feminist awakening Quotes

Suddenly women's lib had made me feel my life had been wasted.

I would say there have been different stages of my feminist awakening. The more layers you peel back and the more things you're made aware of, you're like, "Oh my God."

Getting to a place where I am comfortable saying things was hard-earned for me. I've chewed on the ground glass of my own experience. I saw Gloria Steinem speak, and I was just like, Shut the front door. She was saying that she didn't come into her own until her 40s, and she was asking herself the question, Why should she have to get married? And I just thank God someone asked that question, right? I think we're the first generation of women asking ourselves certain questions and deciding for ourselves.

[The Women's Room] was the first thing I read that explained a lot of the feelings I was having and a lot of the rage and the feeling uncomfortable in my body and knowing that I was feeling a certain way in the world, but I didn't have the language for it.

I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and it took me getting out into the real world and understanding what I faced as a woman in my career to really open up my eyes.

I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see. And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure.

Hebrew School was my first introduction to real feminism. I remember that much more than I remember any kind of actual religious teaching.

Feminism began to dawn on my brain belatedly in life.

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.

The young women waking up to feminism now already wake up to more consciousness than my generation had. Even just simple things like equal pay - before you went, in my generation, and asked for a raise, you went through nausea and your palms sweating.

Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults - is on a psychic level, a battered woman.

There's a book called The Women's Room by Marilyn French that was a really big part of my personal feminist awakening growing up that I read.

The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal.

I was 15 when my family moved to Jidda from Britain in 1982. Living in Saudi Arabia was such a shock to my system that I like to say I was traumatized into feminism.

I never really considered myself much of a feminist until I left Wall Street. I did all the right things - such as put together gender-diverse teams - but feminism wasn't deep in my bones.

The nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters).

Most feminists in France came to feminism after '68 as a result of the hypocrisy they experienced in leftist movements. In these movements, where everyone believed there was going to be true equality, fraternity between men and women, and that together they were going to struggle against this rotten society, even there they noticed that the leftists, the militants, kept them "in their place." Women made the coffee while the others did the talking; they were the ones who typed the letters.

Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology