Patriarchy's Quotes

#1. Men did not need to have balls to have balls.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#2. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy - enforced through the rights of the firstborn son - has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions.

Hanna Rosin

#3. Patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all
even as we forge different individual choices within them
just as do themegapatterns of nationalism or racism.

Gloria Steinem

#4. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man

Virginia Woolf

#5. Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?

Bell Hooks

#6. Often in my lectures when I use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.

Bell Hooks

#7. The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.

Toni Morrison

#8. Force, punishment, and violence are patriarchy's answer to conflicts and social problems. Patriarchy finds its ultimate expression in war.

Starhawk

#9. Women need to do more. We need to find out what it is we're afraid of, and go beyond.

Colette Dowling

#10. 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

#11. I think what's been true across the board is the universal patriarchy, the fear of women ever being born back into complete sexuality and life-force. This manifests itself in different cultural variances, but that's really what's going on everywhere.

Eve Ensler

#12. Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.

Roxane Gay

#13. Achi used to say that, for a woman, sex was her greatest strength. Morality was nothing but a chain invented by man to enslave women.

Anand Neelakantan

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

Germaine Greer

#15. Feminism is not a one size fits all kinda thing but anyone can wear it.

Jess

#16. 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

#17. In a society where women are truly equal to men, a kid bred by a theist mother and an atheist father is born an agnostic. In a patriarchal society, the kid is automatically an atheist.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#18. Because patriarchy uses redemptive theology to legitimate itself, all believers who embrace the redeemer complex are accessory to the master scheme of domination.

John Lamb Lash

#19. Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As

Kate Millett

#20. By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes.

Simone De Beauvoir

#21. 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

#22. Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.

Bell Hooks

#23. Women's potential to disrupt patriarchy and make men vulnerable is why it's so easy for women to make men feel foolish or emasculated through the mildest humor that focuses on maleness and hints at women's power to stop going along with the status quo.

Allan G. Johnson

#24. Patriarchal Poetry makes mistakes.

Gertrude Stein

#25. As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation.

Stacy Schiff

#26. When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers.

Audre Lorde

#27. Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power

Andrea Dworkin

#28. I will outlaw bullshit. After the passage of this law the patriarchy will inevitably start to crumble as will the concept of war itself which is largely a large load of bullshit.

Roseanne Barr

#29. In the beginning was the Mother, the Word began a new era, one we have come to call Patriarchy.

Marilyn French

#30. Patriarchy is like the elephant in the room that we don't talk about, but how could it not affect the planet radically when it's the superstructure of human society.

Ani DiFranco

#31. We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.

Bell Hooks

#32. Judaism is one of the last of the world's matrilineal philosophies. Matriarchies are always the cultures that patriarchy attacks and decimates, because they don't spend all their money on the military like patriarchy does. They are easy prey.

Roseanne Barr

#33. Patriarchy is women structuring lifelong decisions around men they haven't met.

Maggie Young

#34. Patriarchy is a bully notion, which if you will notice never attacks a nation that can defend itself. Zionism is patriarchal and sets Judaism on its head.

Roseanne Barr

#35. Patriarchy is bestowed on men at birth. Whether you want it or not, you have a privilege as a man, and you either fight against it and reject it by becoming a feminist man, or you enjoy the privileges that come with it.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

#36. I felt guilty all of a sudden, as if just by existing and talking to him I was leading him on.

Meredith Russo

#37. Creation myths are not about the origins of the world at all, but about the origins of patriarchy which has claimed itself as the world

Jane Caputi

#38. Because of the way society sets them up, women never again experience the need to develop independence - until some crisis in later life explodes their complacency, showing them how sadly helpless and undeveloped they've allowed themselves to be.

Colette Dowling

#39. I feel sometimes with boys that the tyranny of patriarchy has had a much more devastating blow on boys than it has on anyone. Because they have literally been forced to disassociate from their hearts.

Eve Ensler

#40. If he could not restore her to the status of a respectable woman, then Sohrab would make her into something else entirely, something hitherto unknown in their entire extended family, an educated woman, a professional woman.

Jasmin Darznik

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

Germaine Greer

#42. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism.

Lierre Keith

#43. The Koran did not invent or introduce patriarchy.

Muhammad Khalid Masud

#44. Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself.

Sue Monk Kidd

#45. She was mined for the children
in her, one daughter, then another,
a short seam, quick to clay,
and not a single son to save them.

Robert Wrigley

#46. How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?

Andrea Dworkin

#47. The patriarchy is alive and well in Egypt and the wider Arab world.

Shereen El Feki

#48. There was the one basic storyline, which everyone knew, with the few custom endings to choose now and again. Basic: humming grandmas and polycentric dancing and drinks made from tree sap and patriarchy.

Taiye Selasi

#49. Lovely, quite girl, no trouble, no trouble at all. You wouldn't even know she was in the house. That is often the yarn twisted around women's wrists.

Sue Monk Kidd

#50. I un-gritted my teeth to speak. "I need no more proof of tyranny.""Our only desire is the wellbeing of the common man.""I am not a man.

Rod Duncan

#51. Boys need healthy self-esteem. They need love. And a wise and loving feminist politics can provide the only foundation to save the lives of male children. Patriarchy will not heal them. If that were so they would all be well.

Bell Hooks

#52. Men have more to lose than their chains .

Heidi Hartmann

#53. It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.

Camille Paglia

#54. I think what's happening in the world - there's nothing more dangerous than a wounded beast, and the patriarchy is wounded.

Jane Fonda

#55. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. (Junot Diaz)

Carolina De Robertis

#56. Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other
outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#57. The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.

