Marxist Feminism Quotes

Theory is, of course, critical to the development of specific analyses of women's situation. Explicitly or implicitly, empirical phenomena must be organised in terms of a theoretical construct in order to be grasped conceptually. At the same time, theory is, by its very nature, severely limited. As a structure of concepts, a theoretical framework simply provides guidance for the understanding of actual societies, past and present. However indispensable this theoretical guidance may be, specific strategies, programmes, or tactics for change cannot be deduced directly from theory. Nor can the phenomenon of variation in women's situation over time, and in different societies, be addressed solely by means of theory. These are matters for concrete analysis and historical investigation. ~ Lise Vogel

Romantic love as most people understand it in patriarchal culture makes one unaware, renders one powerless and out of control. Feminist thinkers called attention to the way this notion of love served the interests of patriarchal men and women. It supported the notion that one could do anything in the name of love: beat people, restrict their movements, even kill them and call it a "crime of passion," plead, "I love her so much i had to kill her. ~ Bell Hooks

The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men? ... Let us never cease from thinking
what is this "civilisation" in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men? ~ Virginia Woolf

There is nothing novel or comedic or righteous about men using the threat of sexual violence to control non-compliant women. This is how society has always functioned. Stay indoors, women. Stay safe. Stay quiet. Stay in the kitchen. Stay pregnant. Stay our of the world. IF you want to talk about silencing, censorship, placing limits and consequences on speech, this is what it looks like. ~ Lindy West

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither ... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger. ~ Toni Morrison

You have to have your personal life, and at the end of the day I think what people forget, especially when you're online, is that you're a person too, right, and that you're not this ideal of feminism, that everything you do like feminism just like falls in your wake. ~ Jessica Valenti

Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. ~ Oscar Wilde

He is a good kisser. I can definitely vouch for that. ~ Emma Watson

But Friedan and Greer's movement had passed them by: rape hysteria became fully integrated into mainstream feminism, resulting in such events as the so-called Take Back the Night rallies at colleges around America, which are premised on the idea that when darkness falls over the quad, male students metamorphose, werewolf-like, into potential rapists. ~ Bruce Bawer

...feminism has to be absolutely utopian and unrealistic, far removed form any semblance of the world we're living in now. We have to hope for and envision something before agitating for it, rather than blithely giving up, and accepting the way things are. After all, utopian ideals are as ideological as the political foundations of the world we're currently living in. Above everything, feminism is a constant work in progress. We are all still learning. ~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

But Dracula, the book, the myth, goes beyond metaphor in its intuitive rendering of an oncoming century filled with sexual horror: the throat as a female genital; sex and death as synonyms; killing as a sex act; slow dying as sensuality; men watching the slow dying, and the watching is sexual; mutilation of the female body as male heroism and adventure; callous, ruthless, predatory lust as the one-note meaning of sexual desire; intercourse itself needing blood, someone's, somewhere, to count as a sex act in a world excited by sado-masochism, bored by the dull thud-thud of the literal fuck. The new virginity is emerging, a twentieth century nightmare: no matter how much we have fucked, now matter with how many, now matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freedom) or passion or promiscuous abandon, no matter how often or where or when or how, we are virgins, innocents, knowing nothing, untouched, unless blood has been spilled – ours: not the blood of the first time; the blood of every time; this elegant blood-letting of sex a so-called freedom exercised in alienation, cruelty, and despair. Trivial and decadent; proud; foolish; liars; we are free. ~ Andrea Dworkin

I'm not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.

- Mrs Icarus ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not. ~ Steven Pinker

The Marxist outlook ... represents the most consistent and systematic application of the scientific outlook and method. ~ Bob Avakian

I see feminism as a massive party. It's cool, the idea that 50% of the population can now start doing things and having fun and experimenting with their hair and makeup. ~ Caitlin Moran

In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism. ~ Cornel West

I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on a long and uncertain path. She was always more conservative than I, but she did share my basic social values and was willing at least to let me test my political follies ... Whenever I read the New Testament after 1950, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises of incarnation and resurrection. That required a lot of circular reasoning for me to establish what the text said. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx) or psychosexual motives (with Freud) or self assertive power (with Nietzsche). It was truly a self-deceptive time for me, but I had no inkling of its insidious dangers. ~ Thomas C. Oden

Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world
they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

What is wonderful about a university like LSE is that you not only receive teaching of very high quality, you also learn where to find the knowledge you are seeking. And you make unexpected discoveries;it was a Marxist professor who introduced me to the work of Cardinal Newman, a great master of English prose as well as theology. ~ Pierre Trudeau

When girls see women in leadership roles speaking out for what they believe in, they see it is possible for them, too. Instead of a faraway dream, their aspirations become real, concrete and achievable. Womanhood starts to look more inviting. ~ Tabby Biddle

We must dare to face the way in which patriarchal thinking blinds everyone so that we cannot see that the emotional lives of boys cannot be fully honored as long as notions of patriarchal masculinity prevail. We cannot teach boys that "real men" either do not feel or do not express feelings, then expect boys to feel comfortable getting in touch with their feelings. ~ Bell Hooks

