American Feminist Quotes

Adrienne Rich

Valerie Solanas

Lucretia Mott

Voltairine de Cleyre

Mary Edwards Walker

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Susan Faludi

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it.

Voltairine de Cleyre

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.

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.

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

The male.... tries to convince himself and women - he's succeeded best at convincing women - that the female function is to bear and raise children and relax, comfort and boost the egos of the male, that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. In actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplacable by anyone else; the male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.

Valerie Solanas

Even before computers existed, we already knew that natural selection can, -and often will- produce results which look like trial-and-error experiments, including elements of seemingly-intentional fine tuning. But for all the implications of apparent design, there is never any indication of any intended goal or final product, nor any hint of infallibility on the part of the designer. In fact, so many errors of so many types are known that even if there was an unnatural architect using miraculous means instead of natural ones, then it seems that entity must either be blind and barely competent, or there are whole teams of designers working on separate lines competing against each other.

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.

Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed.

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

A perfect marriage is like a pure heart... those who have it are fit to see God.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Women's property has been taxed, equally with that of men's, to sustain colleges endowed by the states; but they have not been permitted to enter those high seminaries of learning.

Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.

Some people fear seeing or feeling anything about which there is no general agreement. For others, it is thrilling to be aware of innuendo, shading, complexity.

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 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.

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

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

Jennifer Baumgardner

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.

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

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

With a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing. It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.

Crystal Eastman

We have barely tapped the power that is ours. We are more than we know.

Charlene Spretnak

A beautiful eyelash is an important adjunct to the eye. The lashes may be lengthened by trimming them occasionally in childhood. Care should be taken that this trimming is done neatly and evenly, and especially that the points of the scissors do not penetrate the eye.

Eliza Bisbee Duffey

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

Ti-Grace Atkinson

There is, between the sexes, a law of incessant reciprocal action, of which God avails himself in the constitution of the family, when He permits brothers and sisters to nestle about the same hearthstone. Its ministration is essential to the best educational results. Our own educational institutions should rest upon this divine basis.

Caroline Healey Dall