Women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools – but who’s to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and...

Of all creatures that can feel and think,we women are the worst treated things alive

It’s more that they think about sexism in the same way people in London must think about bad weather: It’s an omnipresent and unpleasant fact of life, but it shouldn’t keep you from going about...

The language of marriage is often a language of ownership, not a language of partnership.

It’s not the nineteenth century; I’m not meant to be judged on how good a housekeeper I am. Getting down on the floor with a lemon and a bucket of vinegar does not make me...

Larsson was an active and lifelong feminist, partly for personal reasons but also because he saw that ending gender slavery was as crucial to next-stage evolution as ending race slavery was to the last stage....

The responsibility for men’s behavior, indeed for civilization itself rests entirely with women here, and in how they dress and behave. Men’s animalistic impulses are presumed to be overwhelming and uncontrollable. And as men are...

There is an old question, rarely voiced these days, but nevertheless running as an undercurrent beneath the squabbles and misunderstandings that occur in households, workplaces and universities on a daily basis. ‘What do women want?’...

A girl’s got to use what she’s given and I’m not going to make a guy drool the way a Britney video does. So I take it to extremes. I don’t say I dress sexily...

Insofar as men gain time, ease, independence, or liberty from women’s domestic labors, they lack incentive to change.

Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many...

If reconciling your feminist values with your sexual preferences is something you’re struggling with, don’t panic. But try to believe what I’m about to tell you, because it’s true: It’s healthy to want and seek...

Sir, — Whether women are the equals of men has been endlessly debated; whether they have souls has been a moot point; but can it be too much to ask [for a definitive acknowledgement that...

I’m sure it’s not any wish of mine that I’m born with inclinations for better things. If I could be born again, and had the designing of myself, I’d be born the lowest and coarsest-minded...

The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.

I want to be a wise woman.

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.

Almost every time I speak to teenagers, particularly young female students who want to talk to me about feminism, I find myself staggered by how much they have read, how creatively they think and how...

[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It’s just like the crow,...

They are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip...

Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl’s only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit,...

Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women’s bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman...

[S]ocial order displays not the absolute presence or absence of intolerance to difference but a spectrum of intolerance. Each of us bears responsibility to some degree for maintaining these protocols of intolerance, which could not...

Males lack the seriousness of temperament required of persons with such great responsibilities.

A woman’s situation, i.e those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as instrument of her transcendence, but “an object destined for another.

It’s tragic when people think feminism is a dirty word.

The natural ambition of woman is through marriage to climb up, leaning upon a man; but those days are gone. You shall be great without the help of any man, just as you are.

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought...

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither…. So it seems...

Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it’s at. “Pro-maternity” propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern...

I believe the era of the militant lady is back.

Often, when I read the news, I have to make sure I am not, in face, reading The Onion. We continue to have national and state debates about abortion, birth control, and reproductive freedom, and...

You all watched a sketch about feminism and you didn’t even know it because of all the jokes. It’s like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids’ brownies. Suckers!

When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of...

Women have traditionally took secondary roles to men. I want to be the boss not the secretary.

Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. This was a definition of feminism I offered in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center more than 10 years ago. It was...

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,...

For me, the times that I dressed provocatively had been empowering. It felt good. It’s those times that I felt comfortable in my own skin. Like really, really comfortable. And let’s face it, body self-esteem...

My father might not have held my hand or expressed his love openly, but he taught Callie and me that we had inherent values, that we were fully formed human beings without a boy by...

the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,the lost brother, the twin —for him did we leave our mothers,deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure himover the charring log,nights, late, in the snowbound cabindid we...

This defines the task of feminism not only because male dominance is perhaps the most pervasive and tenacious system of power in history, but because it is metaphysically near perfect. Its point of view is...

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house

When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you’re always protecting me… I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an...

I got him’ is nonsense in terms of love relationships, and so is ‘I lost him’. If we could stop thinking in terms of capture, we would not have to fear the loosening of the...

In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women...

Very early on in writing the series, I remember a female journalist saying to me that Mrs Weasley, ‘Well, you know, she’s just a mother.’ And I was absolutely incensed by that comment. Now, I...

They were sorting, or classifying. It’s easy-anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act...

…it is not really the difference the oppressor fears so much as the similarity. He fears he will discover in himself the same aches, the same longings as those of the people he has shit...