Top 100 Feminism Female Quotes
#1. Our society encourages women to place a very high value on maternity as an essential part of female identity, both a high moral calling and the deepest source of satisfaction on earth. It's not easy to redefine motherhood as handing your baby over to a stranger.
Katha Pollitt
#2. It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#3. Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality.
Camille Paglia
#4. For my relationships with men to change, I needed to change my relationship to myself as a woman.
Gloria Ng
#5. God, what a depressing day that was and what an irony that Britain's first female prime minister had to be Margaret Thatcher. She was the woman who asked, 'What has feminism ever done for me?' Well, dear, if you need to ask that question then you're obviously not very bright
Jo Brand
#6. Since the beginning of the Movement, lesbianism has been a kind of code word for female resistance.
Ti-Grace Atkinson
#7. Female friendships that work are relationships in which women help each other belong to themselves.
Louise Bernikow
#8. And here, of course, we come to the one occupation of a female protagonist in literature, the one thing she can do, and by God she does it and does it and does it, over and over and over again.
She is the protagonist of a Love Story.
Joanna Russ
#9. We walked through the streets with our protectors. We wore our dresses. We gave up our education because that was the price of safety. That was the bargain we made with the devil we knew to escape the devil we didn't.
C.J. Redwine
#10. Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers.
G.K. Chesterton
#11. One female who knows what to do
is better than a thousand males who don't.
Mihri Hatun
#12. Now we are beginning to come to a point where human consciousness is moving back to female energy. The Earth is crying out very loudly, and the herbalists are springing up. Women are becoming healers again. That energy is coming back.
Sun Bear
#13. A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
Naomi Wolf
#14. I've heard a hundred different variations of instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties
feminism and multi-culturalism
come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.
Theodore Dalrymple
#15. In Bonoboville, the females gently but firmly rule the roost, keeping the males gentle and firm
Susan Block
#16. 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.
Germaine Greer
#17. No, I have no desire to be a feminist, I just want to be a female,
Gyula Krudy
#18. To all the women I say, don't ask to be saved by anyone, "my brave baghinis" (tigresses). Remember, if you deem yourselves as sheeps, men will treat you as such, but if you deem yourselves as tigresses, then you are the ones who will shape humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
#19. When female stories are muted, we are teaching our kids that their dignity is second class and the historical accounts of their lives [are] less relevant. This lowered value carries over when women face sexual objectification and systemic brutalization from inside and outside the community.
Aurin Squire
#20. Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby,
Sheryl Sandberg
#21. Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#22. For a lot of the players it was their first exposure to the Southern female - the most flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as feminism. Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness!
Michael Lewis
#23. Most feminist groups began with women talking about how we saw ourselves and other women, how we acted. We openly confessed our fears and hatred of other women. We talked about how to combat jealousy, the politics of envy, and so on.
Bell Hooks
#24. I'm not beholden to the confirmation of your prejudices; to be perfectly frank, the prospect of confining the female characters in my story to placid, helpless secondary places in the narrative is so goddamn boring that I would rather not write at all.
Scott Lynch
#25. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its puerile, paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex.
Camille Paglia
#26. I disapprove of matrimony as a matter of principle ... Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself! (Amelia Peabody)
Elizabeth Peters
#27. The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed.
Germaine Greer
#28. Women's liberation did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual; the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.
Germaine Greer
#29. One of the reasons for the failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female behavior was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people's experience of the mutual interdependence of men and women.
Rosalind Coward
#30. So, what you're saying is, just because a warrior is a woman doesn't mean they yhave to wear a chain mail bikini? Like, they could wear...real armor?
Jeremy Whitley
#31. You can cower," she told them in a clear voice, wrapping her long shaking fingers around the cold iron bars. "But I will stand.
Gwenn Wright
#32. Before modern feminism, stories of female ambition were silenced or erased; even now, they are told with apology ("Yes, it's a great honor to be a Nobel Prize laureate, but really, what I love best is staying home and being a mother to Kevin and Annie").
