups.
— Tina Fey, Bossypants
Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the worldacknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.
— Patrick Califia-Rice
Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men post more e-mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the behavior's origin. If men control society, why don't they just shut up and enjoy their supposed prerogatives? The answer is obvious when you consider sexual competition: men can't be quiet because that would give other men a chance to show off verbally. Men often bully women into silence, but this is usually to make room for their own verbal display. If men were dominating public language just to maintain patriarchy, that would qualify as a puzzling example of evolutionary altruism—a costly, risky individual act that helps all of one's sexual competitors (other males) as much as oneself. The ocean of male language that confronts modern women in bookstores, television, newspapers, classrooms, parliaments, and businesses does not necessarily come from a male conspiracy to deny women their voice. It may come from an evolutionary history of sexual selection in which the male motivation to talk was vital to their reproduction.
— Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
Rachel,” I snap, “I don’t care if Janelle wants to work at Hooters. I don’t care if you and the rest of the world want to go spend your money on dried-out chicken and ketchup-based sauces. And least of all—less than almost anything else I can imagine—I don’t care how much sex your sister is or isn’t having. That’s kind of the deal with the whole uptight feminazi thing—we don’t care when other women want to wear stupid orange Soffe shorts with white tennis shoes and have a lot of sex, or when they want to wear habits and live in a convent, or if they want to walk around in pasties and never French kiss, so long as they’re allowed to do what they want. And right now, all I want is to go to bed. Okay?
— Emily Henry, The Love That Split the World
When a person feels powerless in regard to controlling his life, he can defend against the discomfort of such an experience by asserting control over someone else.
— A. Nicholas Groth, Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender
With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.
— Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours
Reason, you'll always be half-blind.
— Marguerite Porete
Men who shared the load at home seemed just as pressed for time as their wives, and torn between the demands of career and small children...But the majority of men did not share the load at home. Some refused outright. Others refused more passively, often offering a loving shoulder to lean on, an understanding ear as their working wife faced the conflict they both saw as hers.
— Arlie Russell Hochschild
They shared the chores of living as some couples do --she did most of the work and he appreciated it.
— Paula Gosling
When our mother is seen only as the one-dimensional Mary of modern times, instead of the great dual force of life and death, She is relegated to the same second-class status of most women in the world. She is without desires of Her own, selfless and sexless except for Her womb. She is the cook, the mistress, bearer and caretaker of children and men. Men call upon Her and carry Her love and magic to form a formidable fortress, a team of cannons to protect them against their enemies. But for a long, long time the wars that women have been left to wage on behalf of men, on behalf of the human race, have started much sooner, in the home, in front of the hearth, in the womb. We do what we must to protect and provide for our young our families, our tribes
— Ana Castillo, Goddess of the Americas
It is not possible to preserve one's identity by adjusting for any length of time to a frame of reference that is in itself destructive to it. It is very hard indeed for a human being to sustain such an 'inner' split - conforming outwardly to one reality, while trying to maintain inwardly the value it denies.
— Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
Every woman, hell, every man should be a feminist, that is the only way to render this word obsolete.
— Aysha Taryam, The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries
Here's a tip. If you touch a girl, even as joke, and she pushes you off, leave... her... alone. Don't touch her. Anywhere! Just stop. Your touch does nothing but sicken her.
— Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
I'm not ashamed to dress "like a woman" because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman.
— Iggy Pop
My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.
— Andrew Sean Greer, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells
Moving from phonetics to etymology, ‘vagina’ originates from a word meaning sheath for a sword. Ain’t got no vagina.
— Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
Maidens who stay maidens turn into saints. Old women become sorceresses. Tough jobs, both of these.
— Tanith Lee
I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves.
— Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir
It is in the interests of both sexes to hear the other sex's experience of powerlessness.
— Warren Farrell
There are politics in sexual relationships because they occur in the context of a society that assigns power based on gender and other systems of inequality and privilege.