The Warrior Princess Submissive is - at least in my humble opinion - quite possibly destined to be the hope and salvation of the D/s lifestyle from an ever-increasing wave of attacks by a small cadre of radical feminists and misandrists who seek to equate D/s with misogyny. ~ Michael Makai

She smiled, and as she hugged me, the scent of lavender intensified. It was intoxicating; it wrapped its long, soft arms around my head, and whispered tales in my ear. Tales of elegant women living in houses with large gardens where peacocks could wander. Tales of women who lived exactly as they wanted. Tales of women who did as they pleased. Tales of women who loved how and whom they wanted. Tales that could become reality.
Yes, the lavender smelled of freedom. At that moment I understood: this was what I wanted. To live as I pleased, not as I was supposed to. ~ Petra Pavlíková

In this sense, we can render the false meaning of catharsis which occurs in pornography with a different meaning than the catharsis we associate with Aristotle's definition of tragedy. For in the tragedy, we weep, grieve and feel pity. We are brought to feeling, we experience both meaning and sensation at the same time, tremble in our bodies and our souls. Thus we weep over the death of Iphigenia, of Tristan and Iseult, of Madame Bovary. In experiencing these feelings, we have tapped a part of ourselves which had perhaps been quiet for some time. Which indeed, in this stillness, we were not certain was even there. Or had even forgotten. And thus, when we weep at this tragic playing out before our eyes of a drama which touches our hearts, a part of ourselves we had left in shadow comes back to us and is named and is lived. But pornographic catharsis moves from altogether different needs. For, we know, one does not weep over the death of Justine. One does not feel at all. Rather, one experiences only sensation and mastery. If there is a vulnerable part of oneself that would weep, this vulnerability is projected onto the body of a woman who is punished, and is destroyed there. And so we cease, in this projection, to recognize this vulnerability as a part of ourselves. Rather than reclaim a feeling, or own a part of ourselves once more, we disown ourselves. What pornography calls "catharsis" leads to denial and not to knowledge. ~ Susan Griffin

Why should she have to feel unsafe? Didn't this world belong to her as much as it belonged to any man? Yes it did. McKenna refused to let them make her feel unsafe, either by cornering her, or by making her feel like she needed one to protect her ~ Marina Gessner

…all you can think about is Clara Barton, the feminist icon of your youth who had to teach herself how to be a nurse and endured abuse from men telling her what to do at every turn, and you remember being so *angry* and running to your parents and asking them if women still got told what was right or proper, and your mom said 'Yes' and your dad said 'No,' and you, for the first time, had an inkling of how complicated and terrible the world was… ~ Carmen Maria Machado

You can be any sex you like provided you act male. There's no men and women in the Watch, just a bunch of lads. ~ Terry Pratchett

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

In his attempt to graft my attributes onto his own belief system, one just would not take: my rabid feminism, which for me was the idea that no kind of sex is shameful and any kind of violence (including psychological, including societal mores) is. This is the unspoken reverse of American thinking in general, and of rich men in particular. I am often inappropriate. ~ Lisa Crystal Carver

The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial of women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, on from another, by defining "respectability" and "deviance" according to women's sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women. ~ Gerda Lerner

Feminism never harmed anybody unless it was some feminists. The danger is that the study and contemplation of "ourselves" may become so absorbing that it builds by slow degrees a high wall that shuts out the great world of thought. ~ Rheta Childe Dorr

I do not want to have children, and that's okay. As it turns out, not wanting kids will absolutely not make me "less" of a woman. I am not defective. I am not wrong. I know my own mind. I have intrinsic value as a singular, autonomous person, and that value is not contingent upon me using my body to produce another person. Wanting to be child-free does not make me any better or worse of a human being than any other person who does choose to have children. It's just a choice I've made about my own life. It's no less valid a choice than the choice to become a mother. And that, to me, gets at the real heart of feminism: being granted the freedom to make choices for myself without judgment. ~ Jessica Burnell

An intersectional approach to feminism requires understanding that too often mainstream feminism ignores that Black women and other women of color are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of hate. ~ Mikki Kendall

Men have worked as essentially shop keepers and store clerks for a lot longer than they have worked on assembly lines. There have been waiters forever. Lawyers are the world's second oldest profession. Teaching was a male-only profession for centuries. The idea that men are and ought to be unreflective, grunting, two-fisted louts is a class thing, not a gender thing, and it is imposed upon working class men by a system that needs them to be beasts of burden. ~ Lance Mannion

The psychological need to avoid independence - the "wish to be saved" - seemed to me an important issue, quite probably the most important issue facing women today. We were brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We were taught to believe that as women we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, needful of protection. So that now, in these enlightened days, when our intellects tell us to stand on our own two feet, unresolved emotional issues drag us down. ~ Colette Dowling

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. ~ Audre Lorde

What do you think Amy Poehler is doing right now? ~ Georgia Clark

Our sexuality is body, culture, age, learning, habit, fantasies, worries, passions, and the relationships in which all these elements combine. That's why sexuality can change with age, partner, experience, emotions, and sense of perspective. ~ Cordelia Fine

Hillary Clinton bothers me a lot. I realized the other day that her thoughts sound a lot like Karl Marx. She hangs around a lot of Marxists. All her friends are Marxists. ~ Dick Armey