Top 100 Feminist Quotes
#1. I'm a woman and a lesbian and a feminist and a Jew and so many other things, and those identities are a source of pride and strength for me.
Sally Kohn
#2. To me, a feminist belongs in the same category as a humanist or an advocate for human rights. I don't see why someone who's a feminist should be thought of differently.
Suzanne Vega
#3. Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.
Andrea Dworkin
#4. I was always watching the boys and how they interacted. It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society.
Lynn Coady
#5. I am an adamant feminist. It never occurred to me to take my husband's name when we married. I am a supporter of abortion rights, of equal pay for equal work, of the rights of women prisoners, of all the time-honored feminist causes, and then some.
Ayelet Waldman
#6. Suddenly, it occurred to me that my feelings towards the little man were distinctly maternal. Good God, I thought, how utterly revolting, and I turned my mind firmly to the problem at hand.
Laurie R. King
#7. Men are scumbags until they prove they're women.
Robin Mellom
#8. I'm a workaholic and I don't believe in 'no.' If I'm not sleeping, nobody's sleeping.
Beyonce Knowles
#9. To be a feminist, you could cut your hair really short. You have to be really angry about something.
Tucker Carlson
#11. I am failing as a woman. I am failing as a feminist. To freely accept the feminist label would not be fair to good feminists. If I am, indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one. I am a mess of contradictions.
Roxane Gay
#12. I certainly wouldn't be writing books if it hadn't been for the feminist blogosphere, and I think that's a really amazing thing.
Jessica Valenti
#13. I am a feminist, and I didn't think women would accept a throwback heroine.
Linda Woolverton
#14. Well, as a militant feminist, I believe in complete equality with men: intellectual, professional, economic, social and sexual; they're all equally essential, and they're all equally lacking in American society today.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
#15. Any woman who calls herself a post-feminist should keep her Wonderbra and burn her brains.
Kathy Lette
#16. I'm kind of a sloppy feminist. Any ideology makes me a little nervous because there's some point where it doesn't allow for the complexity of things.
Kim Gordon
#17. The general image of a man in an American sitcom is like a complete moron. You'd think the industry was run by a feminist cabal.
Hanna Rosin
#18. You are the most powerful army in the world; you are the future of this planet. You cannot, you will not spend one more minute of your time looking in a mirror wishing you looked different.
Jamie Le Fay
#19. Being a feminist simply means you believe in equal rights, and I think if you ask anybody if they believe in equal rights, they'll say yes, man or woman. And if they don't - who the heck would say that?
Leighton Meester
#20. I'm more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what's going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities.
Lana Del Rey
#21. What's a feminist?" Julie asked.
"Someone who thinks women are fish," Barton replied. He was smiling at Lily. "And that men are bicycles, which makes us basically useless to anyone of the fish persuasion. But it does categorize us as creatures who exist solely for the purpose of being ridden.
Dianne Dixon
#22. I didn't think of 'Thelma and Louise' as a feminist movie.
Callie Khouri
#23. The institutionalization of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, all of these things, led to a sense that the struggle was over for a lot of people and that one did not have to continue the personal consciousness-raising and changing of one's viewpoint.
Bell Hooks
#24. Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn't want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.
Bell Hooks
#25. We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women.
Katha Pollitt
#26. You hear younger women say, 'I don't believe I'm a feminist. I believe women should have equal right and I believe in fighting for the rights of other women, but I'm certainly not a feminist. No, no, not that!' It's just a word. If you called it 'Fred' would it be better?
Gail Collins
#27. The exciting thing about getting a label together and doing press for it is that hopefully some 15-year-old girl who is the only feminist in her junior-high class will hear about it and be like, "Oh, cool, I hadn't heard of that, I'm going to check it out."
Kathleen Hanna
#28. I am a feminist because in every woman I can see reflection of my mother.
Debasish Mridha
#29. No man is as anti-feminist as a really feminine woman.
Frank O'Connor
#30. So many people are concerned with being the perfect 'something.' Whether it's the perfect singer, the perfect sexy girl, or the perfect feminist. I don't want to be the perfect anything.
Halsey
#31. I'm a feminist, of course, and I feel as if I'm very politically correct, although I do question what's P.C. and what's not - I don't just accept what I'm told.
Beth Ditto
#32. Are you trivialising the sisterhood if you dye your hair or have your eyebrows threaded? I'd say the answer to that is no. But equally, it's a perfectly valid feminist thing to say there is a certain amount of attention on a woman's appearance, and I don't wish that to be the focus or a distraction.
Louise Mensch
#33. Every species has a dinner date as part of courting ritual. A woman who won't let you pay for dinner is rejecting your courtship. She may think she's playing fair, or that she's being a feminist, but a very deep level, she knows that she's crossing you off her list of possibilities.
Jennifer Crusie
#34. [Our] struggle for liberation has significance only if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people.
Bell Hooks
#35. Part of it was a feminist streak and the other part of it was the ultimate in antifeminism: a deeply rooted need in me to be accepted by my dad and by other men. If I could do the same things as them, I would be accepted into their world.
Melanie Neale
#36. My mom was sarcastic about men. She would tell me Adam was the rough draft and Eve was the final product. She was a feminist minister, an earth mom who wore a bra only on Sundays.
Daphne Zuniga
#37. It's as if our girls don't understand that they can be recognized for other things
their goals, their brains. Not just their bodies.
Siobhan Vivian
#38. I've thought often about why - why?! - anyone, especially other women, would try to disrupt feminist work that combats violence. What in the world could be the point of that? The only reason I've come up with, and I think it makes sense, is fear of becoming that "impure" woman.
Jessica Valenti
#39. Our religion has defined a position for women (in society): motherhood. Some people can understand this, while others can't. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don't accept the concept of motherhood.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#40. I would much rather be the obnoxious feminist girl than be complicit in my own dehumanization.
Kathleen Hanna
#41. Males were expected to be ready to fuck any hole they could slip their dicks into. Boys weren't considered men unless they were influenced by their carnal instincts to spread their seed.
Maggie Young
#42. Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.
Gloria Steinem
#44. You want to be a corporate success; you want to be an entrepreneurial success. That's the beginnings of the feminist movement which sought to emulate men.
Rush Limbaugh
#45. I read that book 'Fat is a Feminist Issue', got a bit desperate halfway through and ate it.
Jo Brand
#46. In using terms like patriarchy, hermeneutics, and sexual/textual, I do not wish to misrepresent the Qurn as a feminist text; rather, the use of such terminology shows my own intellectual disposition and biases.
Asma Barlas
#47. Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole ... patriarch!
Gloria Steinem
#48. I call myself a feminist when people ask me if I am, and of course I am 'cause it's about equality, so I hope everyone is. You know you're working in a patriarchal society when the word "feminist" has a weird connotation.
Ellen Page
#49. I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me.
Jane Rule
#50. I respect women like Gloria Steinem who paved the way. But when you say 'feminist' now, there is a message that if you are sexy and you acknowledge that part of your personality publicly, then it's somehow an affront to women. And I reject that.
Megyn Kelly
#51. Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict women's ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.
Katha Pollitt
#52. Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply.
Sena Jeter Naslund
#53. The pursuit and preservation of purity can drive prejudice and hate. Many crimes against humanity have been committed in its name. Purity is best applied to water.
Jamie Le Fay
#54. When husbands and wives not only co-work but try to co-homemake, as post-feminist and well-intentioned as it is, out goes the clear delineation of spheres, out goes the calm of unquestioned authority, and of course, out goes the gratitude.
Sandra Tsing Loh
#55. Aw, I feel bad if [Taylor] was upset. I am a feminist, and she is a young and talented girl. That being said, I do agree I am going to hell. But for other reasons. Mostly boring tax stuff.
Amy Poehler
#56. Why does everybody say 'feminist' that way?" "What way?" "The way Dooney kept saying 'herpes' after health class last year. Like it's this terrible, unspeakable thing.
Aaron Hartzler
#57. But when feminists suggest that God might be a She without suggesting that the Devil might also be female, they must be opposed.
Warren Farrell
#58. Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.
Bell Hooks
#59. I would say that each of us has only one thing to gain from the feminist movement: Our whole humanity. Because gender has wrongly told us that some things are masculine and some things are feminine ... which is bullshit.
Gloria Steinem
#60. Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue.
Clifford Geertz
#61. A feminist is a man or woman who already knows for a fact that men and women are qual and wants society to wake up to that fact, so the world can stop operating at half-strength.
Marlo Thomas
#62. I'm a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.
Angela Davis
#63. I feel in my bones that Lady Gaga is a true strident feminist and good for my soul - but how do I square this with the fact that she's constantly walking around in her bra and pants, even at, like, airports and stuff, where even nudists wear a fleece and linen drawstring trousers?
Caitlin Moran
#64. I would definitely say I'm a feminist. To me, it just means being attentive and mindful. It's about equality and equal treatment. It feels like a gut instinct.
