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Feminism Quotes

Browse 5085 quotes about Feminism.

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Feminism Quotes

“You grew up soft. Your tender heart would nurse a frightened field mouse rescued from a trap. Would make a splint. You'd try to help but always it would die. You gave them names. You were a friendless child, a barrel-chested, sturdy little thing who played alone. You grew up soft, but still you learned to hide it. Piece by piece. The world's not built for soft and sturdy things. It likes its soft things small and white, defenceless. Princesses in castles. Maidens waiting for the perfect sword. You grew up soft, and piece by wounded piece you built a carapace around your body. Humans are peculiar little things.”

Growing UpFeminismFairytales
Book:Tangleweed and Brine
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“My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. In the movies there is always one with red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all the away. He power is her own. She will not give it away. I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.”

PowerGrowing UpFeminismGender
Author:S. Cisneros
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“My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. In the movies there is always one with red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own. She will not give it away. I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.”

PowerGrowing UpFeminismGender
Author:S. Cisneros
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“Girl, where you at," he texts me whenever he likes. And sometimes I am at work and sometimes I am walking out of yoga class and sometimes I am on a date and sometimes I am at a museum feeling nostalgic for my failed past as an artist and sometimes I am with a friend eating a big, delicious, expensive dinner and sometimes I am walking on the waterfront ducking European tourists asking directions and sometimes I am sitting on a park bench in the sunshine reading the paper and sometimes I am at home and it is a Sunday night and I am drinking a bottle of wine by myself, alone but not lonely, but definitely alone. And wherever I am, I text him back right away. Because I want him to know. Where I am at.”

FeminismLonelyAloneNew York CityModern WomanSinglehood
Book:All Grown Up
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“The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. I obeyed his commands, sure that I could fulfill this role while still protecting the sacred place inside of me that I knew deserved more. Different. Better. But that isn't how it works.”

FeminismSelf RespectSelf Acceptance
Book:Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
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“From her thighs, she gives you life And how you treat she who gives you life Shows how much you value the life given to you by the Creator. And from seed to dust There is ONE soul above all others -- That you must always show patience, respect, and trust And this woman is your mother. And when your soul departs your body And your deeds are weighed against the feather There is only one soul who can save yours And this woman is your mother. And when the heart of the universe Asks her hair and mind, Whether you were gentle and kind to her Her heart will be forced to remain silent And her hair will speak freely as a separate entity, Very much like the seaweed in the sea -- It will reveal all that it has heard and seen. This woman whose heart has seen yours, First before anybody else in the world, And whose womb had opened the door For your eyes to experience light and more -- Is your very own MOTHER. So, no matter whether your mother has been cruel, Manipulative, abusive, mentally sick, or simply childish How you treat her is the ultimate test. If she misguides you, forgive her and show her the right way With simple wisdom, gentleness, and kindness. And always remember, That the queen in the Creator's kingdom, Who sits on the throne of all existence, Is exactly the same as in yours. And her name is, THE DIVINE MOTHER.”

LifeMindHeartChildrenSoulMotherPoetryUniverseWomenExistenceBeautyKindnessFeminismCreationDivineHairMomBirthPoemFemaleSilentValueMotherhoodTreasureParentsDustWomanGentleTreatmentGrandmotherCherishPregnancyMothersGoddessKingdomWomanhoodSistersRoyaltyMother EarthHeartsQueenEulogyThighsMothers And DaughtersNameAbusiveMotheringSuzy KassemFertilitySeedMothers LoveSeaweedChildishDivine MotherFeatherMommyWoman PowerMatriarchMother PoemWoman RightsLoss Of MotherMothers PoemEulogy MotherMother Poetry
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“Dancing also helped me make this change. If food and I had been battling, so had my body and I. In the culture I grew up in, the messages were so powerful that my girlfriends and I were wearing girdles to school by the time we were in junior high. When I began to dance, the old battle—me versus my body—was transformed. Instead of being just a problem to reshape and control, my body became a source of satisfaction and pleasure.”

