Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes

Thousands of women are crushed and made inarticulate by that system and never develop as their natures would force them to develop were they in a decent environment.

Feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor - it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers - it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.

To empower women, power must be given to them, presumably by an entity that already has it. And that entity is the patriarchy. This also implies that women must be on the receiving end, waiting - politely - to be empowered. Very Victorian-era courtship, isn't it?

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that?

Feminists are in an untenable position, defending something they no longer believe in, and which history will force them to recognize was destructive of most of the central pillars of civilization. I'm just the first one to point it out publicly.

It's mainly a few elite women who benefit greatly from standing with the forces that keep women down.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Very often as a little girl, then as a young woman, I have suffered my lot of discrimination. I was brought up with brothers; I grew up in a boys' world. You have to elbow your way in. When you come with that sentiment of having been in a minority for a long period of time, then you are much more attentive to minorities.

Women are so powerful they're scary, and the incentive to squash this has been going on for so long that some of us actually believe we're subordinate.

There is no reason against woman's elevation, but prejudices.

A segregated spiritual subculture does women no good, even if it does have adorable butterflies in the logo.

You know, women have a history of just being - we've been told all our lives not to say - in the fifties you couldn't say birth or even be pregnant hardly on television - and then gradually things have changed.

Of all the social revolutions now abroad in the world, that of the American women is the least dynamic, the least predictable, the most aimless and divided – in short the most feminine…. As a class, they are today themselves the greatest obstacle to their own advancement.... They are simply ridiculous.

It would be hard to find a single example in history in which a group that cast more than 50 percent of the vote got away with calling itself the victim... Women are the only 'oppressed' group to share the same parents as the 'oppressor'; to be born into the middle class and upper class as frequently as the 'oppressor'; to own more of the culture's luxury items than the 'oppressor'..

Knowing the horror that most women have of anything approaching irreverence, the Bible has been called out to play the part of a scarecrow on the rich fields of men’s monopolies…Men have had the management of all things human for six thousand years…Has the result been so eminently successful that we need dread a little change?

Women's ideas of themselves had changed, but the world's idea of women, somehow, had not. The cognitive dissonance was palpable at all times.

The struggle to conquer oppression in our country is the weaker for the traditionalist, conservative, and primitive restraints imposed on women by man-dominated structures within our movement, as also because of equally traditionalist attitudes of surrender and submission on the part of women.

I think feminism is the worst thing that ever happened to women. Our job used to be no job. We had it so good!

I really hope that men read 'The Power' and watch 'The Handmaid's Tale' and read 'The Handmaid's Tale.'

As Paretsky detailed in her short memoir Writing in an Age of Silence (2007), early optimism buoyed by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s has, in her view, all but crumbled in the face of a bombardment of sadism and misogyny, the withholding of civil liberties, and the nation's move from proud speech into near-deafening silence.

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'

I'm fascinated by how much we, as women, have to subjugate and hide ourselves in order to get on in the world.

We got the vote, which we should've been born with, in 1920. Everything we've had to struggle for - it's ridiculous.

I'm not sure if men really understand this, but I don't think there's a woman in America who really expects her life to be easy. In our own ways, we all know better!