Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

I didn't see myself as any advance guard, or feminist.

All women are feminists, whether they know it or not.

To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.

I did have a feminist side to me, just not in such a pronounced way.

I grew up definitely a feminist, but I didn't call myself a feminist until I took my first women's studies class in college.

I consider myself a feminist, in a way.

I realized that calling yourself a feminist or not calling yourself a feminist, just by being in a band of all girls, it's all you talk about.

I'm a poster child for feminism whether I like it or not, but I was resistant to the part of me that was a woman.

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

Now you ask a group of young women on the college campus, 'How many of you are feminists?' Very few will raise their hands because young women don't want to be associated with it anymore because they know it means male-bashing, it means being a victim, and it means being bitter and angry.

The last speaker alluded to this movement as being that of a few disappointed women. From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman. I was disappointed when I came to seek a profession worthy an immortal being - every employment was closed to me, except those of the teacher, the seamstress, and the housekeeper. In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.

I became a feminist because I wanted to help my daughters, other women and myself aspire to something more than a place behind a good man.

It took me quite a while to even admit that I was a feminist because I was ignorant of what it meant to be a feminist. I grew up believing in equality - believing that women and men were created equal and that we could be stronger together - but I didn't know that made me a feminist.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I am a feminist, that can come off as a negative connotation. But I am a strong female.

Recently some work I made could be seen as feminist art or work that relates to the body. That's just what I'm feeling - like it needs to be done.

To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.

When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.

The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some of the pressures on women which I was lucky enough to have escaped, perhaps because of my eccentricity or the oddness of my upbringing.

Women are in many ways second-class citizens in the United States in 2016, because of the way that we're portrayed in popular culture.

I have to ask myself, Am I content with calling myself a feminist? Yes, because I speak out.

Feminists have not tried to "destroy the family". We just thought the family was such a good idea that men might want to get involved in it too.

The word 'feminist' is a word that discriminates, and I'm not into that. I don't think there has to be a separation in life in anything. [...] Labels are for other people to understand us, so for me, I know how I feel and I don't need to call myself a 'feminist' or 'not a feminist' because I know what my truth is.

I feel like there's this weird thing that as a feminist band you get put in this role as ambassadors.

I was never a feminist because I was never ugly enough for that.

The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.