Feminism History Quotes

#1. There is something less than fully human in those who have never known a commitment to an idea, who have never risked an exploration of the unknown, who have never attempted the kind of creativity of which men and women are potentially capable.

Betty Friedan

#2. Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they're short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It's defeatist and demoralising.

Christina Hoff Sommers

#3. 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

#4. Until quite recently women's histories were largely overlooked but in the wake of feminism there has been increasing interest in retrieving them.

Alison Weir

#5. Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).

Karl Marx

#6. 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

#7. I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.

Siri Hustvedt

#8. The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Virginia Woolf

#9. It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.

Elizabeth Kostova

#10. Now I know I am done. Now I know She is done.

~ Aarush Kashyap

Kirtida Gautam

#11. Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning?

Helene Cixous

#12. Misogyny was born of fear of women.

Sarah B. Pomeroy

#13. [Giving context to how radical bloomers as an article of clothing were at the time]

"The women shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord they God." - Deutronomy 22:5

Miriam Gurko

#14. 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

#15. Every Christian who studies history can only grieve over the atrocities that have been committed in the name of God by people who refuse to follow His ways.

Berit Kjos

#16. Blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books.

Cordelia Fine

#17. I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back forty years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' they would say, 'No.

Helen Mirren

#18. They inhabited a lost world of splendour and brutality, a world dominated by religious change, in which there were few saints.

Alison Weir

#19. When you read about the real history of where feminism comes from, it came from a very political point of view. I don't believe in bringing any politics to an idea like feminism. I love the idea that women should be celebrated, but I also believe men should be, too. We need both - yin and yang.

Michelle Phan

#20. Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.

Betty Friedan

#21. If we constantly rewrite history to fit how we see things now, we forget how things used to be and, equally important to future scholars, how we used to see them.

Anne Summers

#22. 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

#23. If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.

Simone De Beauvoir

#24. The unpleasant image of the feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered by the interests who so bitterly opposed the vote for women...

Betty Friedan

#25. A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide.

Betty Friedan

#26. 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

#27. The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.

Vladimir Lenin

#28. In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#29. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.

Judy Chicago

#30. Feminism rotates between backlash and interest. And the cool thing about the Internet is that it's allowing women more access to their own history. Part of the problem before the Internet was that we didn't know which books to read. Someone had to tell you.

Kathleen Hanna

#31. History is full of lady engineers and spies and scientists. But history is also written by the victorious, and it may not surprise you that thus far the overwhelming winners have been straight white dudes. That hasn't worked out so well for everyone else.

Sam Maggs

#32. Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.

Germaine Greer

#33. The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

Betty Friedan

#34. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#35. Looking at my life through the lens of history has made me increasingly grateful to standout women who pushed those boundaries to make the changes from which I have benefited.

Sara Sheridan

#36. Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.

Vivian Gornick

#37. Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.

Germaine Greer

#38. Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

Doris Lessing

#39. Parsons argued that medicine was a social institution that regulated social deviance through the provision of medical diagnoses for nonconforming behavior. Medicine was, in this understanding, engaged in social control.

Sheila Jeffreys

#40. Women's history is the
primary tool for women's emancipation.

Gerda Lerner

#41. At breakfast one Saturday I decided to tell Hank my desire to go back to work. He explodes, 'What can you do? You can't make enough to buy your own Kotex

Martha Lemasters

#42. I truly believed that a man should not be seen to be out front on feminism. That would be just like a man to try to take over the women's movement. We'd taken over everything else in history, in society, in the world, why not feminism, too? No, I don't think so.

Terry Fallis

#43. We've never heard
About a marvel quite so great,
For all the heroes who have lived
In history can't measure up
In bravery against the Maid.

Christine De Pizan

#44. Most non-Christian philosophies consider history to be the enemy of truth. Feminism shares this suspicion of history.

Monica Migliorino Miller

#45. To misbehave us to denounce the social norms that limit individuals based on who they are. That to make history is to upset patriarchy, a system that is intent on controlling and marginalising others.

Malebo Sephodi

#46. The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.

Simone De Beauvoir

#47. Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.

Germaine Greer

#48. An indigenous feminism has been present in every culture in the world and in every period of history since the suppression of women began.

Robin Morgan

#49. 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

#50. It was critical to finding a way out. I had assumed young women knew the history of feminism and must have felt gratitude to the movement for the opportunities that the work we have done has afforded them.

Betty Buckley

#51. Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.

Jill Lepore