Eleanor Smeal Quotes

The discrimination of women and girls goes to the core of any and all analyses of the world's economic, political, and environmental problems.

I've been speaking out about harassment and gender disparity for years.

There is no reason for women to trail behind men in social, economic, and political outcomes.

The fact is, there is not now, nor has there ever been in the whole of history, a single country in the world where women have equality with men.

I'm feminist in that I believe that there should be equality between men and women. I get deeply frustrated on a daily basis by the enormous gender divide in the U.S. literary world. But I don't know how to deal with it, so I don't tend to say much about it.

No society can thrive when half its people are left behind.

The only bitterness I had is: Where is the conversation on gender? That's been going on since there have been men and women, and still we're not hearing about what they're going through.

Controlling women as the means of reproduction is made even more necessary by any race or caste or class system. It just comes together, it's just like life. And therefore it's not even practical to be a feminist without being anti-racist or against classism. It just doesn't work.

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

The truth is even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface we have huge issues at play that really do affect women. It's time for all the women in America and all the women that love women and all the gay people and the people of color that we've all fought for to fight for us now.

Obviously the most oppressed of any oppressed group will be its women

There's a long, long history of women suffering abuse, injustice, and not having the same opportunities as men, and I think that's been very detrimental to the human race as a whole.

Today is International Women's Day, and there's a fantastic set of pieces running by an organization called ONE called "Poverty Is Sexist." It's a great way to quickly learn about what's actually going on for women in poverty around the world, and then do something about it.

In spite of what Thomas Jefferson wrote, all men may be created equal, but not to all women.

It cannot be doubted that in most countries today women, in comparison to men, still remain underprivileged.

The oppression of women is the single most corrosive and urgent problem of our time.

As long as women are bound by poverty and as long as they are looked down upon, human rights will lack substance.

If you look up feminist in the dictionary, it just means someone who believes men and women have equal rights.

Feminism's failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don't regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come.

Let's distinguish between freedom and equality. The modern American woman may be more liberated sexually than her mother was, but I don't think she enjoys a bit more sexual equality. The American male continues to use her sexually for one thing: a means to the end of his own ejaculation.

Gender inequality is not one problem, it's a collection of problems.

Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sexand take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The beginning point at both conferences must be that everything is a woman's issue. That means racism in a woman's issue, just as is anti-Semitism, Palestinian homelessness, rural development, ecology, the persecution of lesbians, and the exploitative practices of global corporations.

We [women] are the majority of the population, majority of the electorate, majority of the workforce... and yet we're still doing majority of family unpaid or low paid labor. And we live longer. Our stuff is not "special interest" stuff. Our stuff is the stuff of the future, of the whole.

I live in a war zone. I would never have imagined 37 years ago when I started practicing law that there would still be so much discrimination against women, so much denial of women's rights.