Cathy McMorris Rodgers Quotes

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.

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.

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is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.

We fought very hard for feminism, for women's rights. What I'm seeing today is a very opposite thing. I don't know why, but I see women being put back in their place. And I hate it. We're losing all we worked so hard for.

Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women's movement that liberated us, however.

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

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.

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.

I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back 40 years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' They would say, 'No.'

I'm not a big fan of Women's Liberation, but maybe it will help women stand up for the respect they're due.

Women are a great civilizing force in any society and when they are repressed things don’t work very well.

... as the principle of liberty is better understood, and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in behalf of women. As men become aware that few [women] have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance.

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

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

Once women got the right to vote, the kind of relaxed about everything. It was not until after World War II that women discovered that they did not have equal opportunity in the workplace.... The result was almost a revolution.

Voting means very little…if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right. Not one wife in a thousand can do that now, & so long as she suffers this bondage, all other rights will not help her to her true position.

If we should see ladies attending conventions, traveling about the country in great carts drawn by many yoke of oxen, waving their pocket handkerchiefs to assembled multitudes, it would greatly shock our sensibilities.

You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway. You can’t stop us, neither

Vote for Women – Vote Communist!

In the history of Western countries, democratization began despite the existing patriarchy. Gender equality can be seen as an effect, rather than a cause or necessary condition, of democratization.

The history of women has been a history of silence.

I don't think I was a catalyst for the women's movement.

I don't know if I'm a feminist, but I just know that I am all for outspoken, powerful women.

No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party who ignores her sex.

The scope of the history of women is so underplayed and not told as often as it should be.