Phyllis McGinley Quotes

I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.

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.

There's many women now who think, 'Surely we don't need feminism anymore, we're all liberated and society's accepting us as we are'. Which is just hogwash. It's not true at all.

I'm in favour of the old roles being blurred. The old division at school where the boys did metalwork and woodwork and the girls did needlework and domestic science is awful, really - and I'm glad it's gone.

The struggles women face today are simultaneously very, very old and very new.

One of the most disturbing things I heard was that women's issues weren't "hot." Which is so ironic, because women are constantly being judged on some "hot" level. The conversation is not hot enough for them to do anything about. We have to make it hot, make them feel the fire. Until then, a lot of them aren't going to do anything.

We don't need to be feminist in my generation.

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.

The goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved, and those who claim we're living in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject.

If you ask me what I believe in today, I believe in feminism. I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else. Feminism has to do with everything in the world, a vision of how the world can be. I have great doubts about Utopias, but I just keep on thinking there is a better way to live than the way we live now.

society, while willing to make room for women, is not willing to make changes for them.

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.

We need feminist voices today, you know. In my time, we had incredible feminist voices and I'm sure we have it today, too, but in all the massive outlets, maybe the one or two or three voices are somehow disappearing.

Will I have to explain to my daughter that her brother is gonna make more money doing the exact same job because he's a man? If they both played sports since they were three years old, they both worked just as hard, but because he's a boy, they're gonna give him more money? Like, how am I gonna explain that to her? In tennis we've had great pioneers that paved the way - including Venus [Williams], who fought so hard for Wimbledon to pay women the same prize money they pay men, and Billie Jean King, who is one of the main reasons Title IX exists.

I realized that women are still not seen as equal to men. We had a big wave of feminism just before my generation was born. We're still sitting on this wave. There are very militant people and very aggressive women at the top of that wave but I think we have a new version of it now.

As I get older I think, contrary to modern assumption but in line with the old Lerner and Lowe song, that it would actually benefit both them and society if - to quote Professor Higgins - a woman could be more like a man.

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

The strong emergence of pro-feminine values in highly masculine societies signals that traditional masculine structures will continue to be challenged as the Millennial generation grows up and gains even more influence.

In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men-but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily.

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.

I have come far, but not far enough. It is still a man's world.

I wish feminism wasn't so scary to people. It should be an evolving concept. I think it's an umbrella term to embrace conflicting ideas.

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

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

To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male ideas to female facts.