FeminismFood
Book:Diet for a Small Planet: The Book That Started a Revolution in the Way Americans Eat
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“Yet, running just beneath the surface of food industry feminism was an implicit anti-feminist message. Then as now, ads for packaged foods are aimed almost exclusively at women and so reinforced the retrograde idea that responsibility for feeding the family fell to mom. The slick new products would help her do a job that was hers & hers alone.”

WomenFeminismFoodCookingAdvertising
Book:Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
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“It’s funny to me that most of the cooking in the world is done by women, and yet when you look at modern Western cuisine, it’s largely based on what a few dead Frenchmen have opined to be the correct way of doing things. It’s funny how these old European men used a label like “mother sauce” when there were no women to be found anywhere near those old professional kitchens. Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status.”

FeminismFoodCookingTraditional Cooking
Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“It occurred to me that both Maria and I were on the run in the twenty-first century, just like George Sand whose name was also Amantine was on the run in the nineteenth century, and Maria whose name was also Zama was looking for somewhere to recover and rest in the twentieth. We were on the run from the lies concealed in the language of politics from myths about our character and our purpose in life. We were on the run from our own desires too probably, whatever they were.”

CharacterWomenFeminismExpectationsMotherhoodDenialMidlife CrisisWifely DutyPolitical Purpose
Book:Things I Don't Want to Know
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“We don’t have no say, ‘cause we was an afterthought. He yanked us up out o’ man’s ribs, but He made man out the Earth. He made him out the dirt and the mud and made him out the world, so man is the world. Women…women just a part o’ men.” Elaine snubbed the cigarette out, tapped the dark leather case on the edge of the table and I watched as another slim, white stick slid free.”

CharacterWomenFeminismSpeechFeminist
Book:History of a Woman
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“By itself, legal abortion does little for poor and working-class women who have neither the means to pay for it nor access to clinics that provide it. Rather, reproductive justice requires free, universal, not-for-profit health care, as well as the end of racist, eugenicist practices in the medical profession.”

PoliticalJusticeClassFeminismCrisisEqualityAbortionHealthcareNeoliberalismIntersectionality
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“laws criminalizing gender violence are a cruel hoax if they turn a blind eye to the structural sexism and racism of criminal justice systems, leaving intact police brutality, mass incarceration, deportation threats, military interventions, and harassment and abuse in the workplace.”

PoliticalJusticeClassFeminismCrisisEqualityDomestic AbuseNeoliberalismIntersectionalitySystemic Oppression
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“In our country we use different words [than feminism] which mean the liberation or the emancipation of women. Of course I believe in the emancipation of women. It will change a lot of things in society for the better. But, you know, the class patriarchal system under which we live oppresses men too and the discrimination from which women suffer is not good for the life of men. Don’t you think so?”

ClassFeminismArabIntersectional Feminism
Book:Walking through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words
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“I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it's the world around me..”

RaceClassFeminismEqualityGenderEquityIntersectionalityWhite FeminismIntersectional Feminism
Book:Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
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“There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for some absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance towards a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning though a dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial. While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if the attempt is not continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked within its own particularism.”

PhilosophyPoliticsWomenConsciousnessClassHistoryFeminismRevolutionLiberalismMarxism
Book:Women, Resistance & Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World
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“Walter Mignolo terms and articulates _critical cosmopolitanism, juxtaposing it with globalization, which is a process of "the homogeneity of the planet from above––economically, politically and culturally." Although _globalization from below_ is to counter _globalization from above_ from the experience and perspective of those who suffer from the consequences of _globalization from above_, cosmopolitanism differs, according to Mignolo, form these two types of globalization. Mignolo defines globalization as 'a set of designs to manage the world,' and cosmopolitanism as 'a set of projects toward planetary conviviality”

