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

They think that because I’m small, or a girl, or a stiff, I can’t possibly be cruel. But they’re wrong.

Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel...

Men and boys are constantly portrayed as predatory, sexist, their sense of humour is vilified and their behaviour is regarded as unacceptable. Factor in the constant diet we are fed of men as perpetrators of...

If Jesus himself, or Mohammed, or Buddha spoke to me personally and said that women are inferior to men, I would still reject that as false dogma because I know with every ounce of my...

All of us, whether vivisector or vegan, have been subject to mechanisms undercutting sympathy for animals. How long and to what extent we submit to these mechanisms is not a matter of rationality: to cut...

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.

Funny thing, how much weaker boys are than girls.

I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.

It’s the process of being minimized, invalidated, silenced. It’s the process of being subjected to whatever someone else thinks I owe them. It’s the process of being used, examined, explored, and thrown away. It’s the...

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

Some leaders are born women.

Those miserable women who blame the men who let them down for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves.

After all, as it says on a needlepoint sampler or throw pillow or the occasional bumper sticker: Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere. In high heels. Or mules by Manolo Blahnik,...

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off...

The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need...

Young women with ambitions should be very crafty and cautious, lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.

At some point I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and who likes to wear lip gloss and high heels for herself and not for men.

American culture at large has failed working mothers.

It takes a lot of time, focus and energy to realize the enormity of being the ocean with your very own tide every month. However, by honoring the demands of bleeding, our blood gives something...

Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.

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...

Education continued to come under particularly strong fire…: If women learned how to manage in the world as well as men, if they learned about history and politics and studied for a profession, of course...

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked,...

It was a thought, that. Not to attach yourself to a man, but to confront instead the open world, the wide fields of France and Spain, the ocean, anything. Not just to hitch a lift...

We don’t have no say, ‘cause we was an afterthought. He yanked us up out o’ man’s ribs, but He made man out the Earth. He made him out the dirt and the mud and...

If people knew how few abortions are performed after twenty-four weeks, and how serious are the problems that lead women to seek them out, would more of them support Roe? Or would more people reject...

Female friendships that work are relationships in which women help each other belong to themselves.

If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so carefully shut? Why not open it, only a little? Do they know there...

What had she been thinking, suggesting to Alicia, of all people, that a time-travel app was the solution to the problems of women in poverty? ‘Are you talking about my community? You didn’t even think...

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity – and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to...

Do not buy finery or jewels, because books are worth more than they are. Adorn your understanding with their precious ideas, because there is no luxury that dazzles like the luxury of science.

Once I accepted my own transexuality, then it became obvious to me that the question ‘Why do transsexuals exist?’ is not a matter of pure curiosity, but rather an act of nonacceptance, as it invariably...

Time dims memory. But not that kind. Somewhere in a corner of the brain, one little cell never forgets. It keeps the song that, heard again, recreates the room, the person, the moment. It preserves...

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is...

Direct action meant that the goal of any and all of these activities was to provide ways for people to get in touch with their own powers and capacities, to take back the power of...

Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa...

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.

I am a feminist because I dislike everything that feminism implies. I desire an end to the whole business, the demands for equality, the suggestion of sex warfare, the very name feminist. I want to...

My girlfriends and I talk a lot about feminism and the inequality between the way men and women are talked about, the kind of things we say are, ‘Why is it mischievous, fun and sexy...

Seré una de las pocas poetisas en el mundo completamente feliz de ser mujer, no una de esas amargadas y frustradas, retorcidas imitadoras de hombres, que en su mayoría acaban destrozadas

When women turn on women, and take cheap shots at their decisions purely to score political points it serves as proof that feminism, as a movement, is dead and no longer relevant or credible.

If women had power, what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?…I mean, men give her [a queen] power. They let her use their...

Let’s take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated...

Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue...

The message couldn’t have been clearer: women may rise to the top, but they must seem as though they don’t care whether they win or lose. Nice girls care only about being nice. They win...

The problem with movements is that, all too often, they are associated only with the most visible figures, the people with the biggest platforms and the loudest, most provocative voices. But feminism is not whatever...

talk,” and in general to whatever the knowledge-powers of government and management don’t want to hear, which is thus relegated to exclusion from all recognized activity, relegated to the role of a witness.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.