Bella Abzug Quotes

Women today have the keys to the doors which have been barred against them and they will open them without asking consent.

Education ... is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery.

Every now and then I am reminded that even though the need for being a feminist is gradually disappearing in this country, we haven't quite reached the millennium.

Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. Those days are over.

The pedestal is immobilizing and subtly insulting whether or not some women yet realize it. We must move up from the pedestal.

The storm and stress period of women and the new social and psychological formations thereby entailed must indeed extend far into the twentieth century. This period of conflict will cease only when woman within and out of marriage shall have received legal equality with man.

Being a mother is no longer a liability, and being a woman is no longer a pre-existing condition!

Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act.

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Equality and development will not be achieved however if peace is not understood from women's' point of view.

I like the fact that glass ceilings are breaking all over.

We wanted to be achievers, but being an achiever didn't mean that you stopped being a woman.

We women are going to bring change. We are speaking up for girls' rights, but we must not behave like men, like they have done in the past.

My mum fought for feminism in her day so instilled in me the importance of equality. She taught me so much about women.

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.

Women have taken on traditionally masculine roles and professions, and there is no real equivalent for men. Men are still extremely reluctant, as we all are reluctant to see them, take on traditionally feminine roles or professions. That is just not something that they do easily.

Men need to understand, and women too, what feminism is really about.

Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free.

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.

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.

The man of the millennium is much more liberated than the man of the '90s.

Women have begun to see that if I go through that doorway, I take everybody through it.

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.

When you say 'revolution' when you have only men outside, you know that something is going wrong. I'm not like a hardcore feminist, but I think that one of the things that makes the society advanced is equality between men and women. If half of the society is oppressed by the other half, it's not fine.

I believe I've always been a big believer in equality. No one has ever been able to tell me I couldn't do something because I was a girl.