Top 100 Quotes About Patriarchy
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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. It must be odd having a lover as a servant." Jack said. "You mean a servant as a lover." Violet said. "What you describe is merely how most men view marriage.
Lev A.C. Rosen
#71. 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
#72. Women are the only ones who will be able to eliminate the patriarchy, and when that happens all of us will win, men as much as women.
Isabel Allende
#73. Peace in patriarchy is war against women.
Maria Mies
#74. They offer you so much power. All that patriarchy! So tempting to take advantage of it.
Michael Moorcock
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. But whatever sameness I've noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.
Maggie Nelson
#79. Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.
Germaine Greer
#80. It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made.
Edith Wharton
#81. In the face of patriarchy, it is a brave act indeed for both men and women to embrace, rather than shame or attempt to eradicate, the feminine.
Alanis Morissette
#82. The God who hates trees is the founding father of patriarchy.
John Lamb Lash
#83. I wish she'd said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can't hide from it, not even here.
Raquel Cepeda
#84. Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.' (Leviticus 18:22). That means simply that it is foul to do to other men what men habitually, proudly, manfully do to women: use them as inanimate, empty, concave things; fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex.
Andrea Dworkin
#85. At Brandies I discovered Feminism. And I instantly became a convert ... writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages.
Heather Hart
#86. What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.
Bell Hooks
#87. At the center of the way black male selfhood is constructed in white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy is the image of the brute - untamed, uncivilized, unthinking, and unfeeling.
Bell Hooks
#88. If overthrowing some five thousand years of patriarchy seems like a big order, just focus on celebrating each self-respect step along the way
Eve Ensler
#89. As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favoring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail.
Judith Lewis Herman
#90. As a system, patriarchy encourages men to accept male privilege and perpetuate women's oppression, if only through silence.
Allan G. Johnson
#92. I tried to scream like you once screamed God since I wanted to make the whole world faint but Harry Astley clapped his hand over my mouth O the sheer joy of feeling my teeth sink in.
Alasdair Gray
#93. 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
#95. 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
#96. I like to see you in a sari, with your long hair dressed in a single plait. Don't forget that I married a girl from India because I like my wife to be conservative and feminine.
K. Kanagalatha
#97. 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
#98. She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become.
Rabih Alameddine
#99. The very act of accepting her position at Mademoiselle was an act of open defiance against Dick Norton, his entire family, and the gendered expectations of midcentury America.
Elizabeth Winder
#100. When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose.
Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
