Feminism Lite Quotes

Beware the danger of what I call Feminism Lite. It is the idea of conditional female equality. Please reject this entirely. It is a hollow, appeasing, and bankrupt idea. Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in the full equality of men and women or you do not. Feminism ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Because I believe that deep down in woman's nature lies slumbering the spirit of revolt.
Because I believe that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary child-rearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions.
Because I believe that woman's freedom depends upon awakening that spirit of revolt within her against these things which enslave her.
Because I believe that these things which enslave woman must be fought openly, fearlessly, consciously. ~ Margaret Sanger

Yet feminism has never killed anyone. Machismo, it kills every day. ~ Benoite Groult

Many of my movies have strong female leads- brave, self-sufficient girls that don't think twice about fighting for what they believe with all their heart. They'll need a friend, or a supporter, but never a savior. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man. ~ Hayao Miyazaki

Korean feminism is on the brink of death. Korea has a less clear boundary between popular literature and serious literature than in other countries. I feel that feminism is abandoned like a product that was a craze in the past. ~ Kim Hyesoon

- Why should we be feminists? Why not egalitarians?

- "Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general- but to choose to use the vague expression human rights (or egalitarians) is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender.

It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human.

For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution acknowledge that. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Don't let the feminist in you ever die. ~ Suyasha Subedi

I've always felt that feminism was just an excuse for ugly women to march. ~ Larry Flynt

The rifts in this ancient wall continue to be patched with exhortations to women to avoid challenging the norm even if it means faking orgasm and sacrificing honesty in their intimate relationships with men. In the past we have been willing to pay this price; whether we should continue to do so is question for individuals; not historians, to decide. ~ Rachel P. Maines

People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong. ~ Junot Diaz

We're the first generation that can make enough of our own money to live the way we want. I feel like we have a responsibility to figure out what this means. ~ Glynnis MacNicol

It was common for my father to sit my sisters down and tell them things like, "I saw a girl working in the bank in town, and she was a girl just like you." My parents had never completed primary school. They couldn't speak English or even read that well. My parents only knew the language of numbers, buying and selling, but they wanted more for their kids. That's why my father had scraped the money together and kept Annie in school, despite the famine and other troubles. ~ William Kamkwamba

Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her. Ask the politicians who exude delight when they advocate for the so-called traditional family how many women are beaten and children raped when there is no man in the family. Zero is such a perfect and encouraging number, but who, among politicians in male-supremacist cultures, can count that high? ~ Andrea Dworkin

We cannot pretend that this is all about women as victims, when many women are deeply complicit in creating and selling this culture. ~ Natasha Walter

This is the burgeoning days of feminism. This is when the militant feminists are the feminism hormones are raging. They are excited. They are happy. This is a new day! They are through being plugged into these formulas where men run everything and you're in servitude to them. ~ Rush Limbaugh

The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked. ~ Germaine Greer

Only the toughest among women will make the necessary next moves, the revolutionary moves, and among prostituted women one finds the toughest if not always the best. If prostituted women worked together to end male supremacy, it would end. Surviving degradation is an ongoing process that gives you rights, honor and knowledge, because you earn them. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them. ~ Germaine Greer

Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. ~ Virginia Woolf

You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I once asked her if she was happy. "That depends on what I am able to get done today," she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had control over. They were a form of meditation, of salve. Kept busy, she had no time to ruminate and no time for opinions, certainly not feminist ones. I pressed her: "I mean, are you happy with your life, Rajima?" "I don't know," she said uncomfortably, as if she'd never really considered such a question. "When there is little you can do, you do what you can." Happiness for my grandmother seemed to be a verb rather than a noun. She had so little control over her own life. Yet she took control, out of thin air for herself, when she could. ~ Padma Lakshmi

The colours of the universe are there because of the existence of womankind. ~ Mackenzi Lee

The trade unions in the UK are campaigning around zero-hours contracts, which isn't about feminism, but it's a feminist issue. Women are affected by zero-hours contracts, and the recession has and is affecting women more than men. ~ Rachel Holmes

Immoral women do not exist", said the organist. "That this only a superstition. On the other hand there exist women who sleep thirty times with one man, and women who sleep once with thirty men. ~ Halldor Laxness

If one more person tells me that "all gender is performance," I think I am going to strangle them. Perhaps most annoying about that sound-bite is the somewhat snooty "I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-youdidn't" sort of way in which it is most often recited, a magnificent irony given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification, as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality, gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there's one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it's that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It's like a junior high school mixer, where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another, and with all the external expectations that other people place on us.

