When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be...

It wasn’t only my friends who suffered from female rivalry. I remember when I was just sixteen years old, during spring vacation, being whisked off to an early lunch by my best friend’s brother, only...

Maidens who stay maidens turn into saints. Old women become sorceresses. Tough jobs, both of these.

There are two important days in a woman’s life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.

The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.

Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence. But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating social system,...

Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise power. These powers can be used to advance feminist struggle. Forms of power held by exploited and oppressed groups are described in Elizabeth Janeway’s important work...

hearing women singing about themselves – rather than men singing about women – makes everything seem wonderfully clear, and possible

Well, Mr Markham, you that maintain that a boy should not be shielded from evil, but sent out to battle against it, alone and unassisted – not taught to avoid the snares of life, but...

People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart — but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on...

The effect of male-identification means ‘internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one’s self and one’s sex… Male identification is the act whereby women place men above...

A tawdry, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a *kind* of sexual expression we now regard *as* sexuality.

There are much more important qualities to have than a docile disposition.

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed … or find a still greater man to marry her. … The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he...

It is agreed that ‘girls take more bringing up’ than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue.

This semester has born in me the flame of hope to one day become a leader in the modern feminist movement. I can and will be the force that blows new life into it, giving...

I just thought: Oh goodness, you can wear nice clothes and get your hair done and still be a feminist and a serious intellectual.

public display and operatic suffering—an in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don’t see how anyone can...

I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst-burst with forms much more beautiful...

I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men….They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of...

He cried when I left, which I find to be standard male behavior.

They caress their falcons to remind them that they are bound. Touch smacks of ownership, and I am weary of being a possession.

No man wants his daughter to be the kind of girl whom he liked in high school.

Normally when I tell people I’m a gender studies major, they look at me like I’m studying Sanskrit or Latin. But now, NOW I had something to show my family, to possibly convince them that...

I draw a line down the middle of a chalkboard, sketching a male symbol on one side and a female symbol on the other. Then I ask just the men: What steps do you guys...

If you make some comment even obliquely alluding to menstruation or menopause and its effect on my judgment,” Murphy interrupted, “I will break your arm in eleven places.

Exhaustion was pressing upon and overpowering her. “Good-by–because I love you.” He did not know; he did not understand. He would never understand. Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him–but it...

Feminism is not a dirty word. It does not mean you hate men, it does not mean you hate girls that have nice legs and a tan, and it does not mean you are a...

At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act...

All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will,and government by self-control, but submission and yielding...

Abusive relationships exist because they provide enough rations of warmth, laughter, and affection to clutch onto like a security blanket in the heap of degradation. The good times are the initial euphoria that keeps addicts...

There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete’s sake.

The greatest form of abortion is not letting the man put it there in the first place!

The start of empowering women comes with acknowledgment of thought that every born child is equal irrespective of its sex. 

When society was patriarchal, as it was in the New Testament context and as it has been everywhere in the world except in modern society in our day, the church avoided scandal by going along...

When God made man she was practicing.

Beauty” and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be “beautiful” to be sexual. That of course is not...

Valys also didn’t think I was good enough for him. He made that clear every time he acted like a martyr forced to settle. But what he didn’t understand was that if he thought I...

I’m pro-choice. But I hope that choice will be life.

When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they...

The proletariat could plan to massacre the whole ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of seizing the secret of the atomic bomb and turning all of humanity entirely Jewish or entirely black:...

Women are caught between feminism and the pornification of America, and men are, too. I spent my youth squatting on a pedestal, the beauty queen who couldn’t get laid. I’ve been a Relationship Consultant, phone...

It is only when women start to organize in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society in which every human being can...

Women deserve better than propaganda and lies to get into panties. Propaganda and lies to get into office, to get out of court, to get out of paying child support. Get the fuck out of...

[Eric Schmidt] explained that only one criterion that mattered when picking a job- fat growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies grow...

Every woman is well aware of the deadly ingredients of her soul which is why they all detest each other.

Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to...

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as...

The heart of a woman will never be found in the arms of a man.

I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.