Intersectional Feminism Quotes

Nothing is too ugly for this world, I think. It's just that people pretend not to see. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I would subject myself a black man's harassment a thousand times over rather than watch his face hit the pavement with a police officer's weight on his back. That's not justice. That is a betrayal. ~ Morgan Jerkins

In a world where positive expressions of sexual longing connect us we will all be free to choose those sexual practices which affirm and nurture our growth. Those practices may range from choosing promiscuity or celibacy, from embracing one specific sexual identity and preference or choosing a roaming uncharted desire that is kindled only by interaction and engagement with specific individuals with whom we feel the spark of erotic recognition no matter their sex, race, class, or even their sexual preference. Radical feminist dialogues about sexuality must surface so that the movement towards sexual freedom can begin again. ~ Bell Hooks

I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it's the world around me.. ~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

Bigger than you or me. Discussions are healthy. Ignorance is not. ~ Amandla Stenberg

So one of my responsibilities, as a white, cis-gendered woman, is to learn how to be a traitor to the 'joys' of patriarchal culture that I experience, however unconsciously. ~ Erin Wunker

Stop mansplaining menstrution, we've got this. ~ Silvia Young

This idea undermining GIRLHOOD, that saying I feel for you to a woman unlike yourself means you somehow share in her experience, is one of the pitfalls that plagues mainstream feminism. It signals to women of colour that their stories are only worth telling if a white person can understand them, and therefore that a white person's emotions and responses are of greater importance than the stories themselves. ~ Morgan Jerkins

In a culture which holds the two-parent patriarchal family in higher esteem than any other arrangement, all children feel emotionally insecure when their family does not measure up to the standard. A utopian vision of the patriarchal family remains intact despite all the evidence which proves that the well-being of children is no more secure in the dysfunctional male-headed household than in the dysfunctional female-headed household. Children need to be raised in loving environments. Whenever domination is present love is lacking. Loving parents, be they single or coupled, gay or straight, headed by females or males, are more likely to raise healthy, happy children with sound self-esteem. In future feminist movement we need to work harder to show parents the ways ending sexism positively changes family life. Feminist movement is pro-family. Ending patriarchal domination of children, by men or women, is the only way to make the family a place where children can be safe, where they can be free, where they can know love ~ Bell Hooks

At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men and Who Likes to Wear Lip Gloss and High Heels for Herself and Not For Men. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You have to excuse me because I AM a teenager, so I'm allowed to sound illiterate and make stupid comments like 'I'm not into hard-core feminism.' ~ Christina Ricci

Now we are beginning to come to a point where human consciousness is moving back to female energy. The Earth is crying out very loudly, and the herbalists are springing up. Women are becoming healers again. That energy is coming back. ~ Sun Bear

...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look. ~ Laura Bates

Men are minded to conjure the most extraordinary tales about women who would question their place in the world. ~ L.M. Myles

The Goddess helps us heal the deep wound within us that tells us we are unworthy. ~ Tabby Biddle

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. ~ Toni Morrison

Amnesty International Survey found that 25 percent of people believe a woman is to blame for being raped if she dresses provocatively. ~ Caitlin Moran

For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious
or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution. ~ Naomi Wolf

It is not in becoming a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man's world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her seperateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not his. Prostitution may be against the written law, but no prostitute has defied the prerogatives or power of men as a class through prostitution. No prostitute provides any model for freedom or action in a world of freedom that can be used with intelligence and integrity by a woman; the model exists to entice counterfeit female sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men who enjoy them. ~ Andrea Dworkin

One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there. ~ Bell Hooks

The marriage ceremony is sexist beyond parody. The bride appears in a fussy white dress that symbolizes her virtue and virginity, and everyone keeps on remarking on how thin and beautiful she looks. Her father walks her down the aisle to 'give her away', and she passes, like property, from one man to another. The minister, who is traditionally a man, gives the man permission to kiss the woman, as if that is in the minister's authority and the woman has none. The man kisses, the woman is kissed. At the reception, only men are given to speak, while the bride remains seated and silent. Henceforth, the woman will adopt the man's name, as will their eventual offspring. Despite all this, the wedding day is said to belong to the woman. This, would you believe, is 'her day'. ~ Neel Burton

the only way we can become more inclusive and ultimately more legitimate and successful at ensuring peace, prosperity and women's rights is by ensuring that all people can see themselves at the table, and that young women in particular have role models, mentors and the necessary support and amplification to ensure that we occupy those spaces. It was the reason I started my own mentorship programme - because, often, we can't be what we can't see. ~ Scarlett Curtis

