Elizabeth Joan Smith Quotes

I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.

My mom was sarcastic about men. She would tell me Adam was the rough draft and Eve was the final product. She was a feminist minister, an earth mom who wore a bra only on Sundays.

Whatever feminists may say about their only advocating choices, everyone knows the truth: Feminism regards work outside the home as more elevating, honorable, and personally productive than full-time mothering and homemaking.

The Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.

In our religion women are as men.

I'm a feminist at heart, and I'm totally aware of why people have an issue with this show.

We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.

Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered to women for escape from this death and how eagerly and how ignorantly it is embraced.

Mr. DeMille's theory of sexual difference was that marriage is an artificial state for women. The want to be taken, ruled, raped. That was his theory.

If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.

Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.

The nature of women's oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children - we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.

I've always been able to do what I wanted. On the other hand, my mother was. She considered the fact of being a woman a great disadvantage. She had her reasons. In her day women lived in seclusion - in almost all Indian states they couldn't even show themselves on the street.

The theory [before the twentieth century] ... was that all the jobs in the world belonged by right to men, and that only men were by nature entitled to wages. If a woman earned money, outside domestic service, it was because some misfortune had deprived her of masculine protection.

It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.

Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism.

Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful--but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.

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.

I have been told that I am a "natural" feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.

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.

Let's admit that feminism came from liberalism and it was very positive. But then it went dark. It went into a bad place. When feminism replaced biology with social construct, they started to say that everything about a human being was created by your environment or by your - by environmental cues as opposed to innate traits... Like you didn't achieve what you could get because it was your fault. They denied traits that are applied across all cultures. And that's where feminism went wrong is it denied biology and makes them look foolish.

Emancipated' women found out that the honesty, generosity, and camaraderie of men was a lie.

... while our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into sixteenth century logic. They leave nothing to be desired generally in regard to gallantry and chivalry, but they actually do not seem sometimes to have outgrown that old contemporary of chivalry--the idea that women may stand on pedestals or live in doll houses,... but they must not furrow their brows with thought or attempt to help men tug at the great questions of the world.

It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.