Feminist Women Quotes

#1. The feminist women's organization NOW has endorsed Carol Moseley-Braun for president. Once again NOW has shown it is so far behind the times it should change its name to THEN.

Lyn Nofziger

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. I think one of the primary reasons young women don't identify as feminist is because they don't know any feminists and/or don't really have an accurate or comprehensive understanding of what it is - by proudly identifying as a feminist.

Julie Zeilinger

#11. The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.

Rick Santorum

#12. But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.

Audre Lorde

#13. The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming.

Bell Hooks

#14. People say, 'Gee, you don't really do political music.' Well, I sing a lot of songs about how men and women and lovers treat each other, and none of us want to be talked down to or belittled or ignored or disrespected ... So I'm proud to be a feminist.

Bonnie Raitt

#15. Men tend to treat women as fragile creatures, but our bodies were built to withstand pain and hard work, think with profound insight. We were created to do what men can't. And if that isn't reason enough for us to be treated equal, I'm not sure what is.

Caroline George

#16. I consider myself a feminist because I believe women should have equal rights. Of course. It's just that the term 'feminism' conjures up other things for people.

Marina And The Diamonds

#17. What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be. Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.

Caitlin Moran

#18. In Pakistan, when we were stopped from going to school, at that time I realized that education ... Is the power for women, and that's why the terrorists are afraid of education

Malala Yousafzai

#19. I do feel it's crucial that women's opinions be taken equally with men's. But still'I have not been accepted by the American white feminist writers and activists, and frankly I don't care to be, so I am a womanist. I am feisty and I am given to womanish behavior.

Kola Boof

#20. The old lessons of submissiveness and fragility made us victims. Women are so much more than that. You can be a businesswoman, a mother, an artist, and a feminist - whatever you want to be - and still be a sexual being. It's not mutually exclusive.

Beyonce Knowles

#21. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

Audre Lorde

#22. I voted for every woman who has to leave a baby too soon, who has to downgrade her career, or who is made to feel invisible in her role as a mother.

Erin Passons

#23. I think of myself as a political idiot. Idiot, in ancient Greece, denoted a common person without access to knowledge and information--all women, by definition, and most men. I am unable to make judgments. I see no options I can identify with. Is that normal?

Jasmina Tesanovic

#24. Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

Catharine MacKinnon

#25. The war gave women like her opportunities, not a feminist movement, and if the opportunities dwindled after the war, she feels that it was because women didn't want them.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

#26. Women can't wait for equal pay. And I won't stop fighting to address this inequality.

Barack Obama

#27. If you ask Muslim women why they cover up, ninety-nine percent of them will say it's to avoid arousing men. Fuck that, where's your self-accountability?

Michael Muhammad Knight

#28. Know that you matter, your thoughts and feelings matter, your sexual needs and wants matter, your sexual boundaries and sexual health matter. -That is the definition of sexual empowerment.

Miya Yamanouchi

#29. Let's forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace and inspiration from real women ... Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist 'salvation' of this world

Annie Laurie Gaylor

#30. I didn't go to high school, I didn't go to college, I didn't have women's studies. All of my feminist ideals and education have been built around art and my friends and community. And so it's still growing.

Kathleen Hanna

#31. Since 1996, the Feminist Majority Foundation has been immersed in a campaign to support Afghan women and girls in their fight against the brutal oppression of the Taliban.

Eleanor Smeal

#32. If you consider sexual desire and romantic love between men and women to be natural and healthy, you are not a feminist . There is nothing natural about sex, according to feminist ideology, no biological urge that causes women to be attracted to men.

Robert Stacy McCain

#33. Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature. Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know.

Shulamith Firestone

#34. We will have a reckoning with our culture and religion, with military rulers and Islamists - two sides of one coin. Such a reckoning is essentially a feminist one. And it is what will eventually free us. Women - our rage, our tenacity, our daring and audacity - will free our countries.

Mona Eltahawy

#35. It was a feminist act, revealing secrets in order to free herself and the women of her clan from the silence and obscurity to which a misogyny thousands of years old would have relegated them.

Mary Karr

#36. As a feminist, just to speak to what women go through, I think women are put in a box way too often. What I love about 'You're the Worst' is that no female character is portrayed as a black-and-white cartoon character. We're all complicated, messy human beings.

Kether Donohue

#37. Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink . It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.

Camille Paglia

#38. The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer.

Pat Buchanan

#39. Yes, I'm a feminist, because I see all women as smart, gifted and tough.

Zaha Hadid

#40. Boys don't go for fat girls. They talk about wanting 'real women', but what they mean is big tits. Not thighs, not bellies, not fat bums. They want skin and bone.

Claire Hennessy

#41. I believe that feminism has become a political movement that seeks to obtain unlimited rights for woman without corresponding responsibilities via the suppression of feminism.Under my definition, helping oppressed women in other countries falls outside the scope of the movement's interests.

Mike Adams

#42. I am a feminist. And I'm so glad that Lena Dunham exists, because she is one too, and she's quite vocal about it. Yes, women have more freedom and more influence than ever, but it's hardly equal. It's just not.

Claire Danes

#43. Pornography as propaganda, according to feminist analysis, represents women as objects who love to be abused, and teaches men practices of degradation and abuse to carry out upon women.

Sheila Jeffreys

#44. It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

A.S. Byatt

#45. When women internalized the idea that describing their own woe was synonymous with developing a critical political consciousness, the progress of the feminist movement was stalled.

Bell Hooks

#46. Progressive feminists have shown nothing but the most reflexive, regressive contempt for women on the other side of the ideological aisle. It doesn't matter if you're a conservative stay at home mom, work at home mom, or work outside the home mom. If you're Right, the Left is gonna hate.

Michelle Malkin

#47. If you look up feminist in the dictionary, it just means someone who believes men and women have equal rights ...

Aziz Ansari

#48. Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in the full equality of men and women or you do not.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#49. The feminist movement is often clouded with Gloria Steinem's perspective, but I feel like denying women their sexuality is just as chauvinistic.

Amber Heard

#50. I feel like I'm one of the biggest feminists in the world because I tell women not to be scared of anything,

Miley Cyrus

#51. A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.

Shannon Celebi

#52. Given the way universities work to reinforce and perpetuate the status quo, the way knowledge is offered as commodity, Women's Studies can easily become the place where revolutionary feminist thought and feminist activism are submerged or made secondary to the goals of academic careerism.

Bell Hooks

#53. To personally modify the famous quote by Coco Chanel, I will leave you on this note;
A girl should do two things: who and whatever the hell she wants.

Miya Yamanouchi

#54. Let's take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. One feminist project could be to give the killjoy back her voice. Whilst hearing feminists as killjoys might be a form of dismissal, there is an agency that this dismissal rather ironically reveals. We can respond to the accusation with a yes.

Sara Ahmed

#55. We have a lot of work to do, but we can get there if we work together. Women are more than 50 percent of the population and more than 50 percent of voters. We must demand that we all receive 100 percent of the opportunities.

Beyonce Knowles

#56. Women somehow get portrayed as one type. You're either a feminist or you're not. You're a working woman or you're not. I'm raising two girls, and I say to them, 'I need you to be strong and soft. You can be smart and beautiful ... You can be all of these things.'

Maria Shriver

#57. 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

#58. My mom is like this hard-core, liberal feminist. She's a professor in Boston, and she's been teaching women's studies for 30 years and international politics.

Eliza Dushku

#59. 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

#60. There's still a lot of misogynist pop music out there, and I think that hearing something that's so explicitly feminist and so angry - when we're still growing up in a culture where girls and women are not supposed to be angry - is a real revelation for young women.

Kathleen Hanna

#61. I strongly believe that no one can be a true feminist without being an atheist. All religions are anti-women. No one can be pro-woman while supporting anti-woman dogmas.

Taslima Nasrin

#62. Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it's the latter, so I sign up

Margaret Atwood

#63. We feminists think that women deserve the right NOT to prostitute.

Melissa Farley

#64. The minute my child was born, I was reborn as a feminist. It's so incredible what women can do ... birthing naturally, as most women do around the globe, is a superhuman act. You leave behind the comforts of being human and plunge back into being an animal ...

Ani DiFranco

#65. I am absolutely not a feminist, I am against stupidity, and if it comes from males or females, it doesn't change anything. If it means that women and men, they are equal, then OK, certainly I am a feminist.

Marjane Satrapi

#66. When men start affording more rights to women, maybe we'll be nicer to the ones we don't like. But for now, I know that I myself am too busy trying to preserve my rights and faculties to take care of a man's fragile ego.

Leanna Renee Hieber

#67. I'm a bit of a feminist and very "female empowerment," and women should be able to do what they please.

Laura Vandervoort

#68. But one did not do feminist theory, as such, in those days, not only because male academic discourse did not recognize such a term, but especially because the women's movement did not either.

Teresa De Lauretis

#69. I became a feminist because I wanted to help my daughters, other women and myself aspire to something more than a place behind a good man.

Faith Ringgold

#70. Be plain in dress, and sober in your diet; In short, my deary, kiss me, and be quiet.

Mary Wortley Montagu

#71. Defining men as the perpetrators of all violence is a viciously immoral judgment of an entire gender. And defining women as inherently nonviolent condemns us to the equally restrictive role of sweet, meek, and weak.

Katherine Dunn

#72. Soon, a national and international feminist movement was challenging the idea that what happened to men was political but what happened to women was cultural; that the first could be changed but the second could not. - Gloria Steinem

Jay Allison

#73. As soon as a women gets to an age where she has opinions and she's vital and she's strong, she's systematically shamed into hiding under a rock.

Sarah Silverman

#74. I want women to have access to safe healthcare and be in control of their own bodies. I am a feminist. Everyone should be a feminist.

Alice Glass

#75. I've always been a strong feminist and felt that the image of models was detrimental to women. That whole thing really bothered me. I would think about quitting about once a week.

Saffron Burrows

#76. There is a feminist proverb I learned from my mother: The personal is political. There's a powerful literary stereotype that men write about war and politics and public life, while women confine themselves to family and food and personal life.

Annia Ciezadlo

#77. Men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men.

Fay Weldon

#78. Perhaps because women are seen as good listeners, I find that a traveling woman - perhaps especially a traveling feminist - becomes a kind of celestial bartender.

Gloria Steinem

#79. Other women who are killing it should motivate you, thrill you, challenge you and inspire you.

Taylor Swift

#80. 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

#81. When women with class power opportunistically use a feminist platform while undermining feminist politics that helps keep in place a patriarchal system that will ultimately re-subordinate them, they do not just betray feminism; they betray themselves.

Bell Hooks

#82. No feminist whose concern for women stems from concern for justice in general can ever legitimately allow her only interest to be the advantage of women.

Janet Radcliffe Richards

#83. She was simply Asha, a woman on her own. Had the situation been otherwise, she might not have come to know her own brain.

Katherine Boo

#84. For me, now, feminist art must show a consciousness of women's social and economic position in the world. I also believe it demonstrates forms and perceptions that are drawn from a sense of spiritual kinship between women.

Suzanne Lacy

#85. And I withdrew into myself when I understood that they wanted to extract every thought in my head, one by one, like decayed teeth.

Alia Mamdouh

#86. I write for women because it's the only way I can use what I've experienced. It's good that people like what I write, but I don't want to go down the feminist path.

Jennifer Saunders

#87. Women's art, political art - those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.

Barbara Kruger

#88. I hope I just show women that its OK to inhabit your own body. Im not a rah-rah feminist. But its important to me that people see you can be an athlete and be strong-and also be a girl.

Gabrielle

#89. Horseman. I know you were born back when women were thought of as little more than brood mares and slaves, but it's the twenty-first century, and we can do anything a man does.

Larissa Ione

#90. The college strike didn't happen overnight. It started years ago when the war against boys began after the feminist era. Initially, feminism was presented as being about equal rights between the sexes. Now it is often about revenge and special privileges for women and girls.

Helen Smith

#91. The feminist movement has spent 30 years putting down the role of stay-at-home moms and trying to tell young women that only someone who is mentally disabled would pick that for a career.

Phyllis Schlafly

#92. What troubles me about the "hostile workplace" category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women.

Camille Paglia

#93. When will women become civilized enough to stop mistreating men? When will they cease from training their lovers to become providers, merely because they have the power to do so?
As long as they continue as they are, men have no alternative to polygamy.

Esther Vilar

#94. You must have also observed the masculine bias in the English language itself, in which women - literally, 'not men' - are daily confronted with the terror, unknowable to men, of concepts which they can imagine, but which an inherently patriarchal language does not allow them to express.

Dexter Palmer

#95. 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

#96. My parents were civil rights activists, and my mother was active in the feminist movement. Issues concerning marginalized people and especially women of color were what they cared about most in the world.

Anna Holmes

#97. People ask me if I think Anne Boleyn was a feminist ... but she wasn't striking out on behalf of women, and she wasn't particularly keen on them.

Lydia Leonard

#98. I hate Mother's Day. If anything, it's an affront to all women who think full-time moms have never worked a day in their lives. Which reminds me of a good joke: What do you call an angry feminist on Mother's Day? You don't.

Kimberly Guilfoyle

#99. There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#100. Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.'

Gloria Steinem