Feminist Empowerment Quotes

The most empowering feminist act is for women to be taught about the ways babies bond and then decide what they want to do.

The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

My message to women is it's okay not to toe the party line on every issue. You don't have to be a puppet or a mouthpiece for your party on every issue. You can be an independent thinker; you can take it issue by issue, and that's okay. You shouldn't be told, 'You can't sit with us.'

The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.

If we are going to bring about change, then men, for goodness sake, stand up and stand for the right. And I say, ‘power to the women.

I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore, and I know too much to go back and pretend.

I appeal to women not to let themselves become corrupted by male power. Emancipation is something more than a 'ticket' to serve in the army.

One of the key lessons of Africa, where state-directed mobilizations of women have been a regular feature of national politics, has been that women’s movements need to retain a degree of independence from the state and ruling parties.

When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, and would no doubt live a higher, happier life than if guided by theirs, it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves the earth.

I want to quit. Not performing, but being a woman altogether. I want to throw my hands in the air, after reading a mean Twitter comment, and say, 'All right! You got it. You figured me out. I'm not pretty. I'm not thin. I do not deserve to use my voice. I'll start wearing a burqa and start waiting tables at a pancake house. All my self-worth is based on what you can see.' But then I think, F*** that ... I am a woman with thoughts and questions and s*** to say. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story - I will.

It's fair to say that there's something retrograde about putting the leader of Star Wars rebellion in the position of "slave in a bikini." There's no question that that's a fair point. But, it is true, and it's kind of remarkable, that at this point in our history, the slave girl, for a time in the bikini, is the one who chokes her captor with her bare hands and using the chain with which he bound her. That's powerful stuff. That's more retributive feminism than I think teenaged boys had ever seen.

I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.

Extremists have shown what frightens them most. A girl with a book.

It really occurred to me at a certain point: women have not been embodied. Feminism has not been embodied. It hasn't gotten into us in a way where it is so undeniable that there is nothing to prove. Do you know what I mean? That we are so in our feminist skin, so to speak, that we are that world now.

Blogs with feminist content, from 'Feministing' and 'Jezebel' to 'Racialicious' and 'Shakesville' and 'Feministe,' have opened up and changed the scope of the feminist universe for women who might never have encountered contemporary feminism.

It’s time for women to stop being politely angry.

It's time for the aesthetics of upwardly mobile feminist respectability to make room for the aesthetics of survival, particularly trans survival.

The voices of women need to be heard. The volume needs to be turned up.

Women have got to stop being polite. If I ever had children, which I don't, the first thing I'd teach a girl of mine is the words 'f - off.'

We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money.

In a world that wants women to whisper, I choose to yell.

Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.

Our very strength as lesbians lies in the fact that we are outside of patriarchy; our existence challenges its life.

I wrote myself back together. I wrote myself toward a stronger version of myself . . . Through writing and feminism, I also found that if I was a little bit brave, another woman might hear me and see me and recognize that none of us are the nothing the world tries to tell us we are.

There's this idea like feminism is humorless and humorless in a way that's like a whistleblower. Like you're going to - you're going to make sure that nobody has any fun. And that's not true at all. I think feminism allows me to do what I do, and I'm so grateful to the idea of it and grateful to all the women that came before.