— Susan Shaw, Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings
something about giving himself over to a woman was worse than having lunch with the devil...
— Ana Castillo, So Far from God
you will rise.and are you less of a woman for this? nowhat is woman?woman is this—enduring.listen girl, you will survive this–you will.but what fool said you had to do it silently?here is a tip—scream
— Salma Deera, Letters From Medea
Women are raising children, picking up socks, and making sure you feel like a man by supporting you when you need it and looking sexy (but not trying too hard, because that would be pathetic). We're being independent and bad bitches while wearing fucking lipstick and heels so as not to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibility, yet even just the word "feminist" pisses you off. How dare we.
— Jessica Valenti, Sex Object
This semester has born in me the flame of hope to one day become a leader in the modern feminist movement. I can and will be the force that blows new life into it, giving a face and name to associate with instead of those women now who’s names I don’t know because they weren’t listed on Wikipedia.
— Christy Leigh Stewart, Loath Letters
Batman doesn’t want a baby in order to feel he’s ‘done everything’. He’s just saved Gotham again! If this means that Batman must be a feminist role model above, say, Nicola Horlick, then so be it.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, "Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun.""I know," I said. "I don't either." People think you decide to be a "radical," for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler. You "make up your mind," you "commit yourself" (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?).I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which some day somebody will understand:WE WUZ PUSHED.
— Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.
— Susan B. Anthony
The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.
— Andrea Dworkin
You all watched a sketch about feminism and you didn't even know it because of all the jokes. It's like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids' brownies. Suckers!
— Tina Fey, Bossypants
It's like I tell people at my stand-up shows: by making me a bitch, you have given me my freedom, the freedom to say and do things I couldn't do if I was "a nice girl" with some sort of stupid, goody-two-shoes image to keep up. Things that require courage. Things that require balls. Things that need to be done. By making me a bitch, you have freed me from the trite, sexist, bourgeois prison of "likeability." Any idiot can be liked. It takes talent to scare the crap out of people.
— Alison Arngrim, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated
The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation.
— bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
Larsson was an active and lifelong feminist, partly for personal reasons but also because he saw that ending gender slavery was as crucial to next-stage evolution as ending race slavery was to the last stage. It's a noble fight, not least because the various fundamentalisms threatening Western democracy are united in their urgent need to re-cage women's sexuality.
— Elizabeth Farrelly
Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.
— Maxine Hong Kingston
I hate to say it, but all that stuff they try to tell you about women being empowered and how it's fine for a woman to ask a man out, well, it's crap.' I look down at my watch. 'Seven fifty-three p.m.' 'What does that mean?' 'Official time of death of feminism,' I reply, and mom laughs.
— Robin Epstein, God Is in the Pancakes
This was the price for the the strange life she had chosen, but she had gone into it with eyes open, and there was no profit in regret.
— Donna Woolfolk Cross, Pope Joan
Because even subversive sarcasm adds a cool-girl nonchalance, an updated, sharper version of the expectation that women be forever pleasant, even as we're eating shit.
— Jessica Valenti, Sex Object
What I am proud of, what seems so simply clear, is that feminism is a way to fight for justice, always in short supply.
— Barbara Strickland
In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.
— Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer
Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics.
— Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.
— Andrea Dworkin
Feminist effort to end patriarchal domination should be of primary concern precisely because it insists on the eradication of exploitation and oppression in the family context and in all other intimate relationships. It is that political movement which most radically addresses the person – the personal – citing the need for the transformation of self, of relationships, so that we might be better able to act in a revolutionary manner, challenging and resisting domination, transforming the world outside the self.
— bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
It always pisses me off when I’m calling in to some Morning Zoo radio show to promote God-only-knows what—probably this book, so get ready, I’m comin’—when the DJ actually tries to convince me that there are as many female comics as male ones. Cue hypermasculine Morning Zoo Hacky McGee voice: “So Kath, I don’t know what you chicks are always complaining about.” To which I respond: “Really? Why don’t you call your local comedy club and ask for the Saturday night lineup? I guarantee you the male to female ratio is going to be about nine to one. You dick-wad.
