Top 100 Quotes About Women's Movement
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. ..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
#7. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
Norman Mailer
#10. The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.
Nora Ephron
#11. 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
#12. I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.
Alice Walker
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. If it wasn't for the women's movement, I wouldn't be where I am today.
Sally Ride
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. There's always been a women's movement this century!
Mary Stott
#27. Let's start a movement - a movement of men who aren't afraid to stop violence against women.
Carlos Andres Gomez
#28. 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
#29. The women's movement completely changed attitudes all over the world in ways we'll never be able to count.
Holly Near
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The women's movement ... has proved women's own worst enemy.
Susan Faludi
#37. 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
#38. When I went to college in the 1970s, the Women's Liberation movement was all the buzz.
Marianne Williamson
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. The women's movement is a non-hierarchical one. It does things collectively and experimentally.
Robin Morgan
#46. [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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. The history of the women's movement in America follows a consciousness-amnesia cycle.
Carol Tavris
#52. I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.
Doris Lessing
#53. In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news.
Bob Edwards
#54. Why was it that nine men out of ten thought women were incapable of doing anything but boiling potatoes? she thought furiously, and felt a savage sympathy for members of the Women's Lib movement, which up until now she had always faintly despised.
Sue Peters
#55. If the women's movement can be summed up in a single phrase, it is 'the right to choose'.
Beatrice Faust
#56. 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
#57. This semester has born in me the flame of hope to one day become a leader in the modern feminist movement. I can and will be the force that blows new life into it, giving a face and name to associate with instead of those women now who's names I don't know because they weren't listed on Wikipedia.
Christy Leigh Stewart
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. The feminist movement is often clouded with Gloria Steinem's perspective, but I feel like denying women their sexuality is just as chauvinistic.
Amber Heard
#61. According to this hermeneutic, if we follow what the NT says about the relationships between men and women and husbands and wives, we will not be doing the will of God, for the redemptive movement in Scripture means we must go beyond Scripture to discover God's perfect will.
Benjamin Reaoch
#62. The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
Grace Paley
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. We have successful, strong-willed, independent women who stand up for conservative, traditional values. Women are leading this movement because they've been raised to be unafraid....I didn't grow up feeling oppressed. I didn't grow up feeling like a victim.
S. E. Cupp
#67. You can't tell the story of the women's movement through the story of one woman.
Dyllan McGee
#68. I believe and support the feminist movement, but I am not generally interested in considering women's rights in relation to equality with men, or in a competition with men, but rather within their own rights and feminine space.
Shirin Neshat
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. It is ironic that a movement that made its reputation championing the irrelevance of biological differences when those differences were to most women's disadvantage immediately returned to biological determinism when those differences were to the most women's advantage.
Warren Farrell
#75. We often forget that the women's rights movement actually grew out of the abolition movement. It is really within abolitionism that many of the leading women's rights advocates gained experience as organizers and lecturers.
Manisha Sinha
#76. I don't care how many championships you've won or how many records you've broken - if you've had a hand in pushing forward not only a game but women in sport's movement, then I think that's pretty darn good.
Abby Wambach
#77. 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
#78. Megan, you just single handedly set the women's movement back twenty years
Anie Michaels
#79. What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married.
Gloria Steinem
#80. 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
#81. The women's movement hasn't changed my sex life. It wouldn't dare.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
#82. 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
#83. You have to go back to the Children's Crusade in 1212 AD to find as unfortunate and fatuous an attempt at manipulated hysteria as the Women's Liberation Movement.
Helen Lawrenson
#84. My timing in life has been extraordinary. I've ridden the crest of the wave of the women's movement.
Susan Sullivan
#85. Surely women's liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained.
George Gilder
#86. 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
#87. Women's liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful.
Rebecca Solnit
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. In the '60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn't just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.
George Clooney
#92. 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
#93. The evolution of national unity and equal rights is all about what America represents as a nation today: a manifestation of the historical episodes of Jefferson and Henry as well as the Civil War, the Women's Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights struggles.
Patrick Mendis
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Women's propaganda must touch upon all those questions which are of great importance to the general proletarian movement. The main task is, indeed, to awaken the women's class consciousness and to incorporate them into the class struggle.
Clara Zetkin
#98. The women's suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.
Winston Churchill
#99. You could not be in the civil rights movement without having an appreciation for everybody's rights. That these rights are not divisible - not something men have and women don't and so on.
Julian Bond
#100. True, the movement for women's rights has broken many old fetters, but it has also forged new ones.
Emma Goldman
