Top 100 Quotes About Women's Movement
#1. What's universal is the texture of our relationships. It's evolving. Times are changing with the women's movement. Men's roles are being redefined and, in some ways, they're confused.
Terry McMillan
#2. The women's movement, not only here in the U.S., but worldwide, is bigger and stronger than ever before and in places where it has never been. It has arms. It has legs. And most importantly, it has heads.
Bella Abzug
#3. ..the women's movement never left the father Dick's side....We got a share of genocide profits and we love it...If we're Dick's sister and want what he has gotten, then in the end we support that system that he got it all from.
Mary Barfoot
#4. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
#7. The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.
Nora Ephron
#8. There's lots of prejudice, but if you examine yourself, you can make It. Of course, this doesn't make me too popular with some quarters in the women s movement.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
#9. I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.
Alice Walker
#10. Gloria Steinem said it best: "You can't do it all. No one can have two full-time jobs, have perfect children and cook three meals and be multi-orgasmic 'til dawn ... Superwoman is the adversary of the women's movement."5
Sheryl Sandberg
#11. The women's movement was always going to work in two parts. With one part, we'd break open the doors that were closed to women, and with the other part, we'd walk through, transforming society for men and women. Turns out it was a lot easier to open the doors.
Ellen Goodman
#12. I'm a child of the Women's Movement. I always believed that I could do anything. That women didn't have to be limited in any way.
Foxy Brown
#13. When the women's movement started in the 1960s, there was a vision of a future where women didn't wear makeup or worry about how their hair looked, and everybody wore sensible, comfortable clothes. It ran into an absolute brick wall.
Gail Collins
#14. If it wasn't for the women's movement, I wouldn't be where I am today.
Sally Ride
#15. The women's movement is taking a different form right now, and it is because it has been so effective and so successful that there's a huge counter movement to try to stop it, to try to divide women from one another, to try to almost foment divisiveness.
Carol Gilligan
#16. Bourgeois society is not fundamentally opposed to the bourgeois women's movement, which is proven by the fact that in various states reforms of private and public laws concerning women have been initiated.
Clara Zetkin
#17. There's always been a women's movement this century!
Mary Stott
#18. The women's movement completely changed attitudes all over the world in ways we'll never be able to count.
Holly Near
#19. 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
#20. Nonwhite and working-class women, if they are ever to identify with the organized women's movement, must see their own diverse experiences reflected in the practice and policy statements of these predominantly white middle-class groups.
Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
#21. When it comes to two of the big social earthquakes in the last fifty years - which are the gay movement and the women's movement - I think there is a direct line from Kinsey to those.
Bill Condon
#22. The women's movement ... has proved women's own worst enemy.
Susan Faludi
#23. What practical conclusions may we now draw for our propaganda work among women? The task of this Party Congress must not be to issue detailed practical suggestions, but to draw up general directions for the proletarian women's movement.
Clara Zetkin
#24. I was devastated when I got the review for my first book. The book came out a couple years before the women's movement broke through, and people were putting it down, asking, 'Why does the woman in this book need to get a divorce? Why can't she just shut up and be happy?'
Gail Sheehy
#25. I'm doing my bit for the women's movement. The women have always been naked in movies, and now I'm just desperate to take my clothes off as much as possible.
Ewan McGregor
#26. We must begin to create a revolutionary, multiracial women's movement that seriously addresses the main issues affecting poor and working-class women.
Angela Y. Davis
#27. The women's movement burst forth when I was fifteen. That was when I began to believe that life might semi-work out after all. The cavalry had arrived. Women were starting to say that you got to tell the truth now, that you had to tell the truth if you were going to heal and have an authentic life.
Anne Lamott
#28. The women's movement is a non-hierarchical one. It does things collectively and experimentally.
Robin Morgan
#29. The women's movement hit my neighborhood like a freight train. Everybody got divorced. You wonder what would have happened to women if the suburbs hadn't been built.
Susan Faludi
#30. Because women of color were more likely to be in the paid labor force, they were more likely to recognize discrimination, so they were always leading the women's movement.
Gloria Steinem
#31. The history of the women's movement in America follows a consciousness-amnesia cycle.
Carol Tavris
#32. I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.
Doris Lessing
#33. If the women's movement can be summed up in a single phrase, it is 'the right to choose'.
Beatrice Faust
#34. I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are?'
Nora Ephron
#35. Fault lines run along color lines in American public life, and the women's movement is no exception. Over the years, feminism has become more inclusive but there is still hard work to be done to include LGBT women and communities of color.
