Fatima Mernissi Quotes

A gentleman opposed to their enfranchisement once said to me, women have never produced anything of any value to the world. I told him the chief product of the women had been the men, and left it to him to decide whether the product was of any value.

It's a little bit late in the day for men to object that women are getting outside their proper sphere.

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

Women are only children of a larger growth. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.

Yet consider now, whether women are not quite past sense and reason, when they want to rule over men.

I think that Saudi women are very powerful. And I think that Saudi men are the greatest support to Saudi women.

Demands for equality for women are threats to men's self-esteem and sense of sexual turf.

Men regarded women as a servant class in the community, and that women were going to remain in the servant class until they lifted themselves out of it.

We shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, the majority of whom are men, making decisions for women.

The regular Democratic Party and its organization was run by men who looked on women as little more than machine parts.

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.

You know what they say, ‘Behind every successful woman there is an astonished man.

Saudi women far outnumber their male counterparts on university campuses but are reduced to watching men far less qualified control every aspect of their lives.

I don't think there should be anything that women are embarrassed to talk about in the 21st century, because for the last 100,000 years, men have said everything that's on their minds and described everything they have done.

Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.

Women may fall when there's no strength in men.

I remember becoming aware of women's issues and inequality. It became glaringly clear to me when I was living in America that women are regarded as less intelligent than men.

Nature says women are human beings, men have made religions to deny it. Nature says women are human beings, men cry out no!

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

I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.

Until Eve arrived, this was a man's world.

I'm supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I've flunked more often than not. I'm very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don't understand them.

Women will never be as successful as men because they have no wives to advise them.

Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.