Hattie Morahan
#65. My mom brought me up to be a feminist. She would always point out to my brother and me that our culture does often portray women like objects.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#66. Trans activism in the US has most frequently been grassroots, centered on poverty and criminalization, and often oppositional to the exclusionary "mainstreaming" threads in gay and lesbian politics and feminist politics.
Dean Spade
#67. I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just ... womanish.
Alice Walker
#68. The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.
Andrea Dworkin
#69. Open marriage' is an invention of a feminist era. The idea is to have a marriage where dalliances are tolerated or even encouraged for both men and women, or in some combination where both partners are getting something out of it.
Amanda Marcotte
#70. Feminism is not a one size fits all kinda thing but anyone can wear it.
Jess
#71. The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description.
Mary Roach
#72. Torque was the greatest thing in the world, as far as Lina was concerned.
Jaleigh Johnson
#73. When you say you're not a feminist, if feminism hadn't existed, and you didn't live in a feminist world, you wouldn't be saying that, because you'd be too busy scrubbing out the toilets in back while cooking up your husband's tea and dying in childbirth at the age of 34.
Caitlin Moran
#74. I adhere to the law of chastity because I don't believe in pushing women. That's what it means to be a man. I don't hurt others simply to make myself feel superior. Gossip can ruin a woman as surely as unchaste behavior. True men don't indulge in either. We don't need to.
Courtney Milan
#76. The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.
Phyllis Schlafly
#77. On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think ... of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.
Flannery O'Connor
#78. Camille Paglia is: 'the nipple-pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly who poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters.
Naomi Wolf
#79. I've heard people say that 'The Blair Witch Project' is a feminist movie because there's a woman in charge and I've heard it called a completely anti-feminist movie because this woman screws everything up. Who cares really? It's just a movie.
Heather Donahue
#80. The trade unions in the UK are campaigning around zero-hours contracts, which isn't about feminism, but it's a feminist issue. Women are affected by zero-hours contracts, and the recession has and is affecting women more than men.
Rachel Holmes
#81. I'm not a feminist,' some women say sternly as they march off to work where equal opportunity legislation protects them ... Women who say they are not feminists and act like individuals with basic human rights have just got their terminology wrong.
Kaz Cooke
#82. When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.
Isabel Allende
#83. Many fairy tales and ballads present us with animals who are nobler, truer, and kinder than the greedy human beings who desire to possess them. I guess I tend to read these stories as very early (and possibly unconscious) feminist texts.
Delia Sherman
#84. In 2008, I was one of the young feminist whippersnappers who voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries - or as many of my older counterparts called me at the time, a traitor.
Jessica Valenti
#85. Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.
Camille Paglia
#86. Without confronting internalized sexism women
who picked up the feminist banner often betrayed the cause in their
interactions with other women.
Bell Hooks
#87. To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be "reached out to" in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity.
Irena Klepfisz
#88. The problem with a lot of feminist works is that they tend to take the "feminine" out of "feminism.
H.L. Grey
#89. Putting women in military combat is the cutting edge of the feminist goal to force us into an androgynous society.
Phyllis Schlafly
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.
Edward Abbey
#93. 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
#94. Hilary Clinton's great sin was that she left the nicely wallpapered domestic sphere with a slam of the door, took up public life on her own, leaving big feminist footprints all over the place, and without so much as an apology.
Patricia J. Williams
#95. To cherish my purity and set boundaries are, in my opinion, the highest forms of feminism - a woman who saves her body proves she is strong and secure enough to resist the men who seek to claim her, that she's more than what lies between her legs.
Caroline George
#96. I'm a bit of a feminist and I carry a machete! (Laughs) I try to be a strong female. I think it's important. My mum is my idol in life. She's a very strong woman. I think it's important for women to be strong and intelligent and hold their own.
Kaya Scodelario
#97. I like women who look like women. I hated grunge. No one's more feminist than me, but you don't have to look as if you don't give a - you know. You can be smart, bright, and attractive aesthetically to others - and to yourself.
Catherine Zeta-Jones
#98. It's not always easy being a full-time feminist - especially as a young woman - when you're constantly being told that what you do is irrelevant. I'm on the defense all the time.
Jessica Valenti
#99. When the Taliban took over in 1996, the news of their crimes hit the Toronto papers. As a feminist and as an anti-war activist, I heard about what was happening to women, and I wanted to do something to support those folks.
Deborah Ellis
#100. Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.
Toni Morrison
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