— Kathy Griffin, Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
— Soujourner Truth
I don’t think male gamers are more or less sexist than non-gamers. Sexism is unfortunately still a large problem in our culture overall. It is not unique to gaming. Have a pretty girl walk by a construction site in a mini-skirt and you’ll see that. For anyone to imply that male gamers are somehow inherently more sexist than the rest of society smacks of insincerity or naiveté.
— Julie Ann Dawson
It's like suddenly in the Middle Ages, people figured men should be in charge of women's bodies since they were in charge of pretty much everything else
— Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
So you raise up a few generations of young girls, telling them that they should step to the back of the bus, ingrain that in their psyche, preach it to them from the pulpit, hold up as ideal examples women doing precisely that, and in a few years, you can step back; you need say no more. Your work is done, because you have carefully created a herd of women who know and even begrudgingly accept that their place is secondary, just outside the limelight, clapping for and cheering on the important people who were never taught to put others first.
— Susan Campbell, Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl
If you are causing trouble, look for allies, always.
— Justine Larbalestier
Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.
— Stephen King, The Stand
for the disproportionate fear that the statistically and historically minimal group of women who were both angry and had hairy legs have inculcated both in their detractors and in their wannabe-successors, we should salute them as often as possible
— Nina Power
Insofar as men gain time, ease, independence, or liberty from women's domestic labors, they lack incentive to change.
— Linda P. Rouse
To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration.
— Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman... I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself upon the funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion/ Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, 'Thus saith the Lord,' of course he can do it. So long as ministers stand up and tell us Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down through the ages? You Christian women look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage...Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of woman? It teaches us the abominable idea of the sixth century--Augustine's idea--that motherhood is a curse; that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. Can we ever cultivate any proper sense of self-respect as long as women take such sentiments from the mouths of the priesthood?
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
And although we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid.
— Richard M. Sherman, Vocal Selections from Walt Disney's Mary Poppins
Humankind is made up of two sexes, women and men. Is it possible for humankind to grow by the improvement of only one part while the other part is ignored? Is it possible that if half of a mass is tied to earth with chains that the other half can soar into skies?
— Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inadequacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early conditioning tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to remember that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep.
— Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
I am a men's liberationist (or "masculist") when men's liberation is defined as equal opportunity and equal responsibility for both sexes. I am a feminist when feminism favors equal opportunities and responsibilities for both sexes. I oppose both movements when either says our sex is THE oppressed sex, therefore, "we deserve rights." That's not gender liberation but gender entitlement. Ultimately, I am in favor of neither a women's movement nor a men's movement but a gender transition movement.
— Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal
—  that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
I am a feminist because I dislike everything that feminism implies. I desire an end to the whole business, the demands for equality, the suggestion of sex warfare, the very name feminist. I want to be about the work in which my real interests like, the writing of novels and so forth. But while inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist. And I shan't be happy till I get . . . a society in which there is no distinction of persons either male or female, but a supreme regard for the importance of the human being. And when that dream is a reality, I will say farewell to feminism, as to any disbanded but victorious army, with honour for its heroes, gratitude for its sacrifice, and profound relief that the hour for its necessity has passed.
— Winifred Holtby
...the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.
— Susan B. Anthony
Maybe it was only goblin women who were restless and wanted to see the world. She didn't know.
— Maureen Doyle McQuerry, The Peculiars
The 1970s-80s social movement called U.S. third world feminism functioned as a central locus of possibility, an insurgent social movement that shattered the construction of any one ideology as the single most correct site where truth can be represented. Indeed, without making this kind of metamove, any 'liberation' or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppressive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself, and become trapped inside a drive for truth that ends only in producing its own brand of dominations. What U.S. third world feminism thus demanded was a new subjectivity, a political revision that denied any one ideology as the final answer, while instead positing a tactical subjectivity with the capactiy to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved. These dynamics are what were required in the shift from enacting a hegemonic oppositional theory and practice to engaging in the differential form of social movement, as performed by U.S. feminists of color during the post-World War II period of great social transformation. p. 58-59. 
— Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed
I can critique the bad; I can take the good, and I can add whatever I want.
— Justine Larbalestier
Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning?
— Hélène Cixous
It would be a mistake to suppose that all Urnings must be woman-haters. Quite the contrary. They are not seldom the faithfulest friends, the truest allies, and most convinced defenders of women.
— Otto de Joux, Die Enterbten des Liebesgliickes. Ein Beitrag zur Seelenkunde
Man fucks woman
—  subject verb object.
If your social consciousness seems stuck in 1975, 2014 is gonna be a rough ride.
— John Scalzi
Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought, experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptual values developed expressly to subordinate women. Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name. No transcendence of the male system is possible as long as men have the power of naming... As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect.
— Andrea Dworkin
Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher’s stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise power. These powers can be used to advance feminist struggle. Forms of power held by exploited and oppressed groups are described in Elizabeth Janeway's important work Powers of the Weak. One of the most significant forms of power held by the weak is "the refusal to accept the definition of oneself that is put forward by the powerful". Janeway call this the "ordered use of the power to disbelieve". She exp
— bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It’s OK to fuck around if you’re a feminist but it’s also not OK to fuck around because most guys aren’t feminists and won’t respect you and won’t call you again if you fuck around.
— David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Feminist consciousness-raising has not significantly pushed women in the direction of revolutionary politics. For the most part, it has not helped women understand capitalism–how it works as a system that exploits female labor and its interconnections with sexist oppression. It has not urged women to learn about different political systems like socialism or encouraged women to invent and envision new political systems. It has not attacked materialism and our society’s addiction to overconsumption. It has not shown women how we benefit from the exploitation and oppression of women and men globally or shown us ways to oppose imperialism. Most importantly, it has not continually confronted women with the understanding that feminist movement to end sexist oppression can be successful only if we are committed to revolution, to the establishment of a new social order.
— bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
Be militant in your own way! Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property...do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion. Take me if you dare! (Emmeline Pankhurst, 1912)
— Fran Abrams, Freedom's Cause: Lives of the Suffragettes
The central question is not: what is force and what is freedom? That is a good question, but in the realm of human cruelty - the realm of history - it is utterly abstract. The central question is: why is force never acknowledged as such when used against the racially or sexually despised? Nazi terror used against the Jews is not in dispute. Still, there is an almost universal - and intrinsically anti-Semitic - conviction that the Jews went voluntarily to the ovens. Rational discourse on how the Jews were terrorized does not displace or transform this irrational conviction. And similarly, no matter what force is used against women as a class or as individuals, the universal conviction is that women want (either seek out or assent to) whatever happens to them, however awful, dangerous, destructive, painful, or humiliating. A statement is made about the nature of the Jew, the nature of the woman. The nature of each and both is to be a victim. A metaphysical victim is never forced, only actualized.
— Andrea Dworkin
Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while literary fairy tales (including most of the tales that are best known today) were published primarily for adult readers until the 19th century.
— Terri Windling, Black Swan, White Raven
Direct action meant that the goal of any and all of these activities was to provide ways for people to get in touch with their own powers and capacities, to take back the power of naming themselves and their lives. It was to be distinguished from more conventional political activity even in a democratic system. Instead of attempting to make change by forming interest groups to pressure politicians, anarchists insisted that we learn to think and act for ourselves by joining together in organizations in which our experience, our perception, and our activity can guide and make the change. Knowledge does not precede experience, it flows from it: "We begin by deciding to work, and through working, we learn ... We will learn how to live in libertarian communism by living in it." People learn how to be free only by exercising freedom: "We are not going to find ourselves ... with people ready-made for the future ... Without the continued exercise of their faculties, there will be no free people ... The external revolution and the internal revolution presuppose one another, and they must be simultaneous in order to be successful.
— Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women
The lingerie department is the only one that she can reach in her wheelchair. Nevertheless, she is fired the next day because of complaints that a woman who is so obviously not sexually attractive selling alluring nightgowns makes customers uncomfortable. Daunted by her dismissal, she seeks consolation in the arms of the young manager and soon finds herself pregnant. Upon learningof this news, he leaves her for anondisabled woman with a fullerbustline and better homemaking skills in his inaccessible kitchen.
— Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
— Mary Gordon, Conversations with Mary Gordon
...the end goal of feminist revolution must be...not just the elimination of male privilage but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.
— Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
I realize that violence is not more prevalent today than in previous periods of human history, but there is a difference. We have seen visionary standards adopted by the global community that espouse peace and human rights, and the globalization of information ensures that the violation of these principles of nonviolence by a powerful and admired democracy tends to resonate throughout the world community. We should have advanced much further in the realization of women's rights, given these international commitments to peace and the rule of law.
— Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power
If a woman is interested in her own struggle into identity and power, then she will be interested in other women. The lives of these, and other women, show me what a woman can do even without formal power, education, or rights, in a world dominated by men. They are inspirational examples of the strength of the female spirit.
— Philippa Gregory, The Women of the Cousins' War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King's Mother
I added, that whoever the woman was that had an estate, and would give it up to be the slave of a great man, that woman was a fool, and must be fit for nothing but a beggar; that it was my opinion a woman was as fit to govern and enjoy her own estate without a man as a man was without a woman; and that, if she had a mind to gratify herself as to sexes, she might entertain a man as a man does a mistress; that while she was thus single she was her own, and if she gave away that power she merited to be as miserable as it was possible that any creature could be.
— Daniel Defoe
When it comes to current attitudes about surgery, the practice of dismissing the cultural context and rationalizing it as individual betterment "flattens the terrain of power relations." In other words, we can talk about doing it for us until our high-end lipstick flakes off, but we should also keep in mind that we probably wouldn't even be thinking about what life would be like with a new nose or perkier breasts or shapelier inner thighs if it weren't for a long-standing cultural ideal that rewards those who adhere to it with power that often doesn't speak its name, but is instantly recognizable to those who don't have it.
— Andi Zeisler, BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine
I don’t understand all the nuances of the women’s movement. But I do understand that there are feminists who want to challenge the dominant paradigm, not only of patriarchy, but of where the original wealth came from and the relationship of that wealth to other peoples and the earth. That is the only way that that I think you can really get to the depth of the problem.
— Winona LaDuke
You have some balls."Frankie hated that expression, ever since Zada had pointed out to her that it equates courage with the male equipment...
— E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Iranian women are very consciously aware of gender-explicit oppression. Therefore: with so much more at stake, Iranian women have each other's back: on the street, in stores, at celebrations, everywhere.
— Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
there is little difference between man and beast, but what ambition and glory makes.
— Margaret Cavendish
Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
(Ezekial saw the wheel(Way up in the middle of the air --(O Ezekial saw the wheel(Way in the middle of the air!(Now the big wheel runs by faith(And the little wheel runs by the grace of God --(The above made up by professional hope experts, you might say, because willful, voluntary, intentional hope was the only kind they had in anything like long supply. Faith is not, contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet; it's an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of Time and right into Eternity, which is not the end of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, that old Eternal Now. So that you end up living not in the future ((in your intentional "act of faith")) but in the present. Afte
— Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God
She divorced her husband, y' know. I never knew him, it was before I met Jane. Apparently she came back from work one mornin' an' found her husband in bed with the milkman. With the milkman, honest to God. Well, apparently, from that day forward Jane was a feminist. An' I've noticed, she never takes milk in her tea.
