Feminist Quotes - Page 12

• If we value what we've inherited for free - from other women - surely it's right morally and ethically for us to wake up and say, 'I'm a feminist. '

  Annie Lennox

  Wake Up, Ifs, Values

  "Cosmo meets... Annie Lennox". Interview With Fiona Cowood, www.cosmopolitan.com. March 7, 2012.

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• The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Girl, Mother, Role Models

  "Louise Bourgeois: a web of emotions" by Adrian Searle, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2010.

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• Feminists of my mother's generation argued that both mom and dad should work a little less and each do some of the household chores. My parents, for example, split everything 50/50. Even though my father is a terrible cook, he still made dinner exactly half the time.

  Emily Oster

  Mom, Mother, Dad

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• All of women's aspirations--whether for education, work, or any form of self-determination--ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas--and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash.

  Susan Faludi

  Determination, Children, Self

  Susan Faludi (1991). “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women”

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• Most Jewish feminists and gays that I know remain angry and frustrated by Jewish progressives. Deeply committed to progressive causes, frequently in the vanguard of political action, Jewish feminist and gays find ourselves fighting for the rights of others without the secure knowledge that others will fight for us.

  Irena Klepfisz

  Fighting, Gay, Rights

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• Hilary Clinton's great sin was that she left the nicely wallpapered domestic sphere with a slam of the door, took up public life on her own, leaving big feminist footprints all over the place, and without so much as an apology.

  Patricia J. Williams

  Apology, Doors, Leaving

  Patricia J. Williams (1997). “The Rooster's Egg”

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• When women talk about "privacy" they mean abortion rights, and the millions of words feminists have written about "a room of one'sown" refer to psychological space, rarely to physical solitude. For most women being alone is tantamount to being deserted.

  Florence King

  Women, Mean, Rights

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• Militant homosexuals, pro-abortionists, occultists, New Agers, pornographers, radical feminists, atheists, paganists and a whole collection of angry anti-Christian groups are all coming out of their closets and onto the battlefield. Their common denominator is a hatred for Christianity and for any expression of traditional values.

  Carman

  Christian, Religious, Atheist

  Carman Walker, Carman, Walter Walker (1994). “Raising the Standard/Reclaiming Your World for God”, Chordant Distribution

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• Today masses of black women in the U.S. refuse to acknowledge that they have much to gain by feminist struggle. They fear feminism. They have stood in place so long that they are afraid to move. They fear change. They fear losing what little they have.

  Bell Hooks

  Struggle, Moving, Long

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• ...feminism differs from reform of any kind, even franchise reform. Feminists, I should say, are not reformers at all, but ratherintellectual biologists and psychologists.

  Rheta Childe Dorr

  Feminism, Reform, Kind

  Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

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• The old lessons of submissiveness and fragility made us victims. Women are so much more than that. You can be a businesswoman, a mother, an artist, and a feminist - whatever you want to be - and still be a sexual being. It's not mutually exclusive.

  Beyonce Knowles

  Mother, Artist, Fragility

  "Beyoncé Liberated" by Aaron Hicklin, www.out.com. April 8, 2014.

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• I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence. On the whole, I think women havelost something precious, but have gained, immeasurably, by the passing of the old order.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Thinking, Order, Intellectual

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• A feminist is a man or woman who already knows for a fact that men and women are qual and wants society to wake up to that fact, so the world can stop operating at half-strength.

  Marlo Thomas

  Men, Facts, Wake Up

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• Some feminists feel that a woman should never be wrong. We have a right to be wrong.

  Alice Childress

  Should, Feels

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• If we are ever to construct a feminist movement that is not based on the premise that men and women are always at war with one another, then we must be willing to acknowledge the appropriateness of complex critical responses to writing by men even if it is sexist. Clearly women can learn from writers whose work is sexist, even be inspired by it, because sexism may be simply one dimension of that work. Concurrently fiercely critiquing the sexism does not mean that one does not value the work.

  Bell Hooks

  War, Writing, Mean

  bell hooks (2014). “Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics”, p.87, Routledge

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• A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women.

  Bell Hooks

  Race, Class, Diversity

  bell hooks (2014). “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, p.5, Routledge

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• ...feminism never harmed anybody unless it was some feminists. The danger is that the study and contemplation of "ourselves" may become so absorbing that it builds by slow degrees a high wall that shuts out the great world of thought.

  Rheta Childe Dorr

  Wall, Feminism, Degrees

  Rheta Childe Dorr (1980). “A woman of fifty”, Ayer Co Pub

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• Open marriage' is an invention of a feminist era. The idea is to have a marriage where dalliances are tolerated or even encouraged for both men and women, or in some combination where both partners are getting something out of it.

  Amanda Marcotte

  Men, Ideas, Eras

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• Whiffle [whine and wheeze and snuff and sniffle]: The annoying scratchy sound made by weepy feminists as they lament the sufferings of women and, houndlike, sniff out evidence of male oppression.

  Camille Paglia

  Suffering, Feminism, Sound

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• My mom wasn't, like, she was reading all these historical romance novels the majority of the time. She read a feminist book and then my dad would sit down and explain it to her like she was an idiot.

  Kathleen Hanna

  Mom, Dad, Book

  Interview with Nina Corcoran, allstonpudding.com.

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• I am a writer and a feminist, and the two seem to be constantly in conflict.... ever since I became loosely involved with it, it has seemed to me one of the recurring ironies of this movement that there is no way to tell the truth about it without, in some small way, seeming to hurt it.

  Nora Ephron

  Hurt, Two, Movement

  Nora Ephron (2012). “Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media”, p.135, Vintage

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• I'm not suggesting that all men are beautiful, vulnerable boys, but we all started out that way. What happened to us? How did we become monsters of feminist nightmares? The answer, of course, is that we underwent a careful and deliberate process of gender training, sometimes brutal, always dehumanizing, cutting away large chunks of ourselves. Little girls went through something similarly crippling. If the gender training was successful, we each ended up being half a person.

  Frank Pittman

  Beautiful, Girl, Cutting

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• There is nothing wrong with "women's studies" that studying the right women can't cure, but feminist literary scholars have a penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics.

  Florence King

  Rivers, Feminism, Obscurity

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• To be honest, that whole exchange with Crunk Feminist actually made me write the song because I realize there's a lot of young women out there so hurt by the misogynistic images in hip-hop they paint it with such a broad brush stroke that they think anybody that defends hip-hop is defending misogyny.

  Talib Kweli

  Song, Hurt, Writing

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• One can't imagine a Hollywood film whose entire purpose was to ridicule, say, homosexual activists, feminists, animal rights crusaders, or environmentalists. That would be blasphemy. Hollywood understands that religious people, particularly Christians, are the last group in America besides businessmen who may be defamed with impunity.

  Lloyd Billingsley

  Christian, Religious, Animal

  K. Lloyd Billingsley (1999). “The Seductive Image: Cinema and the Christian Faith”, p.119, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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