Feminist quotes thread

A few short topical favourites, in solidarity with “hateful” haberdashers in Scotland (and anywhere):

“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”

• Rosa Luxembourg

”No person is your friend who demands your silence.” - Alice Walker

“A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not to be done." - Marge Piercy

“Causing any damage or harm to one party in order to help another party is not justice.”

• Christine de Pizan

“I will have my serpent’s tongue - my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.” - Gloria Anzaldúa

“If I had my life to live over, I would do it all again - but this time, I would be nastier.”

• Jeannette Rankin (first woman elected to the US House of Representatives)

“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them."

Germaine Greer

I particularly like this one, as I never really got it. Then gender ideology marched in, and a lot of men think it’s just dandy. Now I get it completely.

When sleeping women wake, mountains move.

Chinese proverb

Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.

Germaine Greer

Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man.
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

Fucking love this thread 😍

I am becoming more radical with age. I have noticed that writers, when they are old, become milder. But for me it is the opposite. Age makes me more angry.

Nawal El Saadawi

And, one last one from me, in the same vein as the Joan Collins one (and again someone you might not initially think of a feminist), but upon being judged on appearances and being a mere woman:
“I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb...and I also know that I'm not blonde."
Dolly Parton

An oldie but a goodie:
“A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

“I’m a feminist. I’ve been a female for a long time now. It’d be stupid not to be on my own side.” Maya Angelou

They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.” I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.

Nawal El Saadawi

I am a Woman. Get over it.

Hibo Wardere

I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock

Germaine Greer

You can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, ‘And are the men doing this, as well?’ If they aren’t, chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total fucking bullshit’.

Caitlin Moran

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

Sylvia Plath

P.S Dentons, I loved that.

As everyone else is going to take the serious, clever and profound quotes, I thought I’d go in a different direction. This is an answer to a question that was clearly meant as a dig, a ‘Wait, what? An old, washed up, woman thinks she’s worthy of dating a young man, thirty two years her junior?’ Not everyone will agree, but I think she’s a feminist icon for this alone.....

“But Joan, what about the age gap?”
“(Sigh) If he dies, he dies” (🤷‍♀️)
Joan Collins

This quote is so important for this time when being a woman seems to be defined so much by looks and what is perceived as being feminine.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

Charlotte Brontë

"You don't have to be pretty. 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 children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked 'female.'"
Erin McKean

When you expose a problem, you pose a problem.

Sarah Ahmed

“It is difficult for men to measure the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant from the outside, and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature. The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully.”

― Simone de Beauvoir