Feminist quotes thread

[ArabellaScott]

For a bit of pep on a Friday afternoon, thought I'd gather some stirring quotes.

"I know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion" - Emmeline Pankhurst

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Virginia Woolf

Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.

Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts

“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

“Bare strength entitles the Men to no superiority above us”
― Lady Sophia Fermor, Woman Not Inferior to Man

"After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way. She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature."

Germaine Greer

"The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion."

• Germaine Greer

When you expose a problem, you pose a problem.

Sarah Ahmed

"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

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

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.

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

@WarOnWomen

"You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness. But still, like air, I rise."

Maya Angelou

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.

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

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

Germaine Greer

I am a Woman. Get over it.

Hibo Wardere

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’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

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

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

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

@PurgatoryOfPotholes

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.

Absolutely bloody love this

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 😍

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

When sleeping women wake, mountains move.

Chinese proverb