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...

I can critique the bad; I can take the good, and I can add whatever I want.

Another kind of transcendence myth has been dramatization of human life in terms of conflict and vindication. This focuses upon the situation of oppression and the struggle for liberation. It is a short-circuited transcendence when...

I put in no claims either for happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to exist!

My life views on sex, men, dating, and self-worth were sculpted with the unfiltered ramblings of a drunken misogynist.

You don’t have to be a channel for every free choice denied. Every porcelain bride with no property rights, you don’t have to prove you can fight like a man, leave the screaming to the...

When are we going to realize that hating other women – no matter how much money they have or how far they’ve fallen – is just as bad for ourselves as it is for anyone...

feminine.

I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun...

Oh, Al, shut up! Stop criticizing me! First I’m criticized for being a prude and sounding like a social worker or something, then I’m criticized for looking like a cheap broad. How am I supposed...

I will not send you [Raimondo], they might murder you, but I do not think they will do anything to Catherine – she is a woman and they have great respect for her.

A woman isn’t a whore for wanting pleasure. If it were unnatural, we would not be born with such drives.

Prostitution, perversion, and pornography are intertwined with independence and radical politics in the history of outstanding women. Radclyffe Hall, Colette, Anaïs Nin, Kate Millett, Erica Jong–all of these women used the money they made from...

Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I...

Le sens de la toilette féminine est manifest: il s’agit de se ‘parer’ et se parer c’est s’offrir; les feministes hétérosexuelles se sont montrées naguère sur ce point aussi intransiseantes que les lesbiennes: elles refusaient...

Having ascended to some spiritual strength by focusing on the power of the feminine, it is no doubt tempting to wield this strength against that which triggers memories of having once been weaker.

typical American girl,” this masterful charmer—known for pampering her mostly male passengers while maintaining perfect poise (and straight stocking seams) thirty thousand feet above sea level—became an esteemed national heroine for her womanly perfection.But while...

The tragedy of feminine design is that it receives so little official support. Most of the world’s design schools, having been organized by men, encourage a masculine approach, even when they are run by women....

I realized that searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming. We all grew up on the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty,” which instructs young women that if they just...

Fairy tales for adult readers remained popular throughout Europe well into the 19th century — particularly in Germany, where the Brothers Grimm published their massive collection of German fairy tales (revised and edited to reflect...

That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that...

No matter what happens, no matter who turns on me, no matter what pompous swine thinks he has power over me, I am still me. I will always be me.

The Mommy Wars, as they stand today, serve as an effective check on the ambitions of the American mother. The phenomenon keeps women in a perpetual state of guilt, shame and inadequacy, and does so...

When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women.

Right. I look fine. Except I don’t,’ said Zora, tugging sadly at her man’s nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn’t be able to protect them from self-disgust. To...

The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and...

Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.

Unfortunately, power is something that women abjure once they perceive the great difference between the lives possible to men and to women…

But, of course, you might be asking yourself, ‘Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don’t know! I still don’t know what it is! I’m too knackered and confused to work it out....

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation...

…if I have a daughter I will tell her she can do anything, and I will mean it, because I have no other intention of informing her otherwise. As my mother did with me, and...

In all societies, women are in double jeopardy; on the one hand we are expected to conform to certain emotional standards in our relationships with others at the penalty of being declared insane; on the...

Magistrate: May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil!Lysistrata: If that’s all that troubles you, here take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tounge. Then...

Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and...

[T]he more clamour we make about ‘the women’s point of view’, the more we rub it into people that the women’s point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is —...