Women's Liberation Quotes

#1. Women's liberation will not be achieved until a woman can become paunchy and bald and still think she's attractive to the opposite sex.

Earl Wilson

#2. In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men-but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily.

Robin Morgan

#3. Women's Liberation calls it enslavement but the real truth about the sexual revolution is that it has made of sex an almost chaotically limitless and therefore unmanageable realm in the life of women.

Midge Decter

#4. I am increasingly convinced that technological culture is the entire root of women's liberation.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#5. Women's liberation and the male midlife crisis were the same search
for personal fulfillment, common values, mutual respect, love. But while women's liberation was thought of as promoting identity, the male midlife crisis was thought of as an identity crisis.

Warren Farrell

#6. Fashion really is women's liberation in a lot of ways. Look at how many women in this country are depressed about how they look and how they think they have to look! It's really sad. And it's not about money.

Iris Apfel

#7. Where I grew up, women's liberation was when you let a chick out of her cage for 15 minutes so she could stretch her legs.

John Rachel

#8. I think the fallacy is to think that Women's Liberation meant that men and women would become interchangeable. That has not happened, and most men and women would not want it to happen.

Christina Hoff Sommers

#9. I am the best male ally I have ever heard of for women and women's liberation.

Harvey Jackins

#10. The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

Jane Rule

#11. I was asked by a group to write a song on the theme of brotherhood. This was before women's liberation, when brotherhood meant men and women both, so I wrote the song. Since I had always been very fond of the Passion Chorale, I wrote words to that great piece.

Tom Glazer

#12. 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

#13. She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.

J. Courtney Sullivan

#14. Women's liberation by women who are already liberated through channels that would mess them up further

Nikhil Sharda

#15. When the women's liberation movement began, when people began protesting against the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, at the beginning of those movements, the majority of the country was not with them, did not believe in the basic principles of any of those philosophies.

Michael Moore

#16. Women's liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It's men who are discriminated against. They can't bear children. And no one is likely to do anything about that.

Golda Meir

#17. Where else but in America could the women's liberation movement take off their bras, then go on TV to complain about their lack of support?

Bob Hope

#18. The point of women's liberation is not to stand at the door of the male world, beating our fists, and crying, 'Let me in, damn you, let me in!' The point is to walk away from the world and concentrate on creating a new woman.

Vivian Gornick

#19. Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?

Andrea Dworkin

#20. Women's liberation did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual; the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.

Germaine Greer

#21. It strikes me as very strange that whereas Tennyson could support most of Mr. Buckley's propositions about free trade, and the private sector, and private enterprise, Tennyson found no difficulty also in lending intellectual support to the idea of Women's Liberation.

Germaine Greer

#22. A society can never be free without women's liberation

Abdullah Ocalan

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Women's liberation could have not succeeded if science had not provided them with contraception and household technology.

Max Perutz

#26. My wife's income allowed me to do what I really loved. I realized that women's liberation is men's liberation, too.

Warren Farrell

#27. 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

#28. The greatest impediment to women's liberation is dumb commercials.

Debora Geary

#29. Beware of the man who praises women's liberation. He's about to quit his job.

Erica Jong

#30. I don't care how far we've come with "women's liberation," with all these things. In a man's mind, he still needs to be the support of his family. He needs to hold up the world.

Suze Orman

#31. It's all up to you, girls. You have to be strong. These are the days of post-women's liberation. You have grown up by now and you have to take care of yourself. No one's going to help you.

Kathy Acker

#32. Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation ... none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#33. Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it.

Germaine Greer

#34. The backlash convinced the public that women's 'liberation' was the true contemporary American scourge - the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and economic problems.

Susan Faludi

#35. When I went to college in the 1970s, the Women's Liberation movement was all the buzz.

Marianne Williamson

#36. Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.

Corita Kent

#37. The most exciting thing about women's liberation is that this century will be able to take advantage of talent and potential genius that have been wasted because of taboos.

Helen Reddy

#38. The revolution and women's liberation go together. We do not talk of women's emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph. Women hold up the other half of the sky.

Thomas Sankara

#39. I do wonder, sometimes, if I had had a daughter, how I would have brought her up. How - when it's taken me so long to unlearn the things I believe are most damaging to the cause of women's liberation and equality - would I have raised my daughter to disobey?

Mona Eltahawy

#40. It is not women's liberation, it is women's and men's liberation.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#41. I'm not a big fan of Women's Liberation, but maybe it will help women stand up for the respect they're due.

Loretta Lynn

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers.

G.K. Chesterton

#47. The liberation of women has brought a lot of equality to the man, in the emancipation of the man as a bulldog; we can also be soft. It's interesting, because sometimes I maybe push the men a little bit more than the women, because it's a little bit less expected.

