[The ideology of beauty] has grown strong to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to u...
Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our...
Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling...
Because there’s a silent, shrugging, stoical acceptance of all the things in the world we can never be part of: shorts, swimming pools, strappy dresses, country walks, roller-skating, ra-ra skirts, ve...
Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
A woman's greatest and most perduring failure will be her failure to love. It is certainly not without significance that so many women presently pressing for power on the political, sociological or ec...
I will not send you [Raimondo], they might murder you, but I do not think they will do anything to Catherine - she is a woman and they have great respect for her.
Advocating sexual repression as a solution to violence against women ends up mobilizing women around their fears rather than their visions.
If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect...
I'm not going to limit myself just because people won't accept the fact that I can do something else.
Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.
When you can't find someone to follow, find a way to lead by example.
The school song at Accrington High School for Girls was 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,' a terrible choice for an all-girls' school, but one that helped turn me into a feminist. Where were the famous w...
People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with...
In that instance, my body had decided that this baby was not to be and had ended it. This time, it is my mind that has decided that this baby was not to be. I don't believe one's decision is more vali...
And sometimes drunk women aren't raped; they just make stupid choices--and to say we deserve special treatment when we're drunk because we're women, to say we need to be , I find offensive.
I just love bossy women. I could be around them all day. To me, bossy is not a pejorative term at all. It means someone's passionate and engaged and ambitious and doesn't mind leading.
Inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.
There. There you are. You have dropped a marker pin on your body, to reclaim yourself, to remind you where you are: inside yourself. Somewhere. Somewhere in there.
It would surely be a mistake to gauge the success of feminism by its success as a colonial project. p41.