Feminist Quotes

I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career.  I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.  ~Gloria Steinem

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead.  He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.  ~Robert Mueller

How good does a female athlete have to be before we just call her an athlete?  ~Author Unknown

Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle.  ~Marya Mannes, But Will It Sell?, 1964  

Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.  ~Betty Friedan

Scratch most feminists and underneath there is a woman who longs to be a sex object.  The difference is that is not all she wants to be.  ~Betty Rollin

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.  ~Gloria Steinem    

Because women's work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we're the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it's our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we're nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we're nymphos and if we don't we're frigid and if we love women it's because we can't get a "real" man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we're neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we're selfish and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and "unfeminine" and if we don't we're typical weak females and if we want to get married we're out to trap a man and if we don't we're unnatural and because we still can't get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can't cope or don't want a pregnancy we're made to feel guilty about abortion and...for lots of other reasons we are part of the women's liberation movement.  ~Author unknown, quoted in The Torch, 14 September 1987

  "Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
—Eleanor Roosevelt

Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of women. Reynolds Price

~ You don't have to be anti-man to be pro-woman. Jane Galvin Lewis

~ We are all benefiting from the great feminists who struggled and suffered and worked to give us everything women now enjoy... I refer to myself as a feminist, and I do it with pride. ~Cybil Shepherd

~ Feminism has transformed the lives and aspirations of the majority of women in ways unmeasurable by statistics... raising women's intellectual,economic and political expectations, increasing intolerance of wife beating, rape and other violence against women, redefining women's sexuality. ~Linda Gordon

All of these give me pause for thought, and I will try and reflect more and post about some of them in more detail later.