Gerda Lerner Quotes

We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons?

You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway. You can’t stop us, neither

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

The rights of women are to the 21st century what civil rights were to the 20th.

The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.

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

Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.

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

In no sense of the word am I in sympathy with women’s suffrage ….I have no vote and I’ve raised hell all over this country.

Yes, I'm a suffragist.

I not only advocate it now, but have advocated it earnestly for the last fifty years. As to the militant suffragettes, I have noted that many women believe in militant methods. You might advocate one way of securing the rights and I might advocate another, they both might help to bring about the result desired. To win freedom always involves hard fighting. I believe in women doing what they deem necessary to secure their rights.

Vote for Women – Vote Communist!

In the history of Western countries, democratization began despite the existing patriarchy. Gender equality can be seen as an effect, rather than a cause or necessary condition, of democratization.

It's the 21st century. It's untenable to suggest that women had no significance and no interest and that just because they didn't vote they had no relevance to the course of our history.

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.

Women's history is the primary tool for women's emancipation.

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.

A women's place in history has never been given the attention that it needs to be given, and that's why we have a lot of the misogyny in our society today.

A backlash against women's rights is nothing new. Indeed it's a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.

We have come far, but there is an ongoing battle to be fought. Many of the issues the Suffragettes were dealing with are still issues today across the globe: equal pay, parental rights, sexual abuse, etc.

A few British suffragettes everybody laughed at started the cause of equality between men and women.

And I think women have come a very, very long way, but they have a long way to go.