American Feminist Quotes

Adrienne Rich

Valerie Solanas

Lucretia Mott

Voltairine de Cleyre

Mary Edwards Walker

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Susan Faludi

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

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.

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

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

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

Ti-Grace Atkinson

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

If it is right to be legally married, it is right to be legally divorced... To be deprived of a Divorce is like being shut up in prison because someone attempted to kill you. It is just as honorable to get out of matrimonial trouble legally, as to be freed from any other wrong.

Mary Edwards Walker

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.

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

Charlene Spretnak

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

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

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

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

Jennifer Baumgardner

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.

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

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

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.

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