Top 100 Quotes About The Patriarchy
#1. Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.
Roxane Gay
#2. 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
#3. The patriarchy is alive and well in Egypt and the wider Arab world.
Shereen El Feki
#4. I think what's happening in the world - there's nothing more dangerous than a wounded beast, and the patriarchy is wounded.
Jane Fonda
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. If every planet in the Patriarchy refused to be ruled, we all would be free.
Joan Slonczewski
#9. Reproductive freedom is a real danger for the patriarchy, because it means that women are empowered.
Jane Fonda
#10. But I do have conversations about the Patriarchy and I am having them with gay men. At eighteen, I am discovering what generations of women have long known. The natural ally of the straight woman is the gay man because they are others losers too.
Caitlin Moran
#11. After much diligent research, aided by other women, I gradually came to understand that beneath the familiar Goddesses of the patriarchy, there is a much more ancient Goddess.
Carol P. Christ
#12. Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.
Audre Lorde
#13. Smile, but not for long, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Patriarchy.
Nelly Kaplan
#14. 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
#15. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man
Virginia Woolf
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As
Kate Millett
#26. 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
#27. Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.
Bell Hooks
#28. 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
#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. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
Germaine Greer
#38. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.
Bell Hooks
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.
Germaine Greer
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. The God who hates trees is the founding father of patriarchy.
John Lamb Lash
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#72. 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
#73. She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become.
Rabih Alameddine
#74. 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
#75. When I discarded the idea that God was not a man (as I had been raised to think and believe without question), I grew distant, and the flame that once lit my path began to flicker and hiss like a candle burnt to its wick, making longevity impossible without a new energy source.
B.G. Bowers
#76. Agni was her brother and she loved him, and he often understood her, but he was a man. In the end he thought as a man thinks, of owning and mastering.
Judith Tarr
#77. The fundamental imbalance that is behind all of the other social diseases is patriarchy.
Ani DiFranco
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. This strong female presence was remarkable in the aggressive patriarchy of Mecca and may explain why women were among the first to respond to the message of the Qur'an.
Karen Armstrong
#81. 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
#82. The engine of capitalist patriarchy runs on the dirty fuel of women's shame.
Laurie Penny
#83. 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
#84. There needs to be more women scholars, and that is not something new, we need to return to the glorified past and get more women scholars involved to overcome the Fetahs of patriarchy.
Mark Durie
#85. 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
#86. Rap comes from the humble beginnings of rebelling against the status quo. Now, rappers have become the status quo themselves. You can't rebel against the Queen and then become the Queen yourself. I attribute much of the blame to testosterone-male dominance and patriarchy.
Chuck D
#87. Our very strength as lesbians lies in the fact that we are outside of patriarchy; our existence challenges its life.
Charlotte Bunch
#88. 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
#89. And the answer is, of course, "Ugh, patriarchy.
Emily Nagoski
#90. We walked through the streets with our protectors. We wore our dresses. We gave up our education because that was the price of safety. That was the bargain we made with the devil we knew to escape the devil we didn't.
C.J. Redwine
#91. That a woman claims not to be feminist does not diminish the necessity of feminism. If anything, it makes us see the extent of the problem, the successful reach of patriarchy.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#92. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge.
Virginia Woolf
#96. 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
#97. [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
#98. Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself ... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home.
Gloria Steinem
#99. 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
#100. Because the pure girls get rescued."
Mary Lou felt something she didn't let herself feel often. She was well and truly pissed off. "Why do girls have to be all pure and innocent and good? Why don't guys have to be?
Libba Bray
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