Feminist famous quotes
07-15-2025
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Feminism is sort of like God. Many people profess to believe in it, but no one seems to be able to define it to everyone's satisfaction.
-- Aaron Allston -
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
-- Adrienne Rich -
The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!
-- Adrienne Rich -
The pitfall of the feminist is the belief that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what brings sufferings to the one can leave the other unscathed.
-- Agnes Repplier -
I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament.
-- Alanis Morissette -
I want women to have access to safe healthcare and be in control of their own bodies. I am a feminist. Everyone should be a feminist.
-- Alice Glass -
Unwittingly, the feminists acknowledge the superiority of the male sex by wishing to become like men.
-- Alice von Hildebrand -
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
-- Alice Walker -
My mother was a feminist and a divorcee who worked. She was very smart.
-- Alley Mills -
The belief that female sexual expression is uniquely dehumanizing is a double standard, no matter how much you dress it up in feminist language. Instead of condemning young women for the length of their skirts, why not use that energy for condemning anyone who would think that a woman is lesser-than because she wears a miniskirt?
-- Amanda Marcotte -
I'm thankful for the work that feminists like Gloria Steinem have done. I am a feminist, but the geography for women today is vastly different than it was in the '60s.
-- Amber Heard -
I try to be feminist in, like, I love myself and I don't need someone else's approval.
-- Amy Lee -
Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
...In every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized, made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
I’m a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.
-- Angela Davis -
Either you are a feminist or you are a sexist/misogynist. There is no box marked 'other.'
-- Ani DiFranco -
The minute my child was born, I was reborn as a feminist. It's so incredible what women can do... birthing naturally, as most women do around the globe, is a superhuman act. You leave behind the comforts of being human and plunge back into being an animal...
-- Ani DiFranco -
I've been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.
-- Anna Quindlen -
A man told me that for a woman, I was very opinionated. I said, 'for a man you're kind of ignorant'.
-- Anne Hathaway -
Ladies: Anne Hathaway is a feminist and she has amazing teeth. Let's save our bad attitudes for the ones who aren't advancing the cause.
-- Anne Hathaway -
I'm a feminist, a 21st-century feminist - which means choice and freedom. One has the right to be both glamorous and ethically structured.
-- Arielle Dombasle -
There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
-- Arundhati Roy -
The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.
-- Ashley Montagu -
In using terms like patriarchy, hermeneutics, and sexual/textual, I do not wish to misrepresent the Qurn as a feminist text; rather, the use of such terminology shows my own intellectual disposition and biases.
-- Asma Barlas -
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
-- Audre Lorde -
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
-- Audre Lorde -
Well, you know, I was raised by a 1970s feminist. My mom had a consciousness-raising group. I used to sit at the top of the stairs and listen to them.
-- Ayelet Waldman -
You’re a feminist if you go to a Jay Z and Beyoncé concert, and you’re not like, ‘Mmm, I feel like Beyoncé should get 23 percent less money than Jay Z.'
-- Aziz Ansari -
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
-- Barack Obama -
Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
But I really resist categories – that naming is a closing down of meaning. Women's art, political art – those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.
-- Barbara Kruger -
One of the greatest gifts of Black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to be Black and female.
-- Barbara Smith -
The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.
-- Bell Hooks -
Feminist effort to end patriarchal domination should be of primary concern precisely because it insists on the eradication of exploitation and oppression in the family context and in all other intimate relationships. It is that political movement which most radically addresses the person – the personal – citing the need for the transformation of self, of relationships, so that we might be better able to act in a revolutionary manner, challenging and resisting domination, transforming the world outside the self.
-- Bell Hooks -
There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.
-- Bell Hooks -
Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.
-- Bell Hooks -
Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation. This feminist vision of the sexual imaginary is the space few men seem able to enter.
-- Bell Hooks -
It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism,†to focus on the fact that to be “feminist†in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.
-- Bell Hooks -
Feminist pedagogy can only be liberatory if it is truly revolutionary because the mechanisms of appropriation within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy are able to co-opt with tremendous ease that which merely appears radical or subversive
-- Bell Hooks -
Given the way universities work to reinforce and perpetuate the status quo, the way knowledge is offered as commodity, Women's Studies can easily become the place where revolutionary feminist thought and feminist activism are submerged or made secondary to the goals of academic careerism
-- Bell Hooks -
I wish that I had bridged the feminist movement and the anti-war movement better than I did.
-- Bernardine Dohrn -
Women now wield considerable power along political lines and I believe each succeeding year for some time to come will find them wielding that power more effectively.
-- Bertha Knight Landes -
In politics it commonly takes a superior woman to overcome the handicap of traditional prejudice.
-- Bertha Knight Landes -
Let us, while never forgetting our womanhood, drop all emphasis on sex, and put it on being public servants.
-- Bertha Knight Landes -
Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
-- Bertrand Russell -
I'm a feminist, of course, and I feel as if I'm very politically correct, although I do question what's P.C. and what's not - I don't just accept what I'm told.