Christine Pelosi
#36. The women's movement has not found a way to reconnect comfortably with the religious impulse that was central to its origin.
Helen LaKelly Hunt
#37. The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
Grace Paley
#38. We believe an international women's movement needs to focus less on holding conventions or lobbying for new laws, and more time in places like rural Zimbabwe, listening to communities and helping them get their girls into school.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#39. Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women's movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There's no room for dissent.
Camille Paglia
#40. It's obviously a great sign of growth and success that the media no longer try to embody the bigness and diversity of the women's movement in one person. Only a diverse group can symbolize a movement.
Gloria Steinem
#41. You can't tell the story of the women's movement through the story of one woman.
Dyllan McGee
#42. Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women's movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step.
Gloria Steinem
#43. Sarah Palin is an heir to the women's movement. She has not been constrained by gender. At no point in her life has she thought, 'I can't do that because I'm a woman.'
Gail Collins
#44. The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.
Maya Angelou
#45. I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement. It gave me a vision that I could do something different, and it gave me an understanding that I wasn't a monster, or sport, or a betrayer of my family.
Dorothy Allison
#46. To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals
and critics of the Women's Movement.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#47. I also think the women's movement has unintentionally contributed to the dishonoring of motherhood. It happened because we made such a big deal about our right to go out into the world.
Marianne Williamson
#48. Megan, you just single handedly set the women's movement back twenty years
Anie Michaels
#49. What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married.
Gloria Steinem
#50. Gender equality, historically has been predominantly a women's movement for women. But I think the impact of gender inequality and how it's affecting men hasn't really been addressed.
Emma Watson
#51. The women's movement hasn't changed my sex life. It wouldn't dare.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
#52. The '60s are my favorite decade - with the Cold War, the women's movement. And then there's the music, the fashion, the clothes, the hair.
Margot Robbie
#53. My timing in life has been extraordinary. I've ridden the crest of the wave of the women's movement.
Susan Sullivan
#54. I feel very strongly that the Democratic Party has, in the past, been the party of the future. I think when you look at Social Security and Medicare, when you look at the civil rights movement, the women's movement, I think the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of change.
Richard Lamm
#55. I think the Women's movement has had a major impact on everybody's lives in our nation and in the world as a whole.
Bell Hooks
#56. But one did not do feminist theory, as such, in those days, not only because male academic discourse did not recognize such a term, but especially because the women's movement did not either.
Teresa De Lauretis
#57. 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
#58. The media and even, to some degree, leaders of women's organizations don't understand that the women's movement is an absolute part of society now. It is in the consciousness, it is taken for granted. It is part of the way women look at themselves, and women are looked at.
Betty Friedan
#59. Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women's movement that liberated us, however.
Cathleen Schine
#60. When the women's movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the '60s besides a women's movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.
Gail Collins
#61. Praxis is about applying one's knowledge to challenge oppressive systems and unequal traditions. It is related to the well-known phrase "the personal is political" espoused by many advocates of the second-wave women's movement.
Michele Tracy Berger
#62. There would be no need for the women's movement if the church and Bible hadn't abused them
Leo Booth
#63. I'm not going to say that all the cabinet appointments of the men and women, you know, obviously we might have some reservations on some, but the women's movement has congratulated them for some of the appointments and is urging and encouraging more women in the Executive Branch and high areas.
Eleanor Smeal
#64. The women's movement will present a growing threat to patriarchal religion less by attacking it than by simply leaving it behind.
Carol P. Christ
#65. Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s.
Camille Paglia
#66. I don't know if this is a true statistic, but I heard somewhere that there are three times as many single women over forty as single men. That's what we got from the women's movement. The chickens have come home to roost.
Jack Nicholson
#67. The women's movement in England was totally against Margaret Thatcher.
Gloria Steinem
#68. And, I think, for those of us who came of age with the women's movement, there's always the fear that it's not real, you're not really allowed to determine your own life. It may be pulled back at any moment.
Frances Mayes
#69. The women's movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming.
Sally Ride
#70. Without Police Woman I wouldn't have had a career. The show started about the same time the women's movement was taking off. Ours was the first prime-time one-hour show featuring a strong, professional woman. It paved the way for other series to follow.
Angie Dickinson
#71. I have come to understand that in order to effectively advance women's rights, we need to galvanize a global women's movement.
Zainab Salbi
#72. Twenty years later, twenty years after I joined the women's movement, we're still talking about the same issues. We're still talking about reproductive rights for women, and we're still talking about getting equal pay for women. And that's just frustrating.