Harriet Lerner
#33. I have often wondered if the irrational fear some men have of women that incites them to subjugate and oppress the female species begins in the adage: I brought you into this world, I can take you out!
Annastacia Dickerson
#34. As a feminist, I consider the female pronoun to be an honorific, a term that conveys respect. Respect is due to women as members of a sex caste that have survived subordination and deserve to be addressed with honour. Men who transgender cannot occupy such a position.
Sheila Jeffreys
#35. If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.
Simone De Beauvoir
#36. The noble calling to rule and subdue the earth in God's name was perverted, as male and female tried to rule and subdue each other.
Carolyn Custis James
#37. The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.
Germaine Greer
#38. I'm not feisty. But when you're as small as I am and female if you don't stand up for your rights, you're sure to be pushed around by big, hairy, smelly men with delusions about male superiority.
Robert A. Heinlein
#39. Feminism is lesbian in the sense that lesbians have always hated the female role and coveted the male role. It is based on Marxist notions of "equality" and class conflict that have no relevance to mystical and biological phenomenon such as love.
Henry Makow
#40. Which statements are true according to the passage?
A) Science, governments, and your doctor should be trusted.
B) 'Comforting her deep into the night' is a euphemism for sneaking candy.
C) The ugliest phrase used in this passage is 'female.'
D) Bad things really do come in threes.
Tupelo Hassman
#41. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#42. If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.
Bell Hooks
#43. Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.
Saddam Hussein
#44. There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#45. The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.
Bell Hooks
#46. Even if you are a woman who achieves the ultimate and becomes like a man, you will still always be like a woman. And as long as womanhood is thought of as something to escape from, something less than manhood, you will be thought less of, too.
Ariel Levy
#47. By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult.
Bell Hooks
#48. In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognized as female, a raw strength that only comes fro unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.
Julia Serano
#49. I don't mind being called a "feminist," as I certainly embrace the tenets of feminism, though it does feel a little sad to me that we need to call a novel "feminist" simply because the female characters are interesting and strong.
Laurie Foos
#50. If you are embarrassed about your sex, it must mean that you feel there is something demeaning or disgusting about being female. You are all wondrously made, girls. Remember that: wondrously made, and you should carry your sex proudly, a badge of honor.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
#51. Boys are given the universe in which to carve out their identities, the promise of infinite space for them to expand into and contract upon. Girls are allowed only enough room to be stars, and they must twinkle, twinkle if they want anyone to pay attention to them.
Clementine Ford
#53. It's not new, our valuation of young female people for how they can serve, satisfy, and satiate. Our girls are both the platter and the meal, and we eat them up--we eat their meat, we lap up their sweetness, we covet and control and consume.
Elana K. Arnold
#54. Women, "the softer sex", are expected to bare this emotional performance yet accept the fact it is undervalued, both classified as an intrinsic skill that accompanies living whilst female, and the belief that it cannot be taught formally, so is less valuable
Dawn Foster
#55. Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.
Andrea Dworkin
#56. I actually have a peculiar feminism that does not involve the idea that women shouldn't be sexy. Female characters written in comics have always been pretty damned sexy, and used their sexuality. And I don't have any problem with that.
Ann Nocenti
#57. I hate society's notion that there is something wrong with sex. Something wrong with a woman who loves sex.
Alessandra Torre
#58. Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
Germaine Greer
#59. But Rosa soon made the discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn't read fairly. She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds.
Charles Dickens
#60. Psychologically, Japanese women depend largely on each other. In their sex-segregated society, they could be criticized for living in a female ghetto, and yet they have what some American feminists are trying to build, a "women's culture" with its own customs, values and even language.
Kittredge Cherry
#61. When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women.
Sally Kempton
#62. What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.
Rebecca Traister
#63. There is a need for promoting women's sexual agency in today's society, because if it wasn't an issue, terms such as 'female sexual empowerment' would be made redundant. The fact that we merely have this vocabulary is indicative of that.
