Your favorite feminist or women-centric quotes?

I've been collecting quotes lately, just to stay in touch with the collective, especially the female element of it. Here's one I can't get out of my head:

"Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working." (Adrienne Rich)

Does anyone else have any quotes, inspirational, memorable, incisive, etc., that s/he would like to contribute?

"Optimism is what you do, how you live. I write, which is a quintessential act of optimism. It sometimes means the triumph of faith over experience, a belief in communication, in community, in change, and, for me, in beauty. The power and beauty of language. I act with other women to create social change: activism is optimism. I've always believed in art and politics as keys to transformation. Emotional authenticity and, if you will, social progress towards fairness and equality."

Andrea Dworkin: From A 1995 interview with Micheal Moorecock

TCM just finished a week of her movies, from the early ones where she was put into an ingenue role (she was awful) through her great wisecracking stage and into some of the films she made as she aged. She was a great feminist and an inspiration to me all my life.

• I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

• If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.

• Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

• Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about.

• If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute. --Rebecca West, 1913


Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. --Cheris Kramerae, A Feminist Dictionary

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help each other belong to themselves." (Louise Bernikow)

single women's mental health--employment improves it." (Susan Faludi)

not really a quote but a song lyric.

What kind of father would take his own daughter's rights away?
And what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she were gay?

from Dear Mr. pResident, Pink (featuring the Indigo girls)

And I wasn't looking for profundity, FYI. Feminists should feel free to post whatever they want.

some object in life which will fill this vacuum and prevent this sad wearing away of the heart." (Elizabeth Blackwell)

marriage and a career." (Steinem)

An oldie, but a goody.

Well-behaved women seldom make history. I forget who said it.

But I've seen it attributed to others as well.

Percentage of men in poverty? 9.3% Percentage of women in poverty? 12.5%

to be considered any good." (Mary Kay Blakely)

Does anyone know who said that? Bet it wasn't a male.

:shrug:

"Speak your mind even if your voice shakes" Maggie Kuhn

a light hearted one, a bumper sticker really.....Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did only backwards and in high heels

Cheers

That one's from Sara Jordon. I have really benefitted from doing this lately. Coming home and reading DU for like, two hours. Scrubbing out the pile of nasty, bigoted, misogynist bullshit from my brain's daily exposure to western suburbia, and embracing reality again. Helps keep me centered (and sane).

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

"I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role."

"Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we are in hot water!"

"The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it."

"I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."

Great idea for the post btw :hi:

Good contributions!

as their wives, and torn between the demands of a career and small children...But the majority of men did not share the load at home. Some refused outright. Others refused more passively, often offering a 'loving' shoulder to lean on, an 'understanding' ear as their working wife faced the conflict they both saw as hers." (Arlie Hochschild)

"Radical feminists are always nice. Provoked to the point of madness, but remaining, at heart, nice." --Andrea Dworkin

(I know that quote is taken out of context and that's not, as far as I know, what Dworkin was implying. But it's the first thing I thought of when I saw this article).

but as someone who gets called an angry, man-hating feminazi all the time, I rather like that quote. I can identify with it. I'm really a nice person, but all the fucking bullshit drives me crazy.

;)

On a coffee cup a friend gave me years ago after some guy broke her heart.