Ernestine Rose Quotes

There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves.

In traditional societies, we have a long legacy of men controlling the body and mind of women. Such societies have valorised motherhood and fabricated concepts like chastity. Women have been the victims of these notions for thousands of years.

But it will be said that the husband provides for the wife, or in other words, he feeds, clothes and shelters her! I wish I had the power to make every one before me fully realize the degradation contained in that idea.

Democrat women lead the way in showing other women how to be stepped on and diminished by men. That's what they do, for a payoff somewhere down the line.

Women are not so well united as to form an Insurrection. They are for the most part wise enough to love their Chains, and to discern how becomingly they fit.

Women have to stand up to tremendous discriminatory practices, whether inherited traditions, whether imposed norms, male perceptions of power and control. The women always have to go through that and cannot take any privilege for granted.

All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill.

Women's chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy.

The veil is the mask of Egyptian women in a power struggle against the dictatorship of men…. The veil gives women more power in a man’s world.

Knowing the horror that most women have of anything approaching irreverence, the Bible has been called out to play the part of a scarecrow on the rich fields of men’s monopolies…Men have had the management of all things human for six thousand years…Has the result been so eminently successful that we need dread a little change?

Woman was the first human being that tasted bondage. Woman was a slave before the slave existed.

Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating.

If you're feminist, it means that you've noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn't natural.

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'

It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.

I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.

Men often still expect women to be under their thumb.

Male privilege and entitlement are dying a very painful death; no one gives up power without a struggle.

Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.

Disguise our bondage as we will, 'Tis woman, woman, rules us still.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.

Men are very tough, very critical of me. I think they expect you to basically just be a picture. They don't want to hear you speak.

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.