Margaret Mead Quotes

For women in, say, Alabama, 'feminism' is a dirty word. They would never march in the streets. But although they don't think of themselves as the beneficiaries of feminism, they are.

Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women's movement that liberated us, however.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

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is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.

I think women were gradually becoming more independent - the feminist movement of the Sixties didn't just spring out of nowhere.

We always had a lot of admiration for feminists who were out there trying to change things for the better for women, who were trying to find equality in the workplace and at home.

There's a pattern of the pathway opening in a certain way. We stared thinking, there's so many wonderful films about civil rights movements, but there isn't even one yet about the women's movement? It's hard to capture because it's so sprawling, and it's an ideology.

I've been reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which is obviously very dated now but still relevant. It's so interesting to see how far we've come and how far we haven't come with all these myths that people put onto women.

Even if I am simply one more woman laying one more brick in the foundation of a new and more humane world, it is enough to make me rise eagerly from my bed each morning and face the challenge of breaking the historic silence that has held women captive for so long.

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.

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.

I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free.

The only thing the women were after was just the chance to help the world on. But some men were so dreadfully afraid of them that they refused to understand, and talked about 'shrieking sisterhoods' and 'disappointed spinsters' and rubbish of that sort.

We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.

The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.

They used to give us a day-it was called International Women's Day. In 1975 they gave us a year, the Year of the Woman. Then from 1975 to 1985 they gave us a decade, the Decade of the Woman. I said at the time, who knows, if we behave they may let us into the whole thing. Well, we didn't behave and here we are.

The media and even, to some degree, leaders of women's organizations don't understand that the women's movement is an absolute part of society now. It is in the consciousness, it is taken for granted. It is part of the way women look at themselves, and women are looked at.

I never expect men to give us liberty. No, women, we are not worth it until we take it.

advocating women's rights and greater opportunity for women in the workplace and in every avenue of public life is inconsistent with an insistence on mother taking care of children and housework.

The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself; that is not what I meant by freedom, it is only social progress.

We are the women men warned us about.

I was brought up with a very strong sense of what can happen if your society starts to chip away at the small victories women have won for themselves.

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.

Bourgeois society is not fundamentally opposed to the bourgeois women's movement, which is proven by the fact that in various states reforms of private and public laws concerning women have been initiated.