William J. Brennan Jr. Quotes

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?

In sum, the truth is that we luxuriate in the comfortable assertion that women enjoy equality. We have salved our consciences by eliminating the more obvious discriminations like unequal rates of pay for work of equal value. But, in fact, we have not eliminated the inheritance of the millennia that women are lesser beings, an inheritance which still manifests itself in a whole range of prejudice and other forms of discrimination.

The "Otherizing" of women is the oldest oppression known to our species, and it's the model, the template, for all other oppressions.

The world is still sexist.

We have taken this action, because as women…we realize that the condition of our sex is so deplorable that it is our duty even to break the law in order to call attention to the reasons why we do so.

American women who know the history of this country will always resent the fact that American men chose to enfranchise Negroes fresh from slavery before enhancing their wives and mothers.

It was a feeling of loyalty to our own sex and an enthusiasm to have every degradation that was put upon our sex removed.

Feminism is to sexism what black nationalism is to racism; the most rational response to the problem.

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

The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.

I don’t know what happened through the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s that took feminism off the table, that made it something that women weren’t supposed to identify with and were supposed to be ashamed of. Feminism is about the fight for equality between the sexes, with equal respect, equal pay, and equal opportunity. At the moment we are still a long way off that.

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.

I had met far more discrimination because I am a woman than because I am black.

The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way.

... until opportunity is as free from sex discrimination as the right to vote finally came to be, no man has any right to criticize women for failure to measure up to men.

... so long as woman labors to second man's endeavors and exalt his sex above her own, her virtues pass unquestioned; but when shedares to demand rights and privileges for herself, her motives, manners, dress, personal appearance, and character are subjects for ridicule and detraction.

People get so burned out on hearing about sexism, but you know what? I would love to burn out on it. I would love to never talk about that again, but until we're all equal I shall have to fight, and remain fighting.

I remember becoming aware of women's issues and inequality. It became glaringly clear to me when I was living in America that women are regarded as less intelligent than men.

I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

Men have not stacked the decks against women.

Words cannot describe the indignation a proud woman feels for her sex in disfranchisement.

Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.

Women have no government.

Women are a sisterhood. They make common cause in behalf of the sex; and, indeed, this is natural enough, when we consider the vast power that the law gives us over them.