Mario Testino

#48. At the bitter end of an era of liberation - women's lib, kids' lib, animal lib, and everything-but-ethics lib - America has apparently been liberated from its moral foundations. But for too many, the good life has become a living hell.

Billy Graham

#49. To all the women I say, don't ask to be saved by anyone, "my brave baghinis" (tigresses). Remember, if you deem yourselves as sheeps, men will treat you as such, but if you deem yourselves as tigresses, then you are the ones who will shape humanity.

Abhijit Naskar

#50. The true call of liberation of women is not in taking off their clothes, but taking off their prejudices.

Shannon L. Alder

#51. Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.

Pearl S. Buck

#52. I work toward the liberation of women, but I'm not feminist. I'm just a woman.

Buchi Emecheta

#53. Who cuts hair, while she is heart broken. Is it just me?

Escapades

#54. Depending on which side of the fence you're on, you could argue that the sexual liberation of the late '60s, led to women being emancipated in some ways. That they found a voice during that time, with feminism. It's complicated.

Steve Coogan

#55. Women have always struggled with their men-folk for the abolition of slavery, the liberation of countries from colonialism, the dismantling of apartheid and the attainment of peace. It is now the turn of men to join women in their struggle for equality.

Gertrude Mongella

#56. I believe that as women, we must commit ourselves to sustaining the progress made by our foremothers who fought so hard for women's equality and liberation.

Carre Otis

#57. I'd rather be thought of as smart, capable, strong, and compassionate than beautiful. Those things all persist long after beauty fades.

Cassandra Duffy

#58. This is what sexual liberation chiefly accomplishes - it liberates young women to pursue married men.

George Gilder

#59. Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.

Saddam Hussein

#60. A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated - and turned out to grass.

Pearl S. Buck

#61. The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for, and it's the next step of peace that we need to create.

Vandana Shiva

#62. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is "herself"? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know, I do not believe that you know.

Virginia Woolf

#63. Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand women's opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new pursuits can also be found in mothering.

Elaine Heffner

#64. Liberation is a praxis : the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.

Paulo Freire

#65. As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.

Jonathan Franzen

#66. The struggle for the aim of the liberation of women is the child of fire born on the lap of our liberation movement.

Velupillai Prabhakaran

#67. We, in the late '60s, '70s and '80s, are acting like we have just discovered freedom and liberation. But I'm sure that many women have worked for that for such a long time.

Angeles Mastretta

#68. Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

Germaine Greer

#69. Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

Virginia Woolf

#70. Having had nothing, I will not settle for crumbs.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#71. Like it or not, liberation for women will be achieved only with the full co-operation of men.

Ita Buttrose

#72. Human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.

John Stuart Mill

#73. To reject the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul, or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks, or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned but an inauthentic flight.

Simone De Beauvoir

#74. In the Sixties, fashion was about liberation. It was about setting women free; it wasn't about being unable to walk.

Veruschka Von Lehndorff

#75. I don't work with men who are antagonistic to the liberation of women. I do work with quite a number of men who are supportive of the enlightenment of women. Such men are rare.

Frederick Lenz

#76. I thought liberation had to do with going out into the world and assuming male duties, not with delegating part of my load. The result was a terrible fatigue, as witnessed today by the millions of women of my generation who question feminist movements.

Isabel Allende

#77. Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression ... Our endeavors must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child.

Nelson Mandela

#78. There's comfort to an awful old dressing-gown a pretty peignoir is powerless to provide, and aging bra elastic, is, I suspect, as near to liberation as most women ever get.

Katharine Whitehorn

#79. It is equally easy, initially, for either a man or a woman to attain enlightenment, what we would call liberation or self-realization.

Frederick Lenz

#80. When pockets were first added to women's clothing in 1913, a Paris reporter wrote, "It's all over with men's superiority over women." Pockets are indeed indispensable, and they come in two types: patch and set-in

Claire B. Shaeffer

#81. Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world.

Paulo Freire

#82. Women get more unhappy the more they try to liberate themselves.

Brigitte Bardot

#83. The woman who is liberated must never cross the line in which we ask men to examine their actions; we are a country built on the ideas, ingenuity, canniness, and downright brutality of man - to question their motives is to question our existence.

Kristen Kehoe

#84. An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls - even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls - without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.
(America's Medieval Women, Harper's Magazine, August 1938)

Pearl S. Buck

#85. 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

#86. I am very sad for men and women trapped in any relationship where there is cruelty, dominance, inequity. I long for the liberation of all people.

Jasmine Guy

#87. One should refrain from contempt for the baser specimens of humanity, for whom liberation amounts to shaving the heads of women who have slept with Germans.

Coco Chanel

#88. Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.

Germaine Greer

#89. Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women's silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.

Thomas Sankara

#90. Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.

Betty Friedan

#91. 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