Women's Lib Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Women's Lib. Here they are! All 50 of them:

Jessica. For god's sake," he said. "Allow me to do at least one common courtesy for you. In spite ow what 'women's lib' teaches you, chivalry does not imply that women are powerless. On the contrary, chivalry is an admission of women's superiority. An acknowledgment of your power over us. This is the only form of servitude a Vladescu ever practices, and I perform it gladly for you. You, in turn, are obligated to accept graciously.
Beth Fantaskey (Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side (Jessica, #1))
Where I grew up, women’s liberation was when you let a chick out of her cage for 15 minutes so she could stretch her legs.
John Rachel
I mean, what good is a women's lib if we can't use it to ask guys to dances?
Cynthia Hand (Unearthly (Unearthly, #1))
Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.
Stephen King (The Stand)
The urge to leap across feminism to "human liberation" is a tragic and dangerous mistake. It deflects us from our real sources of vision, recycles us back into old definitions and structures, and continues to serve the purposes of the patriarchy, which will use "women's lib," as it contemptuously phrases it, only to buy more time for itself—as both capitalism and socialism are now doing. Feminism is a criticism and subversion of all patriarchal thought and institutions—not merely those currently seen as reactionary and tyrannical.
Adrienne Rich (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978)
Dating takes too much time. I wanted you. I took you. You’re mine.” She shivered. Women’s lib could say what it wanted. Being claimed by a sexy male still held loads of seductive charm.
Eve Langlais (A Tiger's Bride (A Lion's Pride, #4))
How dull would it be to consume my meat with only one variety of sauce? My body and spirit would whither, being fed on such limited fare. To sample the delights of a great many women is considered right and healthy for a man, yet the opposite is held true for those of our sex. Where we display undue interest in sexual matters, even within marriage, we are thought immoral. For myself, I can only conceive of such limitation with horror: a torture for which I have no taste.” Mademoiselle Noire - The Gentlemen's Club
Emmanuelle de Maupassant (The Gentlemen's Club)
It was a scandal, calling out women for changing the rules on men with no warning because of their vapid women’s lib and their stupid sexual awakenings. Sexual awakenings were not supposed to extend beyond what was merely an upgrade in enjoyment for men.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Fleishman Is in Trouble)
Women don’t buy with me,” he said quietly. “I get it, women’s lib and all, got no problem with that. But you’re with me, I pay. No discussion, definitely no stupid-ass fight. That’s just the way it is with me.
Kristen Ashley (Games of the Heart (The 'Burg, #4))
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain-porridge unleavened literature licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
What Women's Lib might achieve if their 'consciousness raising' - or in plain English, brainwashing— campaign succeeds is a society whose members have identical roles but are perpetually at war with themselves; a society of males made neurotic by suppressed masculinity, of females made miserable by having masculine roles thrust upon them that contradict their feminine impulses.
Arianna Huffington (The Female Woman)
The women's liberation movement of today in America, in its most oceanic sense, is a wish by women to be liked for something other than their reproductive abilities, especially since the planet is harrowingly overpopulated. And the rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment by male state legislators is this clear statement by men, in my opinion: "We're sorry, girls, but your reproductive abilities are about all we can really like you for." The truth.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage)
If I am capable of loving you Lord MacCaulay, of devoting myself to you, it will never be under the terms to which other women submit, for I am battle-born – a female warrior sworn to defy the bonds which enslave those of my sex. I will not, purely to follow common ideas of decency and femininity, give up my enjoyment of other men.” Mademoiselle Noire - The Gentlemen's Club
Emmanuelle de Maupassant (The Gentlemen's Club)
The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble.
Ellen Feldman (Next to Love)
The thing about women is