Miya Yamanouchi
#64. Many of my movies have strong female leads- brave, self-sufficient girls that don't think twice about fighting for what they believe with all their heart. They'll need a friend, or a supporter, but never a savior. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man.
Hayao Miyazaki
#65. In the grammar of the phallus
the I, I, I
[woman] can't utter female experience.
Nancy Mairs
#66. Anytime there's a bad female stand-up somewhere, some dickhead Interblogger will deduce that "women aren't funny." Using that same math, I can state: Male comedy writers piss in cups.
Tina Fey
#67. Empowertising not only builds on the idea that any choice is a feminist choice if a self-labeled feminist deems it so, but takes it a little bit further to suggest that being female is in itself something that deserves celebration.
Andi Zeisler
#68. Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.
Camille Paglia
#69. If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion.
Germaine Greer
#70. Despite all of the social advances in women's rights and the push for gender equality in the workplace, it seems like modern men still want a woman that they can take care of at home.
Shannon Mullen
#72. A tawdry, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a *kind* of sexual expression we now regard *as* sexuality.
Ariel Levy
#73. Recently we've been hearing a lot about women "having it all." Myself, I think that is not really an accurate description of female lives today. It seems to me that what we have been up to is DOING it all.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett
#74. One of the greatest gifts of Black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to be Black and female.
Barbara Smith
#75. Why do you write strong female characters?
Because you're still asking me that question.
Joss Whedon
#76. I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.
Anne Bradstreet
#77. When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!
E. M. Forster
#78. Feminism justified female 'victim power' by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world.
Warren Farrell
#79. Girls don't go to law school," I told him.
"No, but women do.
Rikki Klieman
#80. There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#81. Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.
Jeanette Winterson
#82. You can't exploit a woman who has based her entire career on exploiting herself.
Maggie Young
#83. The rare female scientist was depicted as masculine, coarse, ugly, careworn and industrious but making no significant contribution.
Barbara Goldsmith
#84. Because it is my destiny, Zabdas! Because I've always known the gods made me for something more -- more than just a wife, just a mother, just a woman. They made me for power!
Libbie Hawker
#85. If women cut back on their ambitions en masse, institutional change will never happen and the glass ceiling will lower. We need to be there to demand equal pay, mandatory maternity leave, more human hours. Leaving the "dirty work" of working to the men is a way of muffling our own voices.
Emily Matchar
#87. We are in the midst of a violent backlash againist feminism that uses images of female beauty as political weapons against women's advancement.
Naomi Wolf
#88. Just as we tell women today to vote, in honour of the suffragettes who campaigned for the right to do so, we owe it to these female sports pioneers to draw inspiration from their stories, to continue the fight.
Anna Kessel
#89. In other words, for purposes of sex discrimination law, to be a woman means either to be like a man or like a lady. We have to meet either the male standard for males or the male standard for females.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
#90. Freedman and Barnouin reveal the truth in Skinny Bitch, but they encase the truth in lies
women must be skinny to be attractive and being attractive should be a priority
via the typical verbiage of female disempowerment.
Kim Socha
#91. She threw herself across her bed, weeping into a pillow. She knew just what she wanted -- the desire was a fierce ache inside her. But fiercer still was the knowledge that it was beyond the reach of a female.
Libbie Hawker
#92. The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#93. The ability for a woman to be free is connected with her ability to love another woman.
Susan Griffin
#94. It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact.
Shirley Chisholm
#95. Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large.
Padma Lakshmi
#96. The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.
Marina Warner
#97. I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither ... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
Toni Morrison
#98. Affairs began, drama spread, and traditional, good-old-boy camaraderie was tainted by the temptresses who represented the inconvenience of feminism.
Maggie Young
#99. Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.
Sheila Jeffreys
#100. I prefer people to consider me by who I am and what I do and not by how I look!
Gayathri Jayakumar
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