Clara Zetkin Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

...there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women.

The women's movement completely changed attitudes all over the world in ways we'll never be able to count.

The women's movement was always going to work in two parts. With one part, we'd break open the doors that were closed to women, and with the other part, we'd walk through, transforming society for men and women. Turns out it was a lot easier to open the doors.

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.

This position is untenable, and there can be no pause in the agitation for full political power and responsibility until these are granted to all the women of the nation.

Women are called upon to defend every bit of progress we have made against particularly virulent attack. But we must also hold out a vision, put forth a positive agenda of what women need and want and then move forward toward that dream.

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

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.

Women's issues have always been a part of my life. My goal is to bring the word 'feminism' back into the zeitgeist and reframe it.

The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

There appears to be no limit as to how far the women's revolution will take us.

The women's rights movement of the 1970s had not yet emerged; except for Bella Abzug, I had no women supporters.

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.

The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.

Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.

However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly.

If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.

…if civilization is to advance at all in the future, it must be through the help of women, women freed of their political shackles, women with full power to work their will in society.

You don't run a feminist agenda and achieve political power.

In no sense of the word am I in sympathy with women’s suffrage ….I have no vote and I’ve raised hell all over this country.