Quotes About Feminism

Some of the biggest advocates for feminism seem to believe that in order to feel powerful you have to make another woman subservient, and that is not what feminism is about at all.

I don’t know what happened through the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s that took feminism off the table, that made it something that women weren’t supposed to identify with and were supposed to be ashamed of. Feminism is about the fight for equality between the sexes, with equal respect, equal pay, and equal opportunity. At the moment we are still a long way off that.

I wanted to start a website for teenaged girls that was not kind of this one-dimensional strong character empowerment thing, because one thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism is that girls then think that to be feminists, they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in their beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all the answers...and this is not true and actually, recognizing all the contradictions I was feeling became easier once I realized that feminism was not a rule book but a discussion, a conversation, a process.

If my choice is to, I don’t know, be with a lot of men, or if I enjoy a really physical relationship, I don’t think that’s necessarily being anti-feminist. For me the argument of feminism never really should have come into the picture. Because I don’t know too much about the history of feminism, and so I’m not really a relevant person to bring into the conversation. Everything I was writing was so autobiographical, it could really only be a personal analysis.

Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.

I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, 'You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person.' This caricature is how feminists have been warped by the people who fear feminism most, the same people who have the most to lose when feminism succeeds.

Feminism as a theoretical enterprise is approached differently by Black women depending on where we are. There are more reformist Black women who tend to use the phrase "Black feminism".

Much of the appeal of feminism is that it encourages women to do what they always felt like doing anyway: take everything personally. But to succeed at the highest level, you need some objectivity, which feminism hates. Feminists see objective reality as a conspiracy out to make them feel bad about themselves.

[T]he presence of feminism in our lives is taken for granted. For our generation, feminism is like fluoride. We scarcely notice we have it - it's simply in the water.

First of all, feminism is not man-hating, not man-berating. It is not saying we are better. It is just saying we want the same opportunities, and we want to be able to make decisions on our own without being judged for them. We want the same freedom men have enjoyed over the years, so I think that's the place where we are. And it's completely not mutually exclusive at all for how you want to look, how you take care of yourself, how you want to be, what you want to look like.

I’m going to lie this one right on the line, right here, right now: I’m pro big pants. Strident feminism NEEDS big pants. Really big. I’m currently wearing a pair that could have been used as a fire blanket to put out the Great Fire of London at any point during the first 48 hours or so. They extend from the top of my thigh to my belly button, and effectively double up as a second property that I can escape to at weekends. If I were going to run for parliament, it would be solely on a platform of ‘Get Women In Massive Grundie’s’.

Feminism catches fire when it draws upon its inherent spirituality. When it does not, it is just one more form of politics, and politics never fed our deepest hungers.

I've thought about what is an alternative word to feminism. There isn't one. It's a perfectly good word. And it can't be changed.

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

I've become this voice for a millennial generation of feminism, which is awesome, but at the same time it's complicated. We all know I'm a girl, I'm a woman, but it's difficult to figure out how to talk about it and express how important it is without beating it with a hammer and having it be, "So you're a girl in music! So you're a girl in music!" Yes, I'm a girl in music - can we just talk about something else?

I was born in the middle of World War II, the middle of the Holocaust; I was born when there was no declaration of human rights, when feminism was not an issue, when children were working in factories. I mean, today's world is a better place!

Part of the problem of being a feminist is that you feel you have to be actively doing things 
to relieve women’s plight. Actually, feminism is just thinking 
we should have the same rights as men.

For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work costume. For me, it wasn't Western feminism or the Western workspace. It was my growing up in a house with a bunch of boys, so that male costuming just became my mode of appropriation way before, you know, Betty Friedan came along.

The idea that feminism is a 'battle of the sexes' about blaming all men and setting up a 'gender war' is a handy, controversial media hook. But it doesn't reflect reality.

...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.

One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.

Emancipation can only come from within; it cannot be dictated by someone else. A law banning the wearing of headscarves changes nothing, except perhaps external appearance. Naturally, Islamic feminism must also include the right to education, to work and the freedom to select one's own husband.

Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness.

Feminism means revolution and I am a revolutionist.

Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.

I remember at the time - right before we started Feministing.com - doing a Google search for the term "young feminism" and the term "young feminist," and the first thing that came up was a page from the National Organization for Women that was about 10 or 15 years old. And it just struck me as so odd that there was all of this young feminist activism going on, but that it wasn't necessarily being represented online, that the first things in a Google search to come up were really, really old. I think to a certain degree we really filled a gap, and that's why we got such a large readership.

I think people resist feminism because they're scared. I think for women, they're scared of being picked on or of being called out.

I am not a feminist, but I do believe in the strength of women... This social revolution of feminism in the '70s really achieved so many of its goals-not every single one of them, obviously-but I think we should say it's great that these young women don't feel like they need to be feminists.

It's interesting to think about connecting the dots within an archive in a different way than linearly or teleologically. It's a great delight to make art or use language or just have ideas, and put them together in a very unexpected way. Art gets categorized historically, geographically, by medium, not necessarily by concept or repeating imagery, or feminism or femininity.

for me, the beauty of feminism is that it is a social and political movement that has redefined the power and obligation of the self: self-possession and self-regulation as a tool for social reform.

People have told me that Ive helped them feel confident, like they can say things they want to say. They can talk about feminism in class without people calling them a lesbian. Thats so amazing that I can make someone feel like that.

Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.

I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means

Third World feminism is about feeding people in all their hungers.

Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism, protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the repression, of the anima mundi.

We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.

I think we need to embrace feminism, we need to embrace all of the gifts women bring to the workplace.

My local paper, The New York Times, Yahoo News, CBS, and The Washington Post, all agreed to stop using the word 'mistress.' The big one was the Associated Press. They made a style change, and it's the gold standard that sets the guide for news outlets around the world. That's a small step for the American language, a medium step for feminism, and a huge step for me personally.

Indignation and determination are much more constructive emotions than shame and embarrassment. And feminism was this engine that turned one into the other.

LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent in Russia. There's no doubt in anyone's mind that the values that affirm nontraditional relationships, that affirm feminism, come from abroad. If you've established - and this isn't up for discussion - that foreign agents are bad, and foreign influence is bad, and the West is our enemy, then there's no better expression of the West's influence than gays and lesbians.

Feminism liberated women from the natural dignity of their sex and turned them into inferior men.

In the late '60s and '70s, when feminism was on the up sweep, there was an awareness of things that we're losing again.

I think that blogging and the Internet has completely changed feminism for ever, I think. You know, it used to be, 10 years ago, if you wanted to have a strong, influential voice in the feminist movement, you really needed to be part of this New York/D.C. elite group of feminists, or part of a mainstream feminist organization. And now it's kind of an amazing thing that you can just start a blog and put your voice out there and build your readership.

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.

There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.

Feminism freed my mind. Yoga freed my body. It's one thing to intellectualize self-love and another to embody it.

I see many more men who are feminist, or at least who have learned about life in the context of feminism.

I believe I was raised with feminist values, but I don't think I ever heard my Mom call herself a feminist. Before I identified as a feminist myself, I thought of feminism as more of a historical term describing the women's movement in the '70s but didn't know much about what they had done and didn't think it applied to my life at all.