-- Beth Ditto -
I worshipped Ethel Merman and I worshipped Ethel Merman a lot. It's incredible - Ethel Merman was a conventional singer. Her naming her child Ethel Merman, Jr., was, to me, one of the coolest feminist things.
-- Beth Ditto -
If we're for one another, we're feminists. The rest is semantics.
-- Betty Buckley -
So, when the discussion about not using the term feminist came up at a conference workshop, I couldn't believe it. The more I listened, the more I felt the need to express my passion about my identity as a feminist.
-- Betty Buckley -
The pure connecting factor is that those of us who describe ourselves as feminists want equal rights for all people.
-- Betty Buckley -
The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.
-- Betty Friedan -
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 -
[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man.
-- Betty Friedan -
Scratch most feminists and underneath there is a woman who longs to be a sex object. The difference is that is not all she wants to be.
-- Betty Rollin -
We need to reshape our own perception of how we view ourselves. We have to step up as women and take the lead.
-- Beyonce Knowles -
Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.
-- Bill Griffith -
I definitely can feel the third or fourth feminist wave in the air, so maybe this is a good time to open that Pandora’s box a little bit and air it out.
-- Bjork -
Feminists bore me to death. I follow my instinct and if that supports young girls in any way, great. But I'd rather they saw it more as a lesson about following their own instincts rather than imitating somebody.
-- Bjork -
Bitches and hoes don't exist because the hoes know Bo's a feminist.
-- Bo Burnham -
Women who can, do. Those who can't become feminists.
-- Bobby Riggs -
Any man worth his salt loves a feminist. Only men who are afraid of the feminine in themselves are afraid of women.
-- Brit Marling -
When I was at Baylor, I wasn't fully happy because I couldn't be all the way out. It feels so good saying it: I am a strong, black lesbian woman.
-- Brittney Griner -
I work toward the liberation of women, but I'm not feminist. I'm just a woman.
-- Buchi Emecheta -
What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be. Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.
-- Caitlin Moran -
As far as I'm concerned, you're a feminist by default if you're born in the Western world right now.
-- Caitlin Moran -
So this is why I can't agree with "don't feed the trolls." When millionaire celebrity broadcasters and entire publications start trolling, ignoring them isn't really an option anymore. They are gradually making trolling normative. We have to start feeding the trolls: feeding them with achingly polite emails and comments, reminding them of how billions of people prefer to communicate with each other, every day, in the most unregulated arena of all: courteously.
-- Caitlin Moran -
You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.
-- Caitlin Moran -
A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution.
-- Caitlin Moran -
I’m neither ‘pro-women’ nor ‘anti-men’. I’m just ‘Thumbs up for the six billion
-- Caitlin Moran -
We must recall the most important of humanity guidelines: Be polite. Being polite is possibly the greatest daily contribution everyone can make to life on Earth.
-- Caitlin Moran -
A 'sign of weakness' for a male celebrity is being found to be unfaithful, or unkind to an employee, or having crashed their car while stoned out of their tiny minds. A 'sign of weakness' for a woman, on the other hand, can be a single, unflattering picture.
-- Caitlin Moran -
I call myself a feminist, not a feminist filmmaker. If somebody asked me if I had a feminist sensibility it would be pretty hard to deny, but is it the theme of my work? Not necessarily. I'm interested in a lot of things.
-- Callie Khouri -
We have allowed the sexual debate to be defined by women, and that's not right. Men must speak, and speak in their own voices, not voices coerced by feminist moralists.
-- Camille -
The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture
-- Camille Paglia -
When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.
-- Camille Paglia -
[T]he most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies.
-- Camille Paglia -
Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.
-- Camille Paglia -
Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink . It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.
-- Camille Paglia -
The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood.
-- Camille Paglia -
Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism . My grandmother was sill scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard !
-- Camille Paglia -
Lesbian feminists, for all their ideals of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fickleness, a parasitic exploitativeness, and vicious spite that have to be seen to be believed.
-- Camille Paglia -
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 -
Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader.
-- Camille Paglia -
Hillary [Clinton] is neither the demon of the right's perception, nor a feminist saint, nor is she particularly emblematic of her time perhaps more old-fashioned than modern.
-- Carl Bernstein -
The education situation which most effectively promotes significant learning is one in which (1) threat to the self of the learner is reduced to a minimum and (2) differential perception of the field of experience is facilitated
-- Carl Rogers -
We don't need to be feminist in my generation.
-- Carla Bruni -
I'm not at all an active feminist. On the contrary, I'm a bourgeois. I love family life, I love doing the same thing every day.
-- Carla Bruni -
I wouldn’t want to be labelled unless it was something much broader and inclusive such as an ecological artist or a visionary artist, but there’s a constraint in the definition of a feminist artist, you’re an artist and you’re a feminist.
-- Carolee Schneemann -
In the 1970s, Washington women lawyers were getting organized. Grouping together gave us courage. And we overcame.
-- Carolyn R. Dimmick -
Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.
-- Catharine MacKinnon -
Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.
-- Catharine MacKinnon
