Radical Feminism Quotes

“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

“Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism

“Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective

“Man looks on woman from his vantage point and reduces her to a being that is not for-itself but for-him.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.”
― Gloria Steinem, The Trouble With Rich Women

“Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”
― Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“If women really choose prostitution, why is it mostly marginalized and disadvantaged women who do? If we want to discuss the issue of choice, let’s look at who is doing the actual choosing in the context of prostitution. Surely the issue is not why women allegedly choose to be in prostitution, but why men choose to buy the bodies of millions of women and children worldwide and call it sex.

Philosophically, the response to the choice debate is ‘not’ to deny that women are capable of choosing within contexts of powerlessness, but to question how much real value, worth, and power these so-called choices confer.

Politically, the question becomes, should the state sanction the sex industry based on the claim that some women choose prostitution when most women’s choice is actually 'compliance’ to the only options available?

When governments idealize women’s alleged choice to be in prostitution by legalizing, decriminalizing, or regulating the sex industry, they endorse a new range of 'conformity’ for women.

Increasingly, what is defended as a choice is not a triumph over oppression but another name for it.”
― Janice G. Raymond, Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade

“It would take a denial of all cultural tradition for women to produce even a true 'female' art. For a woman who participates in (male) culture must achieve and be rated by standards of a tradition she had no part in making - and certainly there is no room in that tradition for a female view, even if she could discover what it was.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“With oppression, one group has the power to realize their choices and to name the world in order to change the world, while the other has these choices, these names, and this world imposed on them.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“A man hits me--I hit the man a little harder--then he won't do it again.' Unfortunately he did do it again--a little harder still. The effort to hit harder carried on the action and reaction till society, hitting hardest of all, set up a system of legal punishment, of unlimited severity. It imprisoned, it mutilated, it tortured, it killed; it destroyed whole families, and razed contumelious cities to the ground.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World

“All women are supposed to vilify any peer who deviates from the accepted norm of femininity, and most do. What is remarkable is not that most do, but that some do not.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

“I realized that most women in their teens and twenties hadn’t yet experienced one or more of the great radicalizing events of a woman’s life: marrying and discovering it isn’t yet an equal (or even nonviolent) institution; getting into the paid labor force and experiencing its limits, from the corporate “glass ceiling” to the “sticky floor” of the pink-collar ghetto; having children and finding out who takes care of them and who doesn’t; and, finally, aging, still the most impoverishing and disempowering event for women of every race and so the most radicalizing.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I, too, identified with every underdog in the world before realizing that women are primordial underdogs. Today, many still take injustice more seriously if it affects any group except women. Women ourselves may support other causes before having the self-respect to stand up for our own.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“We might say that the body is part of the creative ground of existence, but we are not bound by that structure in the full creative sense. Our spirit is bound to our bodies, as its creative ground, but surpasses it through freedom and choice. The body is present in all our choices, but as total persons, we have the freedom to be other than what culturally accompanies a male or female body.”
― Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

“[...] there is evidence that educated women throughout the ages were particularly loath to submit to male sovereignty: as now, it was most frequently the education that was found at fault, and not the male sovereignty.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Men tend to rebel when young and become more conservative with age, but women tend to be more conservative when young and become rebellious as we grow older. I’d noticed this pattern in the suffragist/ abolitionist era, when women over fifty, sixty, even seventy were a disproportionate number of the activists and leaders—think of Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ida B. Wells—but I’d assumed it was due to the restrictions placed on younger women by uncontrolled childbirth and their status as household chattel: hard facts that limited all but a few single or widowed white women, and all but even fewer free women of color.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“Today’s young women are encouraged to feel somewhat the same way about feminists who preceded them, a conscious or unconscious way of stopping change by distorting the image of changemakers.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“Most of us have a few events that divide our lives into “before” and “after.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back. Instead of trying to fit women into existing middle-class professions or working-class theories, these radical feminist groups assumed that women’s experience could be the root of theory. Whether at speak-outs or consciousness-raising groups, “talking circles” or public hearings, the essential idea was: Tell your personal truth, listen to other women’s stories, see what themes are shared, and discover that the personal is political.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I’m not sure feminism should require an adjective. Believing in the full social, political, and economic quality of women, which is what the dictionary says “feminism” means, is enough to make a revolution in itself. But if I had to choose only one adjective, I still would opt for radical feminist. I know our adversaries keep equating that word with violent or man-hating, crazy or extremist—though being a plain vanilla feminist doesn’t keep one safe from such epithets either. Neither does saying, “I’m not a feminist, but.…” Nonetheless, radical seems an honest indication of the fundamental change we have in mind: the false division of human nature into “feminine” and “masculine” is the root of all other divisions into subject and object, active and passive, and—the beginning of hierarchy.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“The truth is that every country has its own organic feminism. Far more than communism, capitalism, or any other philosophy I can think of, it is a grassroots event. It grows in women’s heads and hearts.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I’ve come to realize the pleasures of being a nothing-to-lose, take-no-shit older woman; of looking at what once seemed to be outer limits but turned out to be just road signs.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I used to indulge in magical thinking when problems seemed insurmountable. Often, this focused on men, for they seemed to be the only ones with power to intercede with the gods. Now it has been so long since I fantasized a magical rescue that I can barely remember the intensity of that longing. Instead, I feel my own strength, take pleasure in the company of friends, male and female, who are mortals. I no longer believe in gods, except those in each of us.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“We understand that being able to help dependent children find what they need can be a gift in itself. Why shouldn’t we feel the same about the other end of life? Why shouldn’t the equally natural needs of age be an opportunity for others to give? Why indeed? Now I wonder if women’s fear of dependency doesn’t stem from being too much depended upon. Perhaps if we equalize the giving of care—with men, with society—this will bring a new freedom to receive.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“Now I look at artificial boundaries—lines that can stop no current of air or drought or polluted river—and mourn the violence lavished on defending them. Long ago, in times suspiciously set aside as “prehistory,” we were mostly nomadic peoples who claimed nothing but crisscrossing migratory paths. Cultures were the richest where different peoples and paths were most intermingled. We’re still a nomadic species; indeed, we move and travel on this earth more than ever before. Yet we insist on the destructive fiction of nationalism, one that becomes even more dangerous when it joins with religions that try to create nationalistic gods.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“As a group who can never afford the expensive fiction of having a nation—and whose bodies suffer from nationalism by being used as its means of reproduction—women of all races and cultures may be the most motivated to ask: How can we create a future beyond nationalism? After all, it has been around for less than five percent of humanity’s history. We know we have had more migratory and communal ways of sharing this Spaceship Earth. There could be again.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I used to think I would be rewarded for good behavior. Therefore, if I wasn’t understood, I must not be understandable; if I wasn’t successful, I must try harder; if something was wrong, it was my fault. More and more now, I see that context is all. When someone judges me or anyone or anything, I ask: Compared to what?”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“When a woman fears the punishment that comes from calling herself a feminist, I ask: Will you be so unpunished if you don’t? When I fear conflict and condemnation for acting a certain way, I think: What peace or praise would I get if I didn’t?”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I recommend the freedom that comes from asking: Compared to what? Hierarchical systems prevail by making us feel inadequate and imperfect. Whatever we do, we will internalize the blame. But once we realize there is no such thing as adequacy or perfection, it sets us free to say: We might as well be who we really are.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy