20th-century Feminist Quotes

Germaine Greer

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Rebecca West

Valerie Solanas

Adrienne Rich

Anita Roddick

Laura Mulvey

Rape is a national pastime, a form of torture visited upon all girls and women, from babies to the aged.

Women are brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We have been taught to believe that as females we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, too needful of protection.

Colette Dowling

Women of color have no call to trust white women until white women take a gander at the world around them, investigate, learn and annihilate ignorance founded in being white in a society where the perspective and voice presented to the general public is white.

That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing-from dresses to underwear.

I have worked all my life, wanted to work all my life, needed to work all my life.

Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men's rule over them. They do not represent 'truth' but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology.

Sheila Jeffreys

Sexual harassment is becoming the modus operandi of the new world (on-line)... It is the means by which some males are conquering and claiming the new territory as their own.

Since the beginning of the Movement, lesbianism has been a kind of code word for female resistance.

Ti-Grace Atkinson

Many a pair of curious ears had been lured by that well-timed pause.

Li Ang (writer)

There has been a growing distrust, even hatred, between black men and black women. It has been nursed along not only by racism on the part of whites but also by an almost deliberate ignorance on the part of blacks about the sexual politics of their experiences in this country.

Michele Wallace

It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.

Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

It is not women's fault if we are so tender. It is in the nature of the lives we live. And further, it would be a terrible catastrophe if men had to live men's lives and women's also. Which is precisely what has happened today -- to women.

My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life.... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.

Knowing your history can give you the tools to shape your future.

Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.

The problem is not that public schools do not work well, but rather that they do. The first goal and primary function of schools is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we normally label state indoctrination.

While learned ladies had always been present among the educated of nobility, and women had contributed to science and mathematics from earliest times, the "scientific lady" was a product of the Scientific Revolution.

Carolyn Merchant

In order to create an alternative an oppressed group must at once shatter the self-reflecting world which encircles it and, at the same time, project its own image onto history.

Sheila Rowbotham

Love's absence ailed me. I could not imagine loving my husband. He was a superior and I did not know how to love and be subservient together. Nor had he ever thought of me as a human being, let alone a woman. For no reason had he ever softened towards me, I had stirred him that little.

Tehmina Durrani

As it turned out, my perception was so much more intimidating than the reality.

Jennifer Baumgardner

Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however inspired,can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is not a dreadful form of dying.

It's always sunny above the clouds. Always. Every day on earth - every day I have ever had - was secretly sunny, after all.

If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.

The subtlest and most vicious aspect of women's oppression is that we have been conditioned to believe we are not oppressed, blinded so as not to see our own condition.