Women S Liberation Quotes

“For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who - against all the odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero - Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc - and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“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

“Ô, Wanderess, Wanderess
When did you feel your
most euphoric kiss?
Was I the source
of your greatest bliss?”
― Roman Payne

“I'd rather be thought of as smart, capable, strong, and compassionate than beautiful. Those things all persist long after beauty fades.”
― Cassandra Duffy

“Some of the New York Radical Women shortly afterward formed WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and its members, dressed as witches, appeared suddenly on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. A leaflet put out by WITCH in New York said:

WITCH lives and smiles in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh-suffocating clothes our sick society demands. There is no "joining" WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a WITCH. You make your own rules.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced.

For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do.”
― Tiffany Madison

“When a Wanderess has been caged,
or perched with her wings clipped,
She lives like a Stoic,
She lives most heroic,
smiling with ruby, moistened lips
once her cup of Death is welcome sipped.”
― Roman Payne

“The specific character of [women's] oppression cannot be explained away by equating different situations through superficial and childish simplifications[:]

It is true that both the woman and the male worker are condemned to silence by their exploitation. But under the current system, the worker's wife is also condemned to silence by her worker-husband. In other words, in addition to the class exploitation common to both of them, women must confront a particular set of relations that exist between them and men, relations of conflict and violence that use physical differences as their pretext.”
― Thomas Sankara, Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle

“Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.”
― Pearl S. Buck, Of Men and Women

“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, Commencement

“I had come to worry about those women who were full-time mothers and homemakers by choice. Did other, more career-minded women have the right to devalue them . . . ? Maybe it was time to slow down and look at the role restrictions imposed not only on women but the men around them, to search for the balance that could promote self-sufficiency . . .”
― Lin Pardey, Bull Canyon: A Boatbuilder, a Writer and Other Wildlife

“Women's liberty", "women's independence" are words on everybody's lips these days, but they stay on the lips and don't go any further. Do you know why? I've found out that liberty can be obtained neither by theoretical arguments, nor by pleading justice and morality, nor by staging a concerted quarrel with men at a meeting. It's something that no one can give to another - not something to be owed or paid as a due. ..you can easily understand that it comes of its own accord - through one's own fulfillment, by the enlargement of one's own soul.”
― Saratchandra Chattopadhyay

“I, too, identified with every underdog in the world before realizing that women are primordial underdogs. Today, many still take injustice more seriously if it affects any group except women. Women ourselves may support other causes before having the self-respect to stand up for our own.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I recommend the freedom that comes from asking: Compared to what? Hierarchical systems prevail by making us feel inadequate and imperfect. Whatever we do, we will internalize the blame. But once we realize there is no such thing as adequacy or perfection, it sets us free to say: We might as well be who we really are.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“Most of us have a few events that divide our lives into “before” and “after.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back. Instead of trying to fit women into existing middle-class professions or working-class theories, these radical feminist groups assumed that women’s experience could be the root of theory. Whether at speak-outs or consciousness-raising groups, “talking circles” or public hearings, the essential idea was: Tell your personal truth, listen to other women’s stories, see what themes are shared, and discover that the personal is political.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I’m not sure feminism should require an adjective. Believing in the full social, political, and economic quality of women, which is what the dictionary says “feminism” means, is enough to make a revolution in itself. But if I had to choose only one adjective, I still would opt for radical feminist. I know our adversaries keep equating that word with violent or man-hating, crazy or extremist—though being a plain vanilla feminist doesn’t keep one safe from such epithets either. Neither does saying, “I’m not a feminist, but.…” Nonetheless, radical seems an honest indication of the fundamental change we have in mind: the false division of human nature into “feminine” and “masculine” is the root of all other divisions into subject and object, active and passive, and—the beginning of hierarchy.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“The truth is that every country has its own organic feminism. Far more than communism, capitalism, or any other philosophy I can think of, it is a grassroots event. It grows in women’s heads and hearts.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I’ve come to realize the pleasures of being a nothing-to-lose, take-no-shit older woman; of looking at what once seemed to be outer limits but turned out to be just road signs.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I used to indulge in magical thinking when problems seemed insurmountable. Often, this focused on men, for they seemed to be the only ones with power to intercede with the gods. Now it has been so long since I fantasized a magical rescue that I can barely remember the intensity of that longing. Instead, I feel my own strength, take pleasure in the company of friends, male and female, who are mortals. I no longer believe in gods, except those in each of us.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“We understand that being able to help dependent children find what they need can be a gift in itself. Why shouldn’t we feel the same about the other end of life? Why shouldn’t the equally natural needs of age be an opportunity for others to give? Why indeed? Now I wonder if women’s fear of dependency doesn’t stem from being too much depended upon. Perhaps if we equalize the giving of care—with men, with society—this will bring a new freedom to receive.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“Now I look at artificial boundaries—lines that can stop no current of air or drought or polluted river—and mourn the violence lavished on defending them. Long ago, in times suspiciously set aside as “prehistory,” we were mostly nomadic peoples who claimed nothing but crisscrossing migratory paths. Cultures were the richest where different peoples and paths were most intermingled. We’re still a nomadic species; indeed, we move and travel on this earth more than ever before. Yet we insist on the destructive fiction of nationalism, one that becomes even more dangerous when it joins with religions that try to create nationalistic gods.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“As a group who can never afford the expensive fiction of having a nation—and whose bodies suffer from nationalism by being used as its means of reproduction—women of all races and cultures may be the most motivated to ask: How can we create a future beyond nationalism? After all, it has been around for less than five percent of humanity’s history. We know we have had more migratory and communal ways of sharing this Spaceship Earth. There could be again.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I used to think I would be rewarded for good behavior. Therefore, if I wasn’t understood, I must not be understandable; if I wasn’t successful, I must try harder; if something was wrong, it was my fault. More and more now, I see that context is all. When someone judges me or anyone or anything, I ask: Compared to what?”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“When a woman fears the punishment that comes from calling herself a feminist, I ask: Will you be so unpunished if you don’t? When I fear conflict and condemnation for acting a certain way, I think: What peace or praise would I get if I didn’t?”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“You nitwits think that women need alimony. They don't. They can stand on their own two feet.”
― Avijeet Das

“And where the words of woneb are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance "I can't possibly teach Black women's writing- their experience is so different from mine," yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another: "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?" Or, "she's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children." And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance "I can't possibly teach Black women's writing- their experience is so different from mine," yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another: "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?" Or, "she's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children." And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“What must it be like to sit among women with the same animating vitality? To build vast empires and heretofore undreamt worlds? To control the exchange of ideas, the evolution of society? She had never really been all that interested in traditional success or power, but for a moment she saw the appeal of it, of an empire ruled only by women, and then the appeal of wielding might that could bring it all down, on a whim. An entire ruined kingdom as manifestation of one woman’s rage.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch