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Feminism Quotes

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Feminism Quotes

“Women are awesome! I may not agree with the politics behind a lot of contemporary feminism, I like to think that feminism at it’s core is a good thing. Women are not our underlings, they are not subservient, they are not objects created for our pleasure. They are our equals, and should be treated with the same respect and dignity that we expect for ourselves.”

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Book:Manlihood: The 12 Pillars of Masculinity
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“I see stunning men walking on the street everyday. Some walk shirtless because it's hot and they feel more comfortable that way. Do I scream out at them, beep at them or whistle? No, I smile to myself in appreciation of them and drive on by. Why? Because I believe they have the right to go about their lives without me imposing my sexual desire upon them.”

MenWomenFeminismRespectFeministSexual DesireShirtlessStreet HarassmentCatcallingTopless
Book:Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
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“Stop the idea that a woman’s beauty is for a man’s gaze, that you have the right to touch her. This idea that she must smile and accept unwanted approaches even when she is clearly uncomfortable. Just because you call a woman beautiful does not mean you have the right to behave like her beauty belongs to you. There are women healing from scars gotten from men who have called them beautiful yet offered them pain. The beauty of a woman is hers and hers alone. There are triggers for some women, respect this and know this. The beauty of a woman is hers and hers alone.”

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Author:Ijeoma Umebinyuo
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“It’s amazing to me that it’s still considered a notable, commendable trait –‘Oh, she’s a well-known feminist’ –in a woman, or a girl, or a man, or a boy. That that is the unusual thing. Really, it should be the reverse. Rather than what seems like a minority having to spend time, energy, brain and heart explaining why they’re ‘into’ equality, the majority should be explaining why they’re not. You put the time into explaining why –in a world where every concept of justice, wisdom, progress and rightness is a human invention –we still prefer the human concept of ‘some people being inferior to others’ over ‘this is a vast, inky, cold, empty universe, and in it, we are the only humans that exist, all sharing a tiny milky green/ blue world, and faced with a multitude of problems, and an infinite capacity for joy, and should therefore try and stick together and accord each other some respect’.”

FeminismRespectEquality
Book:Moranifesto
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“Most men and women born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriages and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships. Had I been evaluating my relationships from a standpoint that emphasized growth rather than duty and obligation, I would have understood that abuse irreparably undermines bonds. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.... Women who would no more tolerate a friendship in which they were emotionally and physically abused stay in romantic relationships where these violations occur regularly. Had they brought to these bonds the same standards they bring to friendship they would not accept victimization.”

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Book:All About Love: New Visions
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“Dear Men Everywhere, Please don't think that being a feminist means we hate you or don't need you. -We absolutely love you and couldn't live without you! ...We are just on a mission to be treated equally and with respect. No hard feelings. With love, Feminists of the World xoxoox P.S. Yes we do shave our legs!”

MenLoveBeautySocietyFeminismRespectMen And WomenFeministEqualityGenderSexualitySexismMissionEqual RightsEmpowering WomenFeminist QuotesSexistSocial ActivismMiya Yamanouchi
Book:Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
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“Later on, however, I actually did read an unabridged Bible and researched more verses using online topical Bible resources, only to find out that Stanton might have been right. The Bible definitely left room for the relegation of women’s status in all respects. Women appeared to have been held accountable for every sinful act that’s committed because of a single woman who lived in the Garden of Eden, hence appearing to make them required to be silent in church. Women were supposed to be mothers and wives, which are noble pursuits, but it appeared as if men had a wider range of opportunities: they could be fathers and husbands… along with apostles, pastors, political leaders, polyglots, AND leaders of municipal congregations! The pursuits other than being a father and husband were considered to be noble pursuits for men, but if a woman pursued any of that, even if she had the capabilities and the good intentions, it would be considered blasphemous, at least from what I understood”

FeminismBibleEqualityGender Roles
Book:Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics
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“When the awful time of reckoning comes, and the Jehovah God appears to demand why his command has been disobeyed, Adam endeavors to shield himself behind the gentle being he has declared to be so dear. ‘The woman thou gavest to be with me, she gave me and I did eat,’ he whines—trying to shield himself at his wife's expense! Again we are amazed that upon such a story men have built up a theory of their superiority!”

