Quotes by Women Feminists

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

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.

I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation of social injustice.

Emmeline Pankhurst

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

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

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.

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

It matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.

For certainly there cannot be a higher pleasure than to think that we love and are beloved by the most amiable and best Being.

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

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

A child's eyes, those clear, wells of undefiled thought - what on earth can be more beautiful? Full of hope, love and curiosity, they meet your own. In prayer, how earnest; in joy, how sparkling; in sympathy, how tender! The man who never tried the companionship of a little child has carelessly passed by one of the great pleasures of life, as one passes a rare flower without plucking it or knowing its value

Caroline Norton

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

Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of western life. It is in the family that children are groomed to practise, promote and pass on the norms of their parents' culture.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A fly is a very light burden; but if it were perpetually to return and settle on one's nose, it might weary us of our very lives.

Frederika Bremer

Women have suffered too much from the Conspiracy of Silence to allow that conspiracy to last one minute longer. It has been an established and admitted rule in the medical profession to keep a wife in ignorance of the fact that she has become the victim of venereal disease.

Christabel Pankhurst

But it will be said that the husband provides for the wife, or in other words, he feeds, clothes and shelters her! I wish I had the power to make every one before me fully realize the degradation contained in that idea.

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

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

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

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

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

Charlene Spretnak

Ahab makes a great impression on his first appearance in Moby Dick... And if either by birth or by circumstance something pathological was at work deep in his nature, this did not detract from his dramatic character. For tragic greatness always derives from a morbid break with health, you can be sure of that.