Marriage is a core component of the patriarchal system. According to Gerda Lerner’s research on ancient societies, a woman could achieve at least some status, and with that, better treatment and privileges, through preserving her...

[I]f you seek in every way to minimise my firm beliefs by your anti-feminist attacks, please recall that a small dagger or knife point can pierce a great, bulging sack and that a small fly...

What is whiter than snow?’ he said. ‘The truth,’ said Grania.’What is the best colour?’ said Finn. ‘The colour of childhood,’ said she.’What is hotter than fire?’ ‘The face of a hospitable man when he...

Frankly, I’m not responsible for other people’s perceptions and what they consider real or fake. We must abolish the entitlement that deludes us int believing that we have the right to make assumptions about people’s...

Peace in patriarchy is war against women.

Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society.

We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball....

There is any amount of love and good in the world, but you must search for it. Being misunderstood is one of the trials we all must bear. I think that even the most common-minded...

It portrayed motherhood as the highest position that a woman could achieve. For God had made Mary neither a prophet nor the messiah nor the daughter of God. Nor did God take the form of...

And now we who are writing women and strange monstersStill search our hearts to find the difficult answers,Still hope that we may learn to lay our handsMore gently and more subtly on the burning sands.

For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you’ve never had sex, you’re a “good” (i.e. “moral) girl and...

Those who are so eager for women and girls to go back to the kitchen might think again about just what it is we might be up to in there. You can plan a lot...

This pre-eminence is something [men] have unjustly arrogated to themselves. And when it’s said that women must be subject to men, the phrase should be understood in the same sense as when we say we...

The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don’t move. As long as I lie still. The difference between...

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?

Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their...

A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting...

Gender identity is our internal response to a social construction that attempts to make a connection between a person’s biological makeup and their eventual role in society.

Si la mujer es prosaica, casera, bajamente utilitaria, se debe a que le imponen que consagre su existencia a preparar alimentos y limpiar deyecciones. No será de ahí de donde podrá extraer el sentido de...

It’s as if our girls don’t understand that they can be recognized for other things–their goals, their brains. Not just their bodies.

In a story, you must always listen for the voice you cannot hear, the one that has been ignored or silenced. In that crushed voice, there is a strain of truth, as a crushed grape...

Neurotic, ha!” I let out a scornful laugh. “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one...

The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men...

When a man says to me, ‘Let us work together in the great cause you have undertaken, and let me be your companion and aid, for I admire you more than I have ever admired...

The anti-feminism bacllash has been set off not by women’s achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they...

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available...

I was thinking: Girls get scared way too often. Girls get stupidly scared. I was not scared.Telling myself not to be scared kind of worked.

On the scale of relevance, public approval or disapproval of a woman’s choices should not merit measure.

I first knew I was a woman when my mother and father took me out to dinner to celebrate my success on the debate team.” It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they...

The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.

The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.

feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.

Batman doesn’t want a baby in order to feel he’s ‘done everything’. He’s just saved Gotham again! If this means that Batman must be a feminist role model above, say, Nicola Horlick, then so be...

No, I’m the human here. I’m the life at stake. I’m the one with fingernails, who feels pain.Me.

…take down your baby bump photos from Facebook, take down pictures of your kids too. It is your job to protect your children and not parade them around like little circus freaks or glorified mini-you’s.

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent...

Men who are in prison for rape think it’s the dumbest thing that ever happened… it’s isn’t just a miscarriage of justice; they were put in jail for something very little different from what most...

But Rosa soon made the discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn’t read fairly. She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds.

Many of my movies have strong female leads- brave, self-sufficient girls that don’t think twice about fighting for what they believe with all their heart. They’ll need a friend, or a supporter, but never a...

It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance.

We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don’t. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of...

No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street

Something that’s bothered me for a while now is the current profligacy in YA culture of Team Boy 1 vs Team Boy 2 fangirling. […] Despite the fact that I have no objection to shipping,...

When I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search...

real” and on what basis. All human beings are real.Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised. It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel. But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others...

Todas las mujeres conciben ideas, pero no todas conciben hijos

A man must claim responsibility for his own temptation, and not pin it on the woman who arouses him. It’s a gown, Sir Mark. Not even one of my more daring ones.

Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can’t take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can’t take care of anything. It should not be seen as...

I think being a woman is like being Irish… Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.

You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your...