Bella Abzug Quotes

I'm thankful for the work that feminists like Gloria Steinem have done. I am a feminist, but the geography for women today is vastly different than it was in the '60s.

For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, we have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier.

As we move into the twenty-first century, women's status in society will become the standard by which to measure our progress toward civility and peace.

People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.

They used to give us a day-it was called International Women's Day. In 1975 they gave us a year, the Year of the Woman. Then from 1975 to 1985 they gave us a decade, the Decade of the Woman. I said at the time, who knows, if we behave they may let us into the whole thing. Well, we didn't behave and here we are.

Women have a lot to say about how to advance women's rights, and governments need to learn from that, listen to the movement and respond.

We would, however, perform an injustice to the bourgeois women's rights movement if we would regard it as solely motivated by economics. No, this movement also contains a more profound spiritual and moral aspect.

For women in, say, Alabama, 'feminism' is a dirty word. They would never march in the streets. But although they don't think of themselves as the beneficiaries of feminism, they are.

Women are in positions of power the most radical of activists could only dream of in 1960.

The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself; that is not what I meant by freedom, it is only social progress.

I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.

I think 99 percent of women's lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology - it doesn't precede it.

I was a feminist in the Sixties, and can you imagine? The worst thing I could have done was to be in fashion. It was the most uncomfortable position.

We, in the late '60s, '70s and '80s, are acting like we have just discovered freedom and liberation. But I'm sure that many women have worked for that for such a long time.

There's a lot of women's organisations, but they're all working separately. If you get people together, as a collaborative voice, it's strong.

Even if national peculiarities in character and in laws occasion differences in the curve which the woman movement describes in the different countries, yet everywhere the movement has had the same causes, must follow the same main direction, and - sooner or later - must have the same effects.

[T]he great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment.

Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.

Every movement takes a century to make its mark. The women’s movement is only 40 some years old.

The young women waking up to feminism now already wake up to more consciousness than my generation had. Even just simple things like equal pay - before you went, in my generation, and asked for a raise, you went through nausea and your palms sweating.

Despite erasure by the media and other patriarchal institutions, there was, by 1975, a substantial body of feminist writings as well as artwork, music, films, and organization of all kinds.

The women's movement was slow in coming to suburban New Jersey.

Sometimes it feels like the feminist movement never happened.

I think women were gradually becoming more independent - the feminist movement of the Sixties didn't just spring out of nowhere.

As much as any woman of the twentieth century, Madam Walker paved the way for the profound social changes that altered women's place in American society.