GodFeminismEthicsBibleBlameWomens RightsGarden Of EdenMale SuperiorityAdam EveTime Of Reckoning
Book:The Woman's Bible, Part I & II
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“The most revolutionary change that hit the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was the liberation of women. The Bible and the Qur’an came from societies controlled by men. No surprise there. That’s how the world everywhere was run until fairly recently. And there is something worth noting before we go deeper into the issue. History shows that the men in charge never volunteer to give up their privileges. They don’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’ve suddenly realised that the way I control and dominate others is wrong. I must change my ways. So I’ll share my power with them. I’ll give them the vote!’ That’s never how it works. History shows that power always has to be wrested from those who have it. The suffragettes who fought for the vote or suffrage for women learned that lesson. Men didn’t volunteer to give women the vote. Women had to fight them for it.”

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Book:A Little History of Religion
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“This is the picture of a woman cast in the role of a learner, a pupil, even a rabbinic student. Quite obviously this is a prohibited role for women in those days and in that culture. Yet Jesus affirms Mary in that role. Martha, however, rebukes her. Martha demands that Jesus order Mary to abandon the pupil role for the more acceptable domestic role of assisting with the dinner preparations. Jesus supports Mary and defends her consciousness-raising act by stating that she has elected a higher choice.”

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Author:John Shelby Spong
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“The "new" Anglo-American feminist theory argues that too little mothering, and, in particular, the absence of mother-son connection, is what engenders both sexism and traditional masculinity in men. (...) This perspective positions mothering as central to feminist politics in its insistence that true and lasting gender equality will occur only when boys are raised as the sons of mothers. As the early feminist script of mother-son connection required the denial of the mother's power and the displacement of her identity as mother, the new perspective affirms the maternal and celebrates mother-son connection. In this, it rewrites the patriarchal and early feminist narrative to give (...) voice and presence to the mother and make mother-son connection central to the redesign of both traditional masculinity and the larger patriarchal culture.”

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Book:Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons
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“Guys, you don't have to act "manly" to be considered a man; you are a man, so just be yourself. Don't let society make you believe you have to prove your masculinity to anyone because you don't. You are you and you are worthy, full stop.”

MenBoysSocietyFeminismFeministGenderWorthySelf WorthManFeminineMasculinityMasculineManlyGender RolesWorthinessMaleGender StereotypesSocial ExpectationsMan EnoughGender PolicingGender Expectations
Book:Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
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“A man's level of "toughness" (as assessed by other men), will determine whether or not his girlfriend will get hit on by other guys right in front of him in public places. If you're deemed a "p*#%y" by other guys and they want your girlfriend, even in your company she'll be considered "fair game".”

MenGuyBoysFeminismToughFeministEqualityGenderManGirlfriendSexismMasculinityMasculineAlpha MaleSexistTough GuyGuysFair GamePick UpHit OnTough Guy TalkPicking Up The LadiesPicking Up
Book:Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
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“For many of us, feminism denotes the task of abolishing all organized scarcities, from the private nuclear household to the nation. It’s the deprivatization of love, via the insurgency of mothers of every gender against the patriarchal institution of motherhood, the decoupling of survival from the wage, the destruction of markets, the ecological insistence on interspecies responsibility, the decarbonization of every mégapole, and the communization of continent-wide architecture: waterways, seed banks, and libraries. It’s a local proletarian strike against work (that always already gendered and stolen substance otherwise called alienated labor) and a planetary revolution in values that prioritizes care over accumulation. It’s a perfectly good name, too, for the horizon wherein work’s myriad precarious, abject, wageless, mad, incarcerated, and otherwise remaindered victims are avenged. As a revolutionary movement, feminism abolishes gender qua differential, while remaking genders qua lush, interesting, and pleasurable difference.”

