Sarah Gavron Quotes

I grew up in a working-class Israeli family, which was feminist only in its female-dominated structure.

The working class is my home country, and my future is linked with the proletariat.

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created.

I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back 40 years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' They would say, 'No.'

When I started giving talks about women's history, one of the things that bothered me was the tendency to say, 'Well, everybody was totally oppressed and suddenly in 1964 we rose up, got our freedom, and here we are.' It dismisses the women who fought for rights for several hundred years of our history up to that point.

Women are now in the situation of the mass of mankind a few years since, when science and learning were in the hands of priests, and property was held by vassalage.

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

I was taught nothing about the suffragettes in school. The version I eventually got was mainly about the peaceful campaigning of the constitutional suffragists. Their work was vital, but there was this other, not widely known story of the women who risked everything, who were prepared to break every taboo.

My awakening to the fight for women's votes came when I was 13, and the BBC screened a drama called 'Shoulder to Shoulder' about the suffragettes, with the great Sian Phillips as Emmeline Pankhurst. It made a huge impression on me - not just the history, but because of the debates it triggered at home.

There's a pattern of the pathway opening in a certain way. We stared thinking, there's so many wonderful films about civil rights movements, but there isn't even one yet about the women's movement? It's hard to capture because it's so sprawling, and it's an ideology.

Women's history is the primary tool for women's emancipation.

People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.

I make films about working class people.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.

I feel sometimes that there's this sense that people are poor because they want to be, or they're working-class because they want to be or because they don't work hard enough. I feel like there's this demonization of working people in general, but specifically definitely labor union members.

Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.

In the adjustment of the new order of things, we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing less.

People ask me if I think Anne Boleyn was a feminist... but she wasn't striking out on behalf of women, and she wasn't particularly keen on them.

While there's capitalism, there'll be socialism, because there is always a response to injustice.

I certainly came up in an era where women were really making strides and making a point to beat down doors and find their place and crash through the glass ceiling.

Men need to understand, and women too, what feminism is really about.

One of the things that interests me about the Regency period is how women began to stir under the thumbs of men, wanting more and bigger freedoms.

It's time for women to make their voices heard. Their silence on the subject of war and peace is deafening.

If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s.