Sourced and curated.

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

Andrea Dworkin

Sexual Economics · 1979

★ 6.1

Oppressed people are frequently very oppressive when first liberated. And why wouldn't they be? They know best two positions. Somebody's foot on their neck or their foot on somebody's neck.

Florynce Kennedy

1970

★ 6.0

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 5.5

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-"Is this all?"

Betty Friedan

1963

★ 5.3

The power of money is a distinctly male power. Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice. In the hands of women, money stays literal; count it out, it buys what it is worth or less. In the hands of men, money buys women, sex, status, dignity, esteem, recognition, loyalty, all manner of possibility.

Andrea Dworkin

Pornography: Men Possessing Women · 1981

★ 5.2

Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.

Kate Millett

Sexual Politics · 1970

★ 5.1

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.

A Vindiction of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 4.7

Why are women…so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 4.7

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 4.5

If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.

Camille Paglia

Sexual Personae · 1990

★ 4.5

Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

Audre Lorde

Sister Outsider · 1984

★ 4.4

To tell the truth, one is not born a genius: one becomes a genius.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 4.0

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 3.9

There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 3.8

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 3.8

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 3.8

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

A Vindiction of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 3.7

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 3.7

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 3.7

It is the masculine values that prevail... This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 3.7

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

Camille Paglia

Sexual Personae · 1990

★ 3.7

If God is male, then the male is God.

Mary Daly

Beyond God the Father · 1973

★ 3.6

Fetters of gold are still fetters, and the softest lining can never make them so easy as liberty.

Mary Astell

An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex · 1696

★ 3.5

The single most impressive fact about the attempt by American women to obtain the right to vote is how long it took.

Alice Rossi

1973

★ 3.5

Novel · Feminist literature

Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Erica Jong

Fear of Flying · 1973

★ 3.5

Men may have had their own very good reasons for bringing women up in servitude, but the soul of a servant is not an attractive thing, and one of the most infuriating aspects of women's constricted upbringing is that it has made them less attractive, even in the eyes of their constrictors, than they should have been. Man has twisted and pruned women out of all recognition and then not liked the results.

Janet Radcliffe Richards

The Sceptical Feminst · 1980

★ 3.5

How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 2.9

Till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed, because they will be obeyed, because they will be obeyed, and constantly endeavor to settle that power on a Divine right which will not bear the investigation of reason.

A Vindiction of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 2.9

The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.

Valerie Solanas

S.C.U.M. Manifesto · 1967

★ 2.6

Without the means to prevent, and to control the timing of, conception, economic and political rights have limited meaning and women. If women cannot plan their pregnancies, they can plan little else in their lives.

Alice Rossi

The Feminist Papers · 1973

★ 2.6

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 2.1

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.

Betty Friedan

The Feminine Mystique · 1963

★ 2.1

It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion, that they were created rather to feel than reason.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 2.0

I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We Should All Be Feminists · 2014

★ 2.0

Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice.

Robin Morgan

1977

★ 1.9

Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do.

Andrea Dworkin

1981

★ 1.9

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

1918

★ 1.8

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.