Corin Tucker
#73. The women's movement is just a symptom of basic changes in the economy that are favoring women.
Helen Fisher
#74. In the women's movement, women needed men to stand up and say, 'This isn't right.' In the civil rights of the '60s, it took people of all color to demand equal rights.
Pauley Perrette
#75. I think obviously we need to work harder at extending the women's movement. How do women who have prepared for careers and have a child get back to the workplace and still fulfill maternal roles?
Tom Brokaw
#76. I ... was not too happy to suddenly take on this public role thrust upon me. They just assumed I was the Joan of Arc of the women's movement. And I wasn't at all. It put a lot of unnecessary pressure on me.
Bea Arthur
#77. I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.
Grace Paley
#78. I'm a huge supporter of women. What I'm not a supporter of liberalism. Feminism is what I oppose. Feminism has led women astray. I love the women's movement, especially walking behind it.
Rush Limbaugh
#79. People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
Ellen Goodman
#80. The plight of the actor, even if he's a star, is the plight of the women's movement. They're saying the same thing to us: get into bed, give me a good time, then give me something to eat, go get the laundry, be a good girl.
Dustin Hoffman
#81. I hear myself saying these words: What this movement is about is options. I say it to friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I'm really thinking is, If you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.
Nora Ephron
#82. When women turn on women, and take cheap shots at their decisions purely to score political points it serves as proof that feminism, as a movement, is dead and no longer relevant or credible.
S. E. Cupp
#83. Feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor - it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers - it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.
Kavita Ramdas
#84. There's a reason why the assumed goal for women in virginity-movement screeds is marriage and motherhood only: The movement only believes that's the only thing women are meant for.
Jessica Valenti
#85. In early 1970, Newsweek's editors decided that the new women's liberation movement deserved a cover story. There was one problem, however: there were no women to write the piece.
Lynn Povich
#86. Women have a lot to say about how to advance women's rights, and governments need to learn from that, listen to the movement and respond.
Charlotte Bunch
#87. I think - and even with the Live Chin Up movement - it's about women doing things for themselves. Being empowered. Doing things that make you happy. I believe in that philosophy.
Khloe Kardashian
#88. In my small way I became an integral part of the pottery movement, and added fuel to the fire which consumed New Zealand and and swept pottery to the forefront of the of the fifties and sixties.
Theresa Sjoquist
#89. I like that people can just look at you and know that you are taken, that you are mine." He closed his eyes and laughed. "And yes, I know that sentiment is at the top of the Women's Liberation Movement's list of things not to say to a modern woman.
Patricia Briggs
#90. Let's start a movement - a movement of men who aren't afraid to stop violence against women.
Carlos Andres Gomez
#91. If half the society isn't engaged on any number of sectors, success and potential will be limited. In that sense, I do definitely believe there is a growing movement and moment for women's issues.
Zainab Salbi
#92. Women's liberation as a movement makes some valid points. But in the final analysis, it doesn't matter who wears the pants - as long as there's money in the pockets.
Ava Gardner
#93. The idea of equality is still how I define feminism. I think it's a broad definition that encompasses the variety of experiences women and men have with the word and the movement.
Julie Zeilinger
#94. I was alive during the women's lib movement, and I do not remember anyone taking a position against cooking. I think they were talking about other things.
Nora Ephron
#95. When I went to college in the 1970s, the Women's Liberation movement was all the buzz.
Marianne Williamson
#96. The state's interest in marriage is stability. Generally speaking, polygamy does not work for stability. Inherent in the whole polygamous movement is a deep and abiding misogyny and denigration of women. So polygamy is objectionable on lots of grounds.
Gene Robinson
#97. If the day hadn't yet convinced him of the merits of women's suffrage, it had certainly convinced him of the justness of the movement for Rational Dress.
Graham Moore
#98. [Ella Baker]'s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership ... 'She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge'. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement.
Gail Collins
#99. CoverGirl's Girls CAN movement is perfectly aligned with my passion for helping young women overcome life's challenges, and my commitment to highlighting girls' successes. I am thrilled to partner with CoverGirl to embark on this exciting journey to improve the lives of girls and women in the world.
Soledad O'Brien
#100. I believe that feminism has become a political movement that seeks to obtain unlimited rights for woman without corresponding responsibilities via the suppression of feminism.Under my definition, helping oppressed women in other countries falls outside the scope of the movement's interests.
Mike Adams