— Willy Russell, Shirley Valentine
Madeleine Albright has said that there is 'a special place in hell for women who don't help each other.' What are the implications of this statement? Would it be an argument in favor of the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton? Would this mean that Elizabeth Edwards and Michelle Obama don't deserve the help of fellow females? If the Republicans nominated a woman would Ms. Albright instantly switch parties out of sheer sisterhood? Of course not. (And this wearisome tripe from someone who was once our secretary of state ...)
— Christopher Hitchens
How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.
— Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
(Only God can make a tree and She seldom tries, nowadays.)
— Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God
Militant feminists are pro‐choice because it’s their ultimate avenue of power over men. And believe me, to them it is a question of power. It is their attempt to impose their will on the rest of society, particularly on men.
— Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought to Be
Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.(Southey's reply to Charlotte Bronte)
— Robert Southey
As that great philosopher, Mary Poppins, once said, 'A spoonful of sugar makes the feminism go down.
— Irene Ziegler
But Rosa soon made the discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn't read fairly. She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds.
— Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
How did you do that?” Mr. Poe asked. “Nice girls shouldn’t know how to do such things.”“My sister is a nice girl,” Klaus said, “and she knows how to do all sorts of things.
— Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room
The word feminism has become synonymous with man-hating when in fact it has more to do with women than men.
— Aysha Taryam, The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries
What is whiter than snow?' he said. 'The truth,' said Grania.'What is the best colour?' said Finn. 'The colour of childhood,' said she.'What is hotter than fire?' 'The face of a hospitable man when he sees a stranger coming in, and the house empty.''What has a taste more bitter than poison?' 'The reproach of an enemy.''What is best for a champion?' 'His doings to be high, and his pride to be low.''What is the best of jewels?' 'A knife.''What is sharper than a sword?' 'The wit of a woman between two men.''What is quicker than the wind?' said Finn then. 'A woman’s mind,' said Grania. And indeed she was telling no lie when she said that.
— Lady Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and the Fianna of Ireland
The coolest guys aren't afraid to be feminists.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
Males lack the seriousness of temperament required of persons with such great responsibilities.
— Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
If you think my waistline defines my worth, you are not worth my time anyways.
— Maria Elena, Eternal Youth
The first treatise on the interior of the body, which is to say, the treatise that gave the body an interior , written by Henri De Mondeville in the fourteenth century, argues that the body is a house, the house of the soul, which like any house can only be maintained as such by constant surveillance of its openings. The woman’s body is seen as an inadequate enclosure because its boundaries are convoluted. While it is made of the same material as a man’s body, it has ben turned inside out. Her house has been disordered, leaving its walls full of openings. Consequently, she must always occupy a second house, a building to protect her soul. Gradually this sense of vulnerability to the exterior was extended to all bodies which were then subjected to a kind of supervision traditionally given to the woman. The classical argument about her lack of self-control had been generalized.
— Mark Wigley
But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
WANTING to be anything is the whole point of feminism. HAVING TO BE SOMETHING is what feminists fight against, or at least the ones I know.
— Alida Nugent, You Don't Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism
But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion? How do you mark time's passage without the fear that you've just frittered away your time on earth without being relevant? You'll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children, but what if I don't have any? What kind of person does that make me?Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where "all is correct." But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course." Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on.
— Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
She had resolved to never take another step backward.
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Only two things matter in the reproductive health debate: the medical opinions of doctors, and the will of women. Also, feminism is intricately connected with all aspects of our society, including health, but also labor and the economy. A woman can't be an equal player in our society until she has total autonomy, and that includes determining the destiny of her own body.
— Allison Kilkenny Jamie Kilstein
Beware of fascist feminism.
— Hannah Wilke
Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.
— Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognized as female, a raw strength that only comes fro unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.
— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity