Top 100 Quotes About Women's History
#1. Women's history is the
primary tool for women's emancipation.
Gerda Lerner
#2. Their story, as the Delany sisters like to say, is not meant as "black" or "women's" history, but American history. It belongs to all of us. (From the Preface of "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years)
Amy Hill Hearth
#3. Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.
Elizabeth Janeway
#4. History is no longer just a chronicle of kings and statesmen, of people who wielded power, but of ordinary women and men engaged in manifold tasks. Women's history is an assertion that women have a history.
Toshiko Kishida
#5. The most common characteristic of women's history is to be lost and discovered, lost again and rediscovered, lost once more and re-rediscovered - a process of tragic waste and terrible silences that will continue until women's stories are a full and equal part of the human story.
Gloria Steinem
#6. When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.
Gerda Lerner
#7. A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
Naomi Wolf
#9. Women's history is women's right-an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision.
Gerda Lerner
#10. I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.
Antonia Fraser
#11. As we move beyond Women's History Month, I am committed to advancing legislation to raise the minimum wage and ensure women are paid equally for equal work.
Colleen Hanabusa
#12. The clear lesson of New England's history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.
Wallace Stegner
#13. Our recent history should have made one thing clear. Women's rights are human rights. Any foreign policy that fails to recognize this effectively dehumanizes half the human race.
Jack Holland
#14. It is Republicans that have led the fight for women's equality. Go back through history and look at who was the first woman to ever vote, elected to office, go to Congress.
Marsha Blackburn
#15. At this point of time in history, I don't think that women in any work force that's a male-dominated work force have the same rules to play or live by as men do.
Kari Matchett
#16. Feminism rotates between backlash and interest. And the cool thing about the Internet is that it's allowing women more access to their own history. Part of the problem before the Internet was that we didn't know which books to read. Someone had to tell you.
Kathleen Hanna
#18. I defend the authority of women and explore its meaning for them rather than assume they need to be more accommodating or sensitive.
David Bedrick
#19. Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
C.S. Lewis
#20. The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.
Betty Friedan
#21. For the first time in history, Congress has 100 women in it. Congratulations. Welcome to modern times, America. It's great having 100 women in Congress. Unless you're in line for the congressional bathroom.
Craig Ferguson
#22. Suppressed I Rise is for anyone interested in a very personal, human view of the history of World War II. A mother's attempt to protect and raise her two young daughters in hostile NAZI Germany challenges her sensibilities and resourcefulness.
Hank Bracker
#23. I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.
Jodie Foster
#24. I'm not blaming men, I'm not blaming women. What's gone by has already gone by. It's history. It's done. There is no right or wrong in higher spirituality.
Frederick Lenz
#25. It's all very romantic," Gabriel said, and then frowned. "Or it would be, if my brother could get a word out without sounding like a choking frog. I fear he will not go down in history as one of the world's greatest wooers of women.
Cassandra Clare
#26. I look at history, there's not a government on the planet I respect. No country in history was ever safe to its women; internet sex is $100 billion a year industry, and 15-20 million men a day have sex with a child in sexual slavery.
Patch Adams
#27. And in the act of making things, just by living their daily lives, they also make history.
Knitting is clothing made in spare moments, or round the fire, whenever women gathered together ... It's something to celebrate-clothes made in love and service, something women have always done.
Anne Bartlett
#28. A woman's got one life: She's got to reach out and grab it with both hands, or it'll pass her by and leave nothing but a smelly old fart in her face.
Robin Schone
#29. The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women's rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.
James McGreevey
#30. The woman's march of today have deep roots and shoud be respected. Our country must find unification and not division, with men as well as women of all parties rallying around their cause!" Captain Hank Bracker, author of "The Exciting Story of Cuba.
Hank Bracker
#31. Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don't think that the words are necessarily nullified. It's just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of.
Cornel West
#32. I decided I had to find out if it was my scene or not. So I stepped in at the deep end. It leads you to survive or drown. Very often you survive.
Theresa Sjoquist
#33. Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
Germaine Greer
#34. I don't think that women being seen as inferior is a prejudice based on male hatred of women. When you look at history, it's a prejudice based on simple fact.
Caitlin Moran
#35. The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.
Emma Goldman
#36. The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.
Queen Elizabeth II
#37. It's the 21st century. It's untenable to suggest that women had no significance and no interest and that just because they didn't vote they had no relevance to the course of our history.
Kate Williams
#38. During the conflict that was placed before them, they not only gained the gratitude of many in their own generation but they proved, for the first time on a global scale, the enormous value of a woman's contribution, paving the way for future generations of women to do the same.
Kathryn J. Atwood
#39. Elizabeth Cady read the nation's great Declaration, and it bothered her. All men are created equal, it said. But what about women?
Joy Hakim
#40. The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.
Gail Collins
#41. I truly believed that a man should not be seen to be out front on feminism. That would be just like a man to try to take over the women's movement. We'd taken over everything else in history, in society, in the world, why not feminism, too? No, I don't think so.
Terry Fallis
#42. The cool thing about the Internet is that it's allowing women more access to their own history.
Kathleen Hanna
#43. Once you fall for someone, their smell can be a powerful thing. Women will wear their boyfriends' T-shirts, and throughout tales in history men have held on to their lover's handkerchief.
Helen Fisher
#44. In 1946 there was no money in art, no dealer galleries, no craft shops. After the war we started to teach art in every school for the first time. Our generation played a crucial role. We were the stepping stones towards today's galleries.
Theresa Sjoquist
#45. But really, for me, I tried to find first-person accounts. I tried to read stories from men and women who had survived slavery because it's different when you hear it from their mouths instead of reading it from a history book.
Jurnee Smollett
#46. Empowered Women 101: The moment you ignore bad behavior, in order to win a person's affection you have not won anything, but a person that has behavioral problems. If you couldn't fix their behavior before you won him, why could you fix him now?
Shannon L. Alder
#47. Human history's greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves.
Malcolm X
#48. Sigh. Here's another fine woman that historians can't believe was real. Of course she was real. Not only is there a splendid Chinese poem called "The Ballad of Mulan", there is also n excellent cartoon by Disney.
Sandi Toksvig
#49. The male clerk with his quill pen and copper-plate handwriting had gone for good. The female short-hand typist took his place. It was a decisive moment in women's emancipation.
A.J.P. Taylor
#50. You are you because you love the way the world looks through your camera. You are you because of the way you love your friends and family. Not because some scar is on your body. That's a part of your history and what helps form what you believe in. not what defines you.
A.M. Willard
#51. It was the best route to get folks to understand segregation fast. Civil rights and women's rights had a clear history. Making the transition to rights for people with disabilities became easier because we had the history of the other two.
Major Owens
#52. Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.
Germaine Greer
#53. The history of God's people is not a record of God searching for courageous men and women who could handle the task, but God transforming the hearts of cowards and calling them to live courageous lives.
Erwin McManus
#54. Bah! Suffragettes. I've no time for suffragettes. They made the biggest mistake in history. They went for equality. They should have gone for power!
Jennifer Worth
#55. The history of fan fiction demonstrates how efficient, and effective, women have been at pooling together to get what they want out of their stories. It's been a largely female-driven world.
Sherwood Smith
#56. The history of the women's movement in America follows a consciousness-amnesia cycle.
Carol Tavris
#58. There's a long, long history of women suffering abuse, injustice, and not having the same opportunities as men, and I think that's been very detrimental to the human race as a whole.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#59. It's important that young people know about the struggles we faced to get to the point we are today. Only then will they appreciate the hard-won freedom of blacks in this country.
Amelia Boynton Robinson
#60. Within the stable economy it's necessary to eliminate all forms of sexual discrimination, and to provide women for the first time in our history with economic opportunities equal to those of men.
Jimmy Carter
#61. I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.
Betty Friedan
#62. Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.
Grover Cleveland
#63. Sexual activity, for women, has a history of vulnerability, in a way it simply does not have for men. The mother has to teach thishidden text to her daughter. The mother's warnings, her attempts to halt sexual development in her daughter, are not so much signs of disapproval or envy, but of fear.
Terri E Apter
#64. If you think there's a thing - anything - women didn't do in the past, you're wrong.
Kameron Hurley
#65. In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#66. I pray every single moment of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.
Susan B. Anthony
#67. The study of women's intelligence and personality has had broadly the same history as the one we record for Negroes ... in drawing a parallel between the position of, and feeling toward, women and Negroes, we are uncovering a fundamental basis of our culture.
Gunnar Myrdal
#68. When will the human race choose wisely? All know it is just as eventful, if not more so, when the young seek adventure, purpose, and dreams; instead of blaming everyone but themselves if they choose otherwise
Theresa Sjoquist
#69. We knew it was going to be the biggest event scheduled in the history of women's sports, but we didn't ever fathom we would be playing before sold-out stadiums all over the country.
Lorrie Fair
#70. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.
Gordon Brown
#71. I am thinking of our family's women
as faraway bulbs, their history
with crippling loss, and
how I am pieced together, shell and sand,
from the spine of their collective strength.
Jerrold Yam
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Until quite recently women's histories were largely overlooked but in the wake of feminism there has been increasing interest in retrieving them.
Alison Weir
#75. There's no way to approach anything in an objective way. We're completely subjective; our view of the world is completely controlled by who we are as human beings, as men or women, by our age, our history, our profession, by the state of the world.
Charlie Kaufman
#76. She was an autocrat, didn't really believe in democracy. The benefit of her approach was that, if you work with twenty people and ask everybody's opinion, you would never achieve what she did.
Theresa Sjoquist
#77. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life ... Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
James Joyce
#78. The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Virginia Woolf
#79. It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.
Elizabeth Kostova
#80. Women's stories have been neglected for so long - unless they were queens. Exploring the history of women is a way of redressing that imbalance.
Kate Williams
#81. In the history of women's tennis the great players have come back from long absences with no problems.
Lindsay Davenport
#82. Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
Adrienne Rich
#84. We are expected, somehow, not to offend anyone on our way to liberation. There's an absurd expectation that the women's movement must be the first revolution in history to accomplish its goals without hurting anyone's feelings.
Mary Blakely
#85. Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.
Of course you cannot keep a wife-
Everyone's got to live their life!
Kristen McKee
#86. I write about what life was like for typical young women of the sixties - not the type that made headlines, the Hanoi Janes or Angela Davises, but moderates who nonetheless got swept up by history's tides during that turbulent time. All that turmoil lends itself to drama, intrigue, and murder.
Kay Kendall
#87. In my mind, the men and women of NASA are history's modern pioneers. They attempt the impossible, accept failure, and then back to the drawing board while the rest of us stand back and criticize.
Dan Brown
#88. Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It, London: Pluto Press, 1973.
Philippa Gregory
#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. One of the great weaknesses of the women's rights movement over the past two hundred years has been the tendency of its history to disappear, so that it must be resurrected for each new generation.
Susan Jacoby
#91. WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE WOMEN THAT HAVE MADE A REAL DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD THROUGHOUT HISTORY, WHAT THEY'VE DONE HAS ALMOST ALWAYS BEEN DEFINED BY FEARLESSNESS. STOP LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER - THERE'S NOBODY WHO MATTERS BACK THERE.
Anna Quindlen
#92. You have to pay attention to who you are. You need to know your family history as well as you can. It is important for young women to have preventive care. If you catch any women's cancers early it's the difference between life and death. Do you really want to leave your kids without a mother?
Cokie Roberts
#93. Men's bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend he circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural.
Jesmyn Ward
#94. A woman's death, through much of the same history, was thought to be a simpler thing, preferably quiet and uncomplaining, or tragically in childbirth. Just as women were denied the right and the capacity to a full life, they were denied the right and the capacity to a full death as well.
Robert C. Solomon
#95. If you're someone who genuinely believes that women don't deserve or aren't as much as men, you're like the plague. On the big history chart, you're the plague ... It's just pointless and deadly.
Joss Whedon
#96. The less that women are visible as a research subject, the less we are likely to learn about lesbians.
Bonnie J. Morris
#97. When women's true history shall have been written, her part in the upbuilding of this nation will astound the world.
Abigail Scott Duniway
#98. They inhabited a lost world of splendour and brutality, a world dominated by religious change, in which there were few saints.
Alison Weir
#99. I notice perfume smells on his shirts and even later hours. I suspect he's having an affair but really don't care.
Martha Lemasters
#100. Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.
Betty Friedan
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