Quotes About Oppression Of Women

#1. Let us recognize that we can no longer tolerate violent oppression of women in the name of religion and culture any more than we would tolerate violent oppression espoused by any other bully in the name of a twisted rationale.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#2. In effect, Saudi Arabia legitimizes fundamentalism, religious discrimination, intolerance and the oppression of women. Saudi women not only can't drive, but are also told by some clerics that they mustn't wear seatbelts for fear of showing the outlines of their bodies.

Nicholas Kristof

#3. You look at us and you see oppression; we see stability and harmony. You see corruption; we see ties of family, friendship, and mutual support. You see feudalism, we see mutual responsibility. You see the oppression of women, we see the defense of modesty.

Michael Gruber

#4. The oppression of women is the single most corrosive and urgent problem of our time.

Brandi Carlile

#5. Until men learn to celebrate and operate on the feminine aspect of themselves and stop the oppression of women, children, the environment, other species, we don't have a world to live in. It's not a world that anyone chooses to live in.

James Cromwell

#6. When you have increasing power of religious groups, oppression of women increases. Women are oppressed in all religions.

Nawal El Saadawi

#7. I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

Richard Dawkins

#8. The feminists who are aware of the effects of patriarchy realize that we are all in the same boat from the dangers of patriarchy, and that the oppression of women is universal.

Nawal El Saadawi

#9. [Stieg] was describing Sweden the way it was and the way he saw the country: the scandals, the oppression of women, the friends he cherished and wished to honor.

Eva Gabrielsson

#10. The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.

Audre Lorde

#11. I mostly hate organized religion, which I think is a force for the oppression of women and creates warfare.

Erica Jong

#12. Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns.

Audre Lorde

#13. Whiffle [whine and wheeze and snuff and sniffle]: The annoying scratchy sound made by weepy feminists as they lament the sufferings of women and, houndlike, sniff out evidence of male oppression.

Camille Paglia

#14. 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

#15. What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization, but an internation conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.

Camille Paglia

#16. Women prefer to serve the present and are afraid of age; they are in the grip of youth of their dreams. Age is truly an oppression for women.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

#17. Black men and women who refuse to live under oppression are dangerous to white society because they become symbols of hope to their brothers and sisters, inspiring them to follow their example.

Huey Newton

#18. The subtlest and most vicious aspect of women's oppression is that we have been conditioned to believe we are not oppressed, blinded so as not to see our own condition.

Robin Morgan

#19. In poor environment, I find great inspiration. Many of the men and women whom I admire as artists, the things they write, the songs they sing, the admission is filled with inspired moments to overcome oppression.

Harry Belafonte

#20. Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It, London: Pluto Press, 1973.

Philippa Gregory

#21. A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.

Kate Millett

#22. Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

Louis D. Brandeis

#23. The "Otherizing" of women is the oldest oppression known to our species, and it's the model, the template, for all other oppressions.

Robin Morgan

#24. Women are suffering because they are being excluded. The high military council excluded women from the committee to change the constitution [of Egypt]. We cannot be liberated as women in a society built on class oppression or gender oppression or religious oppression.

Nawal El Saadawi

#25. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.

Audre Lorde

#26. The fear of being alone, or of being unloved, had caused women of all races to passively accept sexism and sexist oppression.

Bell Hooks

#27. There were many groups working for women's rights, but none of them dealt with the root cause of women's oppression-religion.

Anne Nicol Gaylor

#28. How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?

Christine De Pizan

#29. 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

#30. Prostitution is not a profession, it is the result of sexism and gender oppression.

Nocturnus Libertus

#31. [H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn't be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign?

Nick Hornby

#32. From joblessness to lack of education and professional skills to sexual and gender-based violence, women face a multi-faceted oppression.

Zainab Salbi

#33. Feminism has never just been about liberating women from men, but about freeing every human being from the straitjacket of gender oppression.

Laurie Penny

#34. This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.

Sheila Jeffreys

#35. Iranian women are very consciously aware of gender-explicit oppression. Therefore: with so much more at stake, Iranian women have each other's back: on the street, in stores, at celebrations, everywhere.

Inga Muscio

#36. Feminists have convinced themselves that any difference between men and women is oppression and that women in the United States are an oppressed minority. This is such a lie. American women are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the earth.

Phyllis Schlafly

#37. Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression ... Our endeavors must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child.

Nelson Mandela

#38. I have no country...my countrymen are the men and women who work against oppression- it does not matter where they are. With them I feel at home- we understand each other. Others are foreign to me." -Agnes Smedley in Daughter of Earth

Agnes Smedley

#39. The idea is that the woman's heritage and background are just as important as the man's. Many women see taking a man's name as a gesture of symbolic oppression. It's like saying to the woman, 'Who you are as a person isn't as important as who I am.

Rhoda Janzen

#40. I want to read
so I can read the Koran
read the signs in the street
know the number of the bus
I'm supposed to take
when I one day leave this house.

Eve Ensler

#41. 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

#42. While women across the globe have many differences - language, culture, environment - our similarities are undeniable, and the impact of abuse and oppression affects us all.

Carre Otis

#43. We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.

Andrea Dworkin

#44. Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women ... they ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

Bell Hooks

#45. Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote.

Gary Steiner

#46. Neither the chains of dictatorship nor the fetters of oppression can keep down the forces of freedom for long.

Angela Merkel

#47. In any conflict area, it is always the women who are the first point of attack. But I think the more they have seen of oppression and violence, they have gotten more brave, more strong, more fearless than they were. You see this refusal to just keep quiet and do as you are told.

Fatima Bhutto

#48. Women are prevented by the threat and reality of male violence from entering public space on equal terms with male citizens.

Sheila Jeffreys