Inga Muscio Quotes

We are still in various kinds of patriarchal systems. The very definition of patriarchy is that men control women as the means of reproduction, so the idea that a woman's main role is to have children often means society wants more workers, more soldiers. The idea that how many children we have should be controlled by the family, the church, the nation - by anyone but women themselves - is still very deep and very strong.

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

I don't think that women being seen as inferior is a prejudice based on male hatred of women. When you look at history, it's a prejudice based on simple fact.

For centuries, the question of men needing to comprehend women simply didn't arise. Men were valued according to how they measured up to the manly virtues.

Woman throughout the ages has been mistress to the law, as man has been its master.

Misogyny should be understood as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing ideology. Sexism wears a lab coat, misogyny goes on witch hunts.... Sexism is bookish; misogyny is combative. Sexism has a theory; misogyny wields a cudgel.

Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.

I don’t think men have time to be funny because they have to make all of our rules about what we can do with our vaginas.

Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men.

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.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

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

The practice of putting women on pedestals began to die out when it was discovered that they could give orders better from there.

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

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.

No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.

In America, Jefferson noted with approval, women knew their place.

A woman who does not become the slave of just one man becomes the slave of all men.

Women must tell men always that they are the strong ones. They are the big, the strong, the wonderful. In truth, women are the strong ones. It is just my opinion, I am not a professor.

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

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

In a country where women regard themselves as equal, they are not prepared to see men running the show themselves.

It is very frightening to see a resurgence of the old mores, or lack thereof, regarding women's rights to their own bodies.

Women's roles are diminished for obvious reasons. It's the men whose names are on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and who were generals and soldiers.