Feminist Progress Quotes

The original feminists wanted two things. They wanted the right to vote, from which we could work to get more equality. And we have made progress. We did pass the anti-discrimination law, Title 7, Title 9, equality in the workplace, equality in education and in sports and in all these other areas. But enforcement is very hard. Changing stereotypes is very hard.

Women are in positions of power the most radical of activists could only dream of in 1960.

Every movement takes a century to make its mark. The women’s movement is only 40 some years old.

I feel incredibly blessed that I'm in my generation and not my mother's generation. I feel that I'm very much benefitting from the strides that the women before me made.

So there really was a whole series of things that took the women of my generation a little bit of time to push forward.

Every so often, we - women in film and TV - get annoyed and frustrated. We kick up a fuss and make some gains. But then we become complacent, and things slide backwards again until the next generation comes up and gets frustrated again.

Society is really coming to a point where they're not asking if women can be funny anymore. We all know they obviously are.

They used to give us a day-it was called International Women's Day. In 1975 they gave us a year, the Year of the Woman. Then from 1975 to 1985 they gave us a decade, the Decade of the Woman. I said at the time, who knows, if we behave they may let us into the whole thing. Well, we didn't behave and here we are.

If we take into account that women have had the right to vote only for some 100 years - in some countries even less - and that we have already won seats in governments or presidential offices, I understand that men look at this rise with some anxiety.

We have to ask ourselves why younger women don't feel the need to be right up front with their politics. Is that going to set us back or is that itself a sign of progress? I don't know the answer.

The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady.

the women's movement, not only here in the U.S., but worldwide, is bigger and stronger than ever before and in places where it has never been. It has arms. It has legs. And most importantly, it has heads.

The media and even, to some degree, leaders of women's organizations don't understand that the women's movement is an absolute part of society now. It is in the consciousness, it is taken for granted. It is part of the way women look at themselves, and women are looked at.

The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win. They have one-thousand generations back of them... Millions of women dead and gone are speaking through us today

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.

Parliaments have stopped laughing at woman suffrage, and politicians have begun to dodge! It is the inevitable premonition of coming victory.

I'm so excited by women right now, not just in America but globally. Women really are coming into their own. We're standing on the shoulders of forty years of hard and messy work.