CareWorkFeminismRevolutionLaborGenderMotherhoodAbolitionPrison AbolitionFamily Abolition
Book:Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
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“Lahko rečem, da se trudim imeti kolikor toliko tekoč pregled nad družbenimi obveznostmi in pravicami, le odkar se zavedam jasno pojma o enakopravnosti med spoloma, sem v praksi nenehno v zadregi. Tako zaenkrat rešujem svoj »ženski problem« z genetično kondicijo in čarovniškimi metodami. Namreč zelo zanimiva je miselnost nas žensk samih. Ko sem nekoč nekaj malega razmišljala v spisu, ki je govoril o ženi, družini in otrocih ter vzgoji, in vse to skupaj objavila v reviji Otrok in družina, sem dobila tako neuporaben odgovor od tov. Beltramove, ki je v kratkem povzetku bil v tem: da naj bom srečna, ker imamo raztegljive nogavice, pralne stroje, električni štedilnik in politične pravice, ki jih ni imela nobena od mojih babic. Vrniva se nazaj k delu, ki me obvezuje, in k času, ki ga merimo s 24 urami. V tem času je čas, ki ga in kadar ga uporabim za ustvarjalno delo, vedno zamejen na ure, ko moji otroci zaspijo ali pa še spijo. Oba sta kratka še za tole pismo. (Pismo objavljeno v knjigi Med tradicijo in modernizmom: pričevanja o slovenski poeziji Franceta Pibernika, Ljubljana: Slovenska matica, 1978)”

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Book:Obhod v času
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“…the culture [had]…a manipulative but disingenuous 'we're not coworkers, we're family' mind-set. (Always be wary of a company that says seemingly well-meaning shit as this. We share a cubicle, not a fucking bloodline.)”

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Book:Financial Feminist: Overcome the Patriarchy's Bullsh*t to Master Your Money and Build a Life You Love
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“But the weakness of these proposals isn't that they're unworkable, or even that they're 'traditional,' but that they're not traditional enough. For most of history, men and women worked together, in a productive household, and this is the model reactionary feminism should aim to retrieve. In any case, half a century into the cyborg era, there's little prospect of reviving the industrial-era housewife as the principal template for sex roles—and there's no need, because for knowledge workers at least the sharp split between 'home' and 'work' that drove the emergence of such roles is blurring again. And the blurring of that divide in turn opens up new possibilities, hinting at a way of viewing lifelong solidarity between the sexes that owes more to the 1450s than the 1950s. It does so by bringing at least some work back into the home, and in the process ramping up the kind of interdependence that can underpin long-term pragmatic solidarity.”

WorkFeminismTraditionFeminism Against ProgressHousehold Economy
Book:Feminism Against Progress
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“[...] The revolution was left unfinished. The feminists of the sixties and seventies challenged the rigid division of labour between men and women; they wanted women to have access to the workplace, and men to rediscover their role at home. The psychotherapist Susie Orbach reflects on the thinking of the seventies: 'We wanted to challenge the whole distribution of work we wanted to put at the centre of everything the reproduction of daily life, but feminism got seduced by the work ethic. My generation wanted to change the values of the workplace so that it accepted family life.' This radical agenda for the reorganisation of work and home was abandoned in Britain. Instead we took on the American model of feminism, influenced by the rise of neo-liberalism and individualism. Feminism acquired shoulderpads and an appetite for power; it celebrated individual achievement rather than working out how to transform the separation between work and family, and the social processes of how we care for dependants and raise children. Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt remembers a turning point in the debate in the UK when she was at the National Council for Civil Liberties: 'The key moment was when we organised a major conference in the seventies with a lot of American speakers who were terrific feminists. When they arrived we were astonished that they were totally uninterested in an agenda around better maternity leave, etc. They argued that we couldn't claim special treatment in the workplace; women would simply prove they were equals. You couldn't make claims on the workplace. We thought it was appalling.”

WorkDemocracyFeminismGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Book:Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
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“During the early stages of the Covid-19 lockdown, prominent newspaper columnists defended their right to have someone clean their homes, even at significant risk to their health, on dubiously feminist grounds. Their argument was that without outsourcing domestic work it would be women who had to do the bulk of it. We might wonder if their cleaners were not also women. When the journalist Owen Jones criticised the cavalier attitude that employers of cleaners were taking to workplace safety, he was accused of sexism. His accusers claimed to be fighting the idea that women have some natural duty or propensity to cleaning but the upshot of their argument was that it is fine for some other – i.e. poorer, usually migrant – women to pick up after them. Escaping the confines of the domestic feminine was their individual prerogative, not a shared horizon for all women.”

WorkFeminismCapitalismLiberalismCovid 19
Book:Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism
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“Lo sfruttamento può riguardare qualunque ambito lavorativo. Il fatto che appaia peggiore quando si parla di sex work è indicativo dell'atteggiamento ambivalente che abbiamo nei confronti del sesso: considerato basso e sporco da un lato, glorificato e santificato dall'altro. Fare un pompino per 5 euro sembra più grave che raccogliere le fragole per 3 euro l'ora. Ma lo sfruttamento è sempre sfruttamento.”

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Book:Sex work is work
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“Today in the US, we're sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads, set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work of caring for family and tending to the house. Even back then, it wasn't true for everyone. Today, it is true for almost no one, except for one significant group: the most powerful positions in society are often occupied by men who do wives who do not work outside the home, and those men may not fully understand the lives of the people who work for them.”

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Book:The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
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“How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? And that question is made legitimate by another: How have men improved themselves by submitting to it? The answer is that men have not, and women cannot, improve themselves by submitting to it.”

WorkFeminismLabor
Book:Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer
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“You see, work is very, very important to women. It gives us independence, security and freedom. It’s often in work that we find our self-confidence and self-esteem. In practical terms, we need to be able to work to cope with life and all it throws at us. It helps us find our talents, grow our skills, and give ourselves pleasure.”

WorkFeminism
Book:The Kama Sutra of Work: Why Work is the New Sex and How to Make Sure You're Getting Enough
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“In the end, the answer is the men. They have to do the work. Why do we tie ourselves in knots to avoid saying this one simple truth? It's a daily and repetitive and eternal truth, and it's a dangerous truth, because if we press this point we can blow our households to pieces, we can take our families apart, we can spoil our great love affairs. This demand is enough to destroy almost everything we hold dear. So we shut up and do the work. No single task is ever worth the argument. Scrub a toilet, wash a few dishes, respond to the note from the teacher, talk to another mother, buy the supplies. Don't make a big deal out of everything. Don't make a big deal out of anything. Never mind that, writ large, all these minor chores are the reason we remain stuck in this depressing hole of pointless conversations and stifled accomplishment. Never mind that we are still, after all these waves of feminism and intramural arguments among the various strains of womanhood, treated like a natural resource that can be guiltlessly plundered. Never mind that the kids are watching. If you mind you might go crazy. Cooking and cleaning and childcare are everything. They are the ultimate truth. They underpin and enable everything we do. The perpetual allocation of this most crucial and inevitable work along gender lines sets women up for failure and men for success. It saps the energy and burdens the brains of half the population. And yet honest discussion of housework is still treated as taboo.”

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Author:Megan Stack
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“Few have cared to appreciate that the job of a switchboard operator demanded a high level of communication skills and an exceptional grip over the English language, besides decent telephone manners. This is a major reason why switchboard operating was one of the first careers completely dominated by women. Yet, the lady telephone operator has been parodied, often in bad taste, in the media, in films and on television soaps. One important reason why women were preferred is because they talked in soft tones, sometimes in whispers and had excellent telephone manners. This has been a trait injected into the female of the species almost from the time she learns how to speak. Imposing silence on women is one of the most invisible forms of violence perpetrated on girls and women across the world.”

WomenSilenceFeminismWomen EmpowermentWomen S Rights
Book:The Female Gaze: Essays on Gender, Society and Media
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