Violent men, and men in authority over violent men, and the broader public that authorises those men, are not yet shamed by the harm of coercive control over women ... Maybe we can rest some hope on the growing activity of men of goodwill calling on each other to change. When that group hits a critical mass, the majority of men will be more likely to want to change. ~ Lee Lakeman

Time dims memory. But not that kind. Somewhere in a corner of the brain, one little cell never forgets. It keeps the song that, heard again, recreates the room, the person, the moment. It preserves the phrase or the laugh or the gesture that resurrects a friend long gone. It knows precisely where you were and what you were doing when you heard about Pearl Harbor if you're old enough, or Kennedy's assassination, or Martin Luther King's, or the Challenger explosion. Every detail is frozen in memory, despite all the years. It keeps the innocuous question, too. The question that sometime later, when all the synapses are working, produces the epiphany, the moment when you're driving along and you realize that finally you understand. And why did it take you so long? ~ Kay Mills

It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the Christian religion. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

Women's behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. ~ Nancy Friday

Women's liberationists, white and black, will always be at odds with one another as long as our idea of liberation is based on having the power white men have. For that power denies unity, denies common connections, and is inherently divisive. ~ Bell Hooks

That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind - that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man's comfort. ~ Nellie L. McClung

To the contemporary feminist, sexual differences mean inequality, inequality means injustice, and injustice must be stamped out at all costs. And so, they have set about stamping out sexual differences at all costs. ~ Eric Robert Morse

A goal is a dream with it's work boots on. ~ Rachel Hollis

But if I'm useless only because I haven't been properly educated, is that my fault? ~ Richard Aldington

This is the real work of woman of color feminism: to resist acquiescence to fatality and guilt, to become warriors of conscience and action who resist death in all its myriad manifestations: poverty, cultural assimilation, child abuse, motherless mothering, gentrification, mental illness, welfare cuts, the prison system, racial profiling, immigrant and queer bashing, invasion and imperialism at home and at war.

To fight any kind of war, Kahente Horn-Miller writes. "The Biggest single requirement is fighting spirit." I thought much of this as I read Colonize This! since this collection appears in print at a time of escalating world-wide war--In Colombia, Afghanistan, Palestine. But is there ever a time of no-war for women of color? Is there ever a time when our home (our body, our land of origin) is not subject to violent occupation, violent invasion? If I retain any image to hold the heart-intention of this book, it is found in what Horn-Miller calls the necessity of the war dance. This book is one rite of passage, one ceremony of preparedness on the road to consciousness, on the "the war path of greater empowerment. ~ Bushra Rehman

Unfortunately, it hurts all three of my feelings. ~ Carrie Fisher

The Singularity is at once an escape and a birth fantasy. I said to him: A Zeus dream that avoids the organic body altogether. Brand-new creatures burst forth from men's heads. Presto! The mother and her evil vagina disappears. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I twist and pin my hair at the nape of my neck, and then stand with legs wide. It's what Nash told me to do before speaking because men, no matter how many times they profess women are equal, prefer to take direction from bodies like theirs. ~ Caroline George

Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone. ~ Rebecca Solnit

There is a wildness in us, something magnificent, ancient and connect to each other. Though it's been nearly beaten out of us by society and this toxic demand on little girls to be good, nice, pretty and quiet, it's still very much alive in us ~ Scarlett Curtis

The enemy of feminism isn't men. It's patriarchy, and patriarchy is not men. It is a system, and women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equality. ~ Justine Musk

One of the basic tenets of radical feminism is that any woman in the world has more in common with any other woman regardless of class, race, age, ethnic group, nationality - than any woman has with any man. ~ Sonia Johnson

Long before feminism made fashion a guilty pleasure, my first experience of the sisterhood among strangers took place in a communal dressing room. ~ Judith Thurman

I think I'm speaking for a bunch of girls when I say that the idea that feminism is completely natural and shouldn't even be something that people find mildly surprising ... I find a lot of feminist reading quite confusing and that often there's a set of rules, and people will be like, 'Oh, this person isn't a true feminist because they don't embody this one thing,' and I don't know, often there is a lot of gray area that can be hard to navigate. ~ Lorde

For every woman who burned a bra, there's a man burning to wear one. ~ Miss Vera

Advocating sexual repression as a solution to violence against women ends up mobilizing women around their fears rather than their visions. ~ Alice Echols

Stupid men and their stupid violence. Tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn't you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot's dick? ~ Rebecca Makkai

The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming. ~ Bell Hooks