Kathy Bates Quotes

Our daughters were coming of age during a rising consciousness about gender equality. Throughout their school years - from kindergarten through graduate school, 1972 to 1992 - women were starting to take their places in areas traditionally reserved mostly for men.

Women are the only ones who will be able to eliminate the patriarchy, and when that happens all of us will win, men as much as women.

The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.

Has feminism increased the pool of happy women?

When people were very concerned about the violence against women, I encouraged people to stick with it because it was going somewhere and there was a reason why. It's all a commentary on gender roles and women and having to be the damsel or to stay on the ranch or to stay at home.

Women were doing quite well in this country before feminism came along.

I was brought up with a very strong sense of what can happen if your society starts to chip away at the small victories women have won for themselves.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

When I was coming of age, I remembered reading and studying the initial ideas within the feminist movement. There was this idea with my parents' generation that in order to find equality, a woman would need to behave like a man.

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

I was just nine years old when 'Straw Dogs' came out, so I can't really speak to the women of the time, but I can tell you that the women of 2011 are not put-upon, and they're not victims.

Feminism has always been a theme that I'm very interested in.

I've been reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which is obviously very dated now but still relevant. It's so interesting to see how far we've come and how far we haven't come with all these myths that people put onto women.

I am not a feminist, but I do believe in the strength of women... This social revolution of feminism in the '70s really achieved so many of its goals-not every single one of them, obviously-but I think we should say it's great that these young women don't feel like they need to be feminists.

It is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights.

Feminism liberated women from the natural dignity of their sex and turned them into inferior men.

Since the beginning of time, women have had to fight for what they deserve. I'm proud to be a part of a wave of strong women on TV!

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

As women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman's proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially.

To transform the world women need to demand their place - which is not equal, but superior.

Surely women's liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained.

Women are a new race, recreated since the world received Christianity.

I became a feminist because I wanted to help my daughters, other women and myself aspire to something more than a place behind a good man.

In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.

The only thing the women were after was just the chance to help the world on. But some men were so dreadfully afraid of them that they refused to understand, and talked about 'shrieking sisterhoods' and 'disappointed spinsters' and rubbish of that sort.