Mary Daly Quotes

Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!

We are tired of having a 'sphere' doled out to us, and of being told that anything outside that sphere is 'unwomanly'. We want to be natural just for a change … we must be ourselves at all risks.

I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.

Tradition has made women cowardly.

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.

In the name of feminism, we denied some essential aspects of our authentic selves. While feminism should have been nothing if not a celebration of our own unique characteristics, we insisted that we had no unique characteristics... that gender differences were hogwash, and a feminine woman was nothing more than a plaything for men.

I'm trying to encourage more women to be themselves, rather than what men want them to be. I don't believe in patronizing either sex.

I really want to speak for young women, especially because I feel like we're constantly brainwashed in everyday life.

Girls are socialised in ways that are harmful to their sense of self - to reduce themselves, to cater to the egos of men, to think of their bodies as repositories of shame. As adult women, many struggle to overcome, to unlearn, much of that social conditioning.

Owing to cultural beliefs, girls have been taught to be small, disappear and not take our full place in society. But that is not what we are meant to be.

We gotta break these double-standards and get women to loosen up a bit. We gotta show them that we can do what we want to do how we want to do it. If someone doesn't like it, they can get to stepping.

To be liberated, woman must feel free to be herself, not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity and her personality.

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.'

The thing I want to see before I die is women achieving full equality in the world. I'm very passionate about injustice against women and there's too much of it in the world. In so many parts of the world, women are not regarded as worthy or equal to men. In parts of the world, women are bought and sold.

I had no desire to crash a man's world.

It's scary to become a woman in this world. We have to understand that some of the messages we get, messages that we are not enough, are there to keep our power in check. We can't buy into these messages.

In my own writing, I tend to be very honest, and my goal is to identify something people think but are afraid to say. That's not the general cultural expectation of women.

Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged in by male energy.

We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.

Women can really be who they are. I'm about to say the F word, feminist. Often that word has such a negative connotation.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.

Honestly, because of the way women were treated, I wouldn't want to go back to Puritan times. I'm far too outspoken to be a woman in Puritan times.

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