"No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. "
— Betty Friedan

"The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. "
— Roseanne Barr

"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.' "
— Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)

"Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power."
— Gloria Steinem

"A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men."
— Gloria Steinem

"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."
— Gloria Steinem

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way."
— Adrienne Rich

"I've never been able to figure out precisely what a feminist is. I know only this, people call me a feminist whenever I express any sentiment that differentiates me from a doormat."
— Rebecka West

"Felicity ignores us. She walks out to them, an apparition in white and blue velvet, her head held high as they stare in awe at her, the goddess. I don't know yet what power feels like. But this is surely what it looks like, and I think I'm beginning to understand why those ancient women had to hide in caves. Why our parents and suitors want us to behave properly and predictably. It's not that they want to protect us; it's that they fear us."
— Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty)

"Woman's degradation is in mans idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man."
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age."
— Gloria Steinem

""Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.""
— Gloria Steinem

"He is a gentleman, and I am a gentleman's daughter. So far we are equal."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself."
— Betty Friedan

"My idea of super woman is someone who scrubs her own floors. "
— Bette Midler

"Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since. "
— Abigail Adams

"Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?'"
— Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique)

"I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time."
— Iris Murdoch

"If women want rights more than they got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it."
— Sojourner Truth

"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 (The Revolution and Woman in Iraq)

"It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the Christian religion."
— Pope Benedict XVI

"Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.

Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.

If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.

Should I outlive this anguish, and men do,
I shall have only good to say of you."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream"
— Virginia Woolf

"I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser. "
— Mother Jones

"There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent."
— Monique Wittig

"The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write."
— Franz Kafka (Diaries of Franz Kafka)

"Since a time has come, Mademoiselle, when the severe laws of men no longer prevent women from applying themselves to the sciences and other disciplines, it seems to me that those of us who can should use this long-craved freedom to study and to let men see how greatly they wronged us when depriving us of its honor and advantages. And if any woman becomes so proficient as to be able to write down her thoughts, let her do so and not despise the honor, but rather flaunt it instead of fine clothes, necklaces, and rings. For these may be considered ours only by use, whereas the honor of being educated is ours entirely. "
— Louise Labé

"The most cursory examination of even the most progressive organs of information reveals a curious inability to recognize women as newsmakers, unless they are young or married to a head of state or naked or pregnant by some triumph of technology or perpetrators or victims of some hideous crime or any combiniation of the above. Women's issues are often disguised as people issues, unless they are relegated to the women's pages which amazingly still suvive. Senior figures are all male; even the few women who are deemed worthy of obituaries are shown in images from their youth, as if the last fourty years of their lives have been without achievement of any kind. If you analyse the by-lines in your morning paper, you will see that the senior editorial staff are all older men, supported by a rabble of junior females, the infinitely replacesable 'hackettes'."
— Germaine Greer (Whole Woman)

"Reason, you'll always be half-blind."
— Marguerite Porete

"A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not."
— Simone Weil (Waiting for God)

"My wish is to ride the tempest, tame the waves, kill the sharks. I will not resign myself to the usual lot of women who bow their heads and become concubines."
— Trieu Thi Trinh

"Philosophy is the toil which can never tire persons engaged in it. All ways are strewn with roses, and the farther you go, the more enchanting objects appear before you and invite you on."
— Mary Wortley Montagu

"DOGMA: a political belief one is unreasonably committed to, such as the notion that freedom is good and slavery is bad.
BIAS: predeliction for a particular dogma. For example, the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between.

(an early comment on backlash, from "Glossary for the Eighties")"
— Ellen Willis (1941-2006)

"We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other...""
— Jeffrey Eugenides

"Nowadays it is seen as a shame, to marry a girl who is a mother, who has never been married. I want to get rid of that prejudice. "
— Friedrich der Große (Erster Diener seines Staates. Friedrich der Große in ausgewählten Zitaten)

"The 1970s-80s social movement called U.S. third world feminism functioned as a central locus of possibility, an insurgent social movement that shattered the construction of any one ideology as the single most correct site where truth can be represented. Indeed, without making this kind of metamove, any 'liberation' or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppressive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself, and become trapped inside a drive for truth that ends only in producing its own brand of dominations. What U.S. third world feminism thus demanded was a new subjectivity, a political revision that denied any one ideology as the final answer, while instead positing a tactical subjectivity with the capactiy to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved. These dynamics are what were required in the shift from enacting a hegemonic oppositional theory and practice to engaging in the differential form of social movement, as performed by U.S. feminists of color during the post-World War II period of great social transformation. p. 58-59. "
— Chela Sandoval (Methodology of the Oppressed)

"The free mind, unafraid of labor, presses on to attain the good."
— Laura Cereta (Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist)

"It is doubtful that real personal change can occur without the conscious and painful process of self-criticism that is required to reject power and ego."
— Janis Birkeland

"Theologians and other clerks,
You won't understand this book,
-- However bright your wits --
If you do not meet it humbly,
And in this way, Love and Faith
Make you surmount Reason, for
They are the protectors of Reason's house. "
— Marguerite Porete

"If you cannot sound the depths of the heart of man or unravel the arguments of his mind, how can you fathom the God who made all things, or sound His mind or unravel His purpose?"
— Various

"The first treatise on the interior of the body, which is to say, the treatise that gave the body an interior , written by Henri De Mondeville in the fourteenth century, argues that the body is a house, the house of the soul, which like any house can only be maintained as such by constant surveillance of its openings. The woman’s body is seen as an inadequate enclosure because its boundaries are convoluted. While it is made of the same material as a man’s body, it has ben turned inside out. Her house has been disordered, leaving its walls full of openings. Consequently, she must always occupy a second house, a building to protect her soul. Gradually this sense of vulnerability to the exterior was extended to all bodies which were then subjected to a kind of supervision traditionally given to the woman. The classical argument about her lack of self-control had been generalized."
— Mark Wigley