ReligionRaceSilenceChristianityClassFeminismTeachingHuman RightsGenderSexualityTheologyLgbtqRhetoricGlobalizationModernityDifferencePluralismReligious StudiesCosmopolitanismPostcolonialismCosmopolitanPostcolonialReligious PluralismCultural AlibiEcumenicalEpdagogyGender JusticeIntereligious DialogueWalter Mignolo
Book:Cosmopolitan Theology: Reconstituting Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love, and Solidarity in an Uneven World
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“Cosmopolitanism seeks a _we_ that does not rely on the exclusion of _others_ but, instead, recognizes and confirms each other as part of the planetary _we_. The cosmopolitan _we_ is not grounded in a monolithic sameness but in a constant alterity and _ethical singularity_ of each individual human person regardless of one's national origin and belonging, religious affiliation, gender, race and ethnicity, class ability, or sexuality.”

AbilityRaceChristianityClassFeminismEthicsGenderSexualityTheologyAgencyDisabilityLgbtqEthnicityCosmopolitanismCosmopolitanAlterity
Book:Cosmopolitan Theology: Reconstituting Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love, and Solidarity in an Uneven World
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“Teaching and learning _religious plurality often ends up privileging religious _texts_ over _practice_ and largely ignoring the social and historical contexts and the lived experience of people who shape, situate, and structure these religious texts. Furthermore, adopting the politics of recognition as a pedagogical principle in teaching can lead to an _uncritical silence_ about the various forms of oppression and domination of certain religious groups. Here people often use _religious difference_ as a _religious alibi_ for the oppression or violation of human rights of certain groups of people, such as women or LGBT people.”

ReligionRaceSilenceChristianityClassFeminismTeachingHuman RightsGenderSexualityTheologyLgbtqDifferenceCosmopolitanismCosmopolitanReligious PluralismCultural AlibiEpdagogy
Book:Cosmopolitan Theology: Reconstituting Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love, and Solidarity in an Uneven World
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“Whenever one comes to the the table for interreligous dialogue, there is what I would call an _ecumenical taboo_ that one has to comply with. The ecumenical taboo_ does not exist in a written document, but people tend to practice it around the dialogue table. One should not raise, for instance, such questions as gender justice, sexual orientation issues, religious constructions of the other, multiple forms of violence in a religious community, or religious cooperation with neo/imperialism. each religion has its own _history of sin_ that has justified and perpetuated oppression and exclusion of certain groups of people through its own religious teaching, doctrine, and practice. In order to be _nice_ and _tolerant_ to one another, interreligious dialogue has not challenged the fundamental issues of injustice that a particular religion has practiced, justified, and perpetuated in various ways. I do not disregard that most ecumenists have based interreligious dialogue on a politics of tolerance, and this has played a significant role in easing the antagonism between religions, at least among the leaders of established religions. However, we should ground an authentic ecumenism and theology of religion in a _politics of affirmation and transformation, rather than a politics of tolerance_.”

ReligionRaceSilenceChristianityClassFeminismTeachingHuman RightsGenderSexualityLgbtqRhetoricDifferencePluralismReligious StudiesCosmopolitanismEcumenismCosmopolitanReligious PluralismCultural AlibiEcumenicalEpdagogyGender JusticeIntereligious DialogueTheology Of WorkOikoumeneWcc
Book:Cosmopolitan Theology: Reconstituting Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love, and Solidarity in an Uneven World
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“المرأة (المفكرة) ليست بالضرورة بشعة، ولا عجوزًا، ولا عانسًا، ولا يائسة. إنها أنثى أخرى مثلي ومثلكِ، تحب الحياة كما نحبها، لكنها أكثر وعيًا في هذا الحب، لذا فإن سلوكها يتخذّ صورة الدفاع عن أهم ما في الحياة: الكرامة.”

LifeWomenFeminismDignityكرامةمرأة
Book:كتابات غير ملتزمة
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“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.”

PoetryWomenFictionDreamsFeminismEmpowermentDignityEqualityGenderOpportunitiesSelf DeterminationAspirationsSocial NormsWomen Writers
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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