Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Surely women's liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained.

Womanpower means the self determination of women, and that means all the baggage of paternalistic society will have to be thrown overboard.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

Our daughters were coming of age during a rising consciousness about gender equality. Throughout their school years - from kindergarten through graduate school, 1972 to 1992 - women were starting to take their places in areas traditionally reserved mostly for men.

The most important movement in the world is the feminist movement. If we can really figure out what's going on between men and women, the other problems will take care of themselves. I'm sure of it.

It's a little bit late in the day for men to object that women are getting outside their proper sphere.

A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.

Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.

For a woman emancipation means corruption.

… it is not sufficient to change laws, institutions and customs. It is essential that women acquire ‘a new skin’. This can occur only through a collective effort while women suffer and loathe the oppression of men; it does not follow that her ovaries condemn her to be on her knees for eternity.

It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

Feminism, when it truly achieves its goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society.

Feminism liberated women from the natural dignity of their sex and turned them into inferior men.

As women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman's proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially.

Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.

In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.

Men ruled the roost and women played a subservient role [in the 1960s]. Working wives were a rarity, because their place was in the home, bringing up the kids. The women who did work were treated as second-class citizens because it was a male-dominated society. That was a fact of life then. But it wouldn't be tolerated today, and that's quite right in my book... people look back on those days through a thick veil of nostalgia, but life was hard if you were anything other than a rich, powerful, white male.

Whether we regard the Women's Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a movement that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships.

When people were very concerned about the violence against women, I encouraged people to stick with it because it was going somewhere and there was a reason why. It's all a commentary on gender roles and women and having to be the damsel or to stay on the ranch or to stay at home.

...feminism differs from reform of any kind, even franchise reform. Feminists, I should say, are not reformers at all, but ratherintellectual biologists and psychologists.

It is often asserted that as woman has always been man's slave--subject--inferior--dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition. This might have some weight had not the vast majority of men also been enslaved for centuries to kings and popes, and orders of nobility, who, in the progress of civilization, have reached complete equality.

I think the fallacy is to think that Women's Liberation meant that men and women would become interchangeable. That has not happened, and most men and women would not want it to happen.

It is not a woman I want - it is all women.