Mary Boykin Chesnut Quotes

Marriage has ever been a one-sided matter, resting most unequally upon the sexes. By it, man gains all- woman loses all; tyrant law and lust reign supreme with him- meek submission and ready obedience alone befit her.

The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman.

Man treats woman as his own property and not as being capable of feelings, like himself. The way man treats women is much worse than the way landlords treat servants and the high-caste treat the low-caste. These treat them so demeaningly only in situations mutually affecting them; but men treat cruelly and as slaves, from their birth till death.

A woman who does not become the slave of just one man becomes the slave of all men.

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

Forever behind a woman is the mediaeval English common law which places upon her the stigma of inferiority and bondage

I belong to that degraded race called woman – who whether her lot be cast among Jew, or Turk, heathen or Christian is yet a slave.

Marriage finally became acceptable to the churches when laws were established that could make it a means of depriving women of incomes and property, and making wives the equivalent of slaves.

If you have a slave around the house how can you expect to make a revolution outside it? The problem for women is that if we try to be free, then we naturally become lonely, because so many women are willing to become slaves, and men usually prefer that.

[The married woman is] is a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, and serves her master's passion; [and] who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation.

Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

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

Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

I am always revolted when Islamic leaders, from Afghanistan or elsewhere, deny the very existence of female oppression, avoid the issue by pointing to examples of what they view as Western mistreatment of women, or even worse, justify the oppression of women on the basis of notions derived from Sharia law.

The married woman as family provider beside the man, often also in place of the man, but always however subservient to the man's dominion - this is the worst form of woman slavery our time has created.

That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.

Women are not so well united as to form an Insurrection. They are for the most part wise enough to love their Chains, and to discern how becomingly they fit.

We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.

The patriarchy is alive and well in Egypt and the wider Arab world.

Women in Somalia face almost unimaginable oppression.

I was traumatised in the medieval Afghan society at Sarana village by the local boys of Omar's Taliban who forced my in-laws to subjugate me for trying to be different. There can be Omars in other religions, too, who oppress women.

All religions have always hated females.

I grew up in a culture in which it was a sin for a woman to speak out.

Marriage is such a lottery …. the poor woman is virtually a slave to her husband.

Woman does not belong to herself.... Man has made her a perpetual minor.