Adrienne Rich Quotes

The revolution and women's liberation go together. We do not talk of women's emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph. Women hold up the other half of the sky.

The women are very important too, we can't have a revolution that doesn't involve and liberate women. It's so subtle the way you're taught male superiority.

Courage to be is the key to revelatory power of the feminist revolution.

Feminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society.

I have made speeches urging women to adopt methods of rebellion such as have been adopted by men in every revolution.

Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.

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

People ask me if I think Anne Boleyn was a feminist... but she wasn't striking out on behalf of women, and she wasn't particularly keen on them.

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.

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation... none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

If feminism wasn't powerful, if feminism wasn't influential, people wouldn't spend so much time putting it down.

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.

Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s.

Women are not stupid, but they were not clever enough to realise that feminism did not bring freedom, but the opposite. That's why I'm glad feminism is dead.

In the late sixties, when revolution and upheaval were everywhere, feminists were ridiculed for focusing on housework.

During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects.

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.

The emancipation of women was one of the central issues In the renewal of the Italian state and of the Italian society.

While women were powerfully liberated both externally as well as internally by the feminism of the 1970s, we made some serious mistakes as well.

Black women have never embraced feminism. They didn't embrace it in the '50s and '60s; they're not embracing it now. That's not new. I think it's a tendency among women in general not to be supportive of each other.

The media has bought into the whole social revolution, the Kinsey ideas, and has been completely taken over by the feminists. And the feminists, I think, are the most destructive elements in our society.

There was an angry wave in the '70s, a strong feminist angry wave. I remember thinking - oh my God - I thought it was the beginning of something, and it all went quiet.

Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.

I want women to be the subject, not the object.

Empower us women and we will change this whole entire world.