Bell Hooks

#58. Women are rising. And I think that's all the violence and war - it could be the last gasp of the patriarchy, actually.

Jane Fonda

#59. Patriarchy is not God's dream for humanity.

Sarah Bessey

#60. To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.

Bell Hooks

#61. Women internalize the feminine wound or feminine inferiority so deeply, there's little or no female authority and esteem to fall back on. So they seek it by adopting and pleasing patriarchal standards.

Sue Monk Kidd

#62. Some people are surprised that the Republicans are waging a war on women, or that they voted against equal pay for women. I'm not surprised at all. In some ways, it may be a good thing. They're defending the patriarchy, which is a wounded beast! And wounded beasts are always dangerous.

Jane Fonda

#63. He came to see, and I did too, that patriarchy wounds men also, that men have their own journeys to make in order to heal and differentiate themselves from it.

Sue Monk Kidd

#64. Recognition of the harm that patriarchy has caused to people and the planet does not mean that men are wrong and women are right; rather it is a call for new organizational forms and for relishing gender differences within a context of equality.

Elizabeth Lesser

#65. Myths born in patriarchy offer a limited source of data on women. What they usually tell is how women react under patriarchy.

Sue Monk Kidd

#66. 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

#67. There are things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's not just peculiar to Mormonism - it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our creativity.

Terry Tempest Williams

#68. Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.

Bell Hooks

#69. Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.

Timothy Morton

#70. The Women's March did what it set out to do and that is to show the sheer magnitude of passion that the female voice can project and most importantly, for our future generations, it has shattered the falsity of the patriarch myth that women do not support other women.

Aysha Taryam

#71. Overturning patriarchy does not mean replacing men's dominance with women's dominance. That would merely maintain the patriarchal pattern of dominance. We need to transform the pattern itself.

Petra Kelly

#72. The enemy of feminism isn't men. It's patriarchy, and patriarchy is not men. It is a system, and women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equality.

Justine Musk

#73. One way or another, we spend our whole lives being conditioned into accepting some line or order, some position of domination or subjection. It's hard to unlearn such hierarchy, to undo such control. It's implicit.

Cliff James

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

Germaine Greer

#75. As a system, patriarchy encourages men to accept male privilege and perpetuate women's oppression, if only through silence.

Allan G. Johnson

#76. If it's not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I'm interested in but don't yet know. It's when they explain things to me I know and they don't that the conversation goes awry.

Rebecca Solnit

#77. It's hard to measure success when we're dealing with between 500 and 5,000 years of patriarchy depending on which continent we sit, so I would say feminism has been successful and we have a huge distance to go, huge.

Gloria Steinem

#78. Submissive men, men who desire to serve as consensual slaves, are on one of the most difficult journeys in the world today, because they have rejected patriarchal privilege and embraced their own heart's calling instead.

TammyJo Eckhart

#79. 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

#80. The curse that was laid upon Eve
her desire would be for her husband, and her pain in childbirth would be greatly multiplied
even shows us how patriarchy, subordination, and pain are part of the Fall. They were never God's original intent; they are a consequence of sin.

Sarah Bessey

#81. Patriarchy's chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole.

Kate Middleton

#82. Nothing indicts female allegiance to patriarchy more than the willingness to behave as though the problems created by cultural investment in sexist thinking about the nature of male and female roles can be solved by women's working harder.

Bell Hooks

#83. The engine of capitalist patriarchy runs on the dirty fuel of women's shame.

Laurie Penny

#84. We're witnessing the end of a 5,000 year reign of patriarchy, and are coming into a society created by our technology that will be more balanced and more feminine. It's already happening. And I think that the good news is that it's coming just in time.

Leonard Shlain

#85. And that's the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones.

Jill Lepore

#86. Misogyny was born of fear of women.

Sarah B. Pomeroy

#87. So now you are a woman. Do you have the least idea of what that means?
It means that I am now fit to be wedded and bedded ( ... ) and to bear children for the king.

George R R Martin

#88. If you're in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination - even though you understand it intersectionally - you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that's what is needed to change the situation.

Bell Hooks

#89. [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

#90. Patriarchy 101 would have you believe otherwise, but you know - that's just not true. Those inequalities are recipes for resentment. And, yes, the formula isn't perfect yet. We don't all have that. But we're trying.

Gloria Steinem

#91. Especially on television, it's not so much a patriarchy; it always seems that there's a smart, strong woman calling the shots, and her doofus husband. In the sitcom world, it's almost a cliche that the women have the common sense, going back to 'The Honeymooners.'

Jake Weber

#92. Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn't killed our hearts. It's killed men's hearts. It's silenced them; it's cut them off.

Eve Ensler

#93. Patriarchy is a fundamental imbalance underlying society And it's one we rarely address because it's so universal. But as I get older, I see that peace is a product of balance.

Ani DiFranco

#94. One of the key things about the entitlement and power of patriarchy, but also within feminism, is not that it's wilful nastiness. But you can't ask for permission. You can negotiate and you can bring people on board and you can build a base but you can't expect for it to be given.

Rachel Holmes

#95. It's not about winning, Haven. I'm not a prize to be won. I'm not the princess that needs rescuing from the dragon. I'm the prince and I kill my own monsters. You need to be ok with that. -Anita Blake

Laurell K. Hamilton

#96. In my real life I had to confront the sins of the father, but it's also a symbolic journey - a social, psychological, sexual journey for women and minorities who must pass through patriarchy and the symbolic order in order to claim a self.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#97. Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity ... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.

Kate Millett

#98. There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

Adrienne Rich

#99. 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

#100. 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