But somehow things took a sinister turn, and the division of labor came to be understood as the demarcation of a social hierarchy. Women kept busy with numerous domestic responsibilities while their male counterparts’ sole...

No, I have no desire to be a feminist, I just want to be a female,

This is the picture of a woman cast in the role of a learner, a pupil, even a rabbinic student. Quite obviously this is a prohibited role for women in those days and in that...

Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny...

I’d learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves.

I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse. The less a person thinks and inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things, when dragging along through...

We [-women and men-] are all equal in our creaturehood, whatever our sex, color, age, background, or abilities. But we are all different in the functions we were created to perform, as different as water...

But wouldn’t [the Spice Girls] have shown a little bit more solidarity if they had at least called themselves feminists? The feminist activist Jennifer Pozner was more dismissive,writing that it was “probably a fair assumption...

The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She’s young, white, and skinny. She’s a cheerleader, a babysitter; she’s accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She’s never a woman of color....

Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else’s. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories...

Cosmopolitanism seeks a _we_ that does not rely on the exclusion of _others_ but, instead, recognizes and confirms each other as part of the planetary _we_. The cosmopolitan _we_ is not grounded in a monolithic...

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard.

The beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because...

Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market...

In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.

Gender is like a Rubik’s Cube with one hundred squares per side, and every time you twist it to take a look at another angle, you make it that much harder a puzzle to solve.

Constituye una paradoja criminal rehusar a la mujer toda actividad pública, cerrarle las carreras masculinas, proclamar en todos los dominios su incapacidad y confiarle, al mismo tiempo, la empresa más delicada y más grave de...

Eleanor hated it when her mom acted like that. Relentlessly submissive. It was humiliatng to be in the same room.

Souraya thought those days that she knew so many songs about the misery of love because pain kept love within the boundaries of time, and knowable, whereas what she was experiencing passed beyond the horizon...

But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?

Feminism is a tremendously underestimated force, viewed in the present context primarily as a woman’s concern. The understanding has not yet percolated throughout society that the advancement of women is a program vitally connected to...

I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic…

Chastity … has, even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day...

I find it strange that practicing law in a comfortable well-heated office is considered too demanding an occupation for women, yet laboring from dawn’s first light in crowded, drafty, ill-lit sweatshops is not.

All men think that a woman walking alone at night is a whore.

Better is not good enough, and it’s a shame that anyone would be willing to settle for so little.

In 1995, each cast at The Second City was made up of four men and two women. When it was suggested that they switch one of the companies to three men and three women, the...

What Friedan gave to the world was, “the problem that has no name.” She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs:...

I’m going to ask you to remember the prostituted, the homeless, the battered, the raped, the tortured, the murdered, the raped-then-murdered, the murdered-then-raped; and I am going to ask you to remember the photographed, the...

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” wouldn’t accept slaggy birds, dim birds, birds that bitch, birds that hire cleaners, birds that stay at home with their kids, birds that have pink Mini Metros with POWERED BY FAIRY DUST! bumper stickers,...

I have often wondered if the irrational fear some men have of women that incites them to subjugate and oppress the female species begins in the adage: “I brought you into this world, I can...

In a world where money, security, children, money, temptation, sex, money, passion and more money is all that women expect of men, that is what men begin to offer. Anyone who has anything different to...

Re-vision–the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction–is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival....

To be rapable, a position that is social not biological, defines what a woman is.

When I dare to be powerful–to use my strength in the service of my vision–then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

Disdaining the heroic outfit, excitable in her methods, garrulous, episodical, shrill, she misled her lover much as she misled her aunt. He mistook her fertility for weakness. He supposed her “as clever as they make...

A housewife’s work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not.

Female castration results in concentration of her feelings upon her male companion, and her impotence in confrontations with her own kind. Because all her love is guided by the search for security, if not for...

If any of us had heard the word “feminist” we would have thought it meant a girl who wore too much makeup, but we were, without knowing it, feminists ourselves, bound together by the freemasonry...

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Why is it that when Robert Redford-cum-Denys Finch Hatton flies away in the golden glow out of Africa, he is pursuing his destiny? And when I walk away I’m just a chick who’s scared of...

Feminism is comprised of values that are important to you as a woman, not ideals arrived at by forced consensus to which you should adjust your own life.

Put it down in capital letters: SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A HIGHER DUTY THAN SELF-SACRIFICE. The thing that most retards and militates against women’s self development is self-sacrifice.

Vaginas beat penises every time. They’re like kryptonite.Penises are defenseless against them.

Breasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality.

Gingerbread I knew I had to get out of therebefore the icing cracked and they discoveredthat I’m burnt around the edges,doughy in the center,that what they thought was sugaris salt.If I was a good girl,if...

I have a date,’ he explained. ‘This is an emergency.’ He paused to catch his breath. ‘Do you know’ – breath – ‘how to iron?’ I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled...

The rest of us have never embraced your victim mentality; we are not victims. We are people, the same way that men are. We are equal, yet different. We, unlike you, realize that is not...

Today we tell girls to grow up to be or do whatever they want. But the cultural pressure to become a mother remains very strong; rare is she who doesn’t at least occasionally succumb to...