Sure, I can perform gender: I can curtsy, or throw like a girl, or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn't explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come to me more naturally than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn't capture the very real physical and emotional changes that I experienced when I hormonally transitioned from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn't even begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same, wore the same T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers that I always had, yet once other pe ~ Julia Serano

The rules that shape the lives of employees in the workplace today often don't honor the lives of employees outside the workplace. That can make the workplace a hostile place - because it pits your work against your family in a contest one side has to lose. ~ Melinda Gates

You have to take the basics of feminism and the kind of outline of it and do what you do with it. You have to make things work for your own life. ~ Sandra Bernhard

Maybe my values are outdated, but I come from an old school of thought. I think that men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts. Try and convict me if I'm a bad person for thinking so. I enjoy treating a woman like a lady, opening doors for her, paying for shared meals, giving flowers–all that sort of thing. ~ Jim Butcher

Real feminism is spinsterhood. It's time America admitted that old maids give all women a good name. ~ Florence King

I am a woman with wings,' I once wrote and will revise these words again. 'I am a woman with wings dancing with other women with wings.' In a voiced community, we all flourish. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning. ~ Sheila Jeffreys

There is a theory that men do not need Paganism because they have endless avenues of societal power available. Why use spells when one can get a bank loan with little trouble? The world already bends over backward to accommodate men, so why perfect the art of magickally shaping it? ~ Thomm Quackenbush

I need to find a catchy new word for feminism, right? Like 'bootylicious.' ~ Beyonce Knowles

A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. ~ Andrea Dworkin

It was surprising to hear it from his lips, my plain, ordinary name spoken as it never had been before, with awe, lite it was sacred, like treasure. Like I was treasure. ~ Mary Calmes

Men and women in their very essence -in their souls if you wish- have natural parity. (...) This was a relatively new idea at the time [of Shakespeare]. It ran counter to the teaching in the Bible -Eve's being made out of Adam's rib to be his helpmate -which was the basis for the idea, held for so long, that women do not have souls of their own but are dependent on their fathers' and husbands' . ~ Tina Packer

Much of what is considered "good" in little girls is considered downright repulsive in little boys. Physical timidity or hypercautiousness, being quietly "well behaved", and depending on others for help and support are thought to be natural - if not outright charming - in girls. Boys, however, are actively discouraged from the dependent forms of relating, which are considered "sissyish" in male children. ~ Colette Dowling

You might be a redneck if you're a lite beer drinker, because you start drinking when it gets light. ~ Jeff Foxworthy

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. ~ Abigail Adams

He say, Celie, tell me the truth. You don't like me cause I'm a man?
I blow my nose. take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss 'em, as far as I'm concern, frogs is what they stay. ~ Alice Walker

And little girls went to charm schools. Now you've all got degrees from the University of Sarcasm. ~ Ian Rankin

I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that. ~ Bell Hooks

Come on, fight me as a queen would. ~ Rebecca Ross

The word feminism has become synonymous with man-hating when in fact it has more to do with women than men. ~ Aysha Taryam

Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I've been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an "angry black woman." I've wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most - is it "angry" or "black" or "woman"? ~ Michelle Obama

It wasn't only my friends who suffered from female rivalry. I remember when I was just sixteen years old, during spring vacation, being whisked off to an early lunch by my best friend's brother, only to discover, to my astonishment and hurt, that she was expecting some college boys to drop by and didn't want me there to compete with her. When I started college at Sarah Lawrence, I soon noticed that while some of my classmates were indeed true friends, others seemed to resent that I had a boyfriend. It didn't help that Sarah Lawrence, a former girls' school, included very few straight men among its student body--an early lesson in how competing for items in short supply often brings out the worst in women.

In graduate school, the stakes got higher, and the competition got stiffer, a trend that continued when I went on to vie for a limited number of academic jobs. I always had friends and colleagues with whom I could have trusted my life--but I also found women who seemed to view not only me but all other female academics as their rivals.

This sense of rivalry became more painful when I divorced my first husband. Many of my friends I depended on for comfort and support suddenly began to view me as a threat. Some took me out to lunch to get the dirt, then dropped me soon after. I think they found it disturbing that I left my unhappy marriage while they were still committed to theirs. For other women, the threat seemed more immediate--twice I was told in ~ Susan Shapiro Barash

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation - is that good for the world? ~ Christopher Hitchens

No, I have no desire to be a feminist, I just want to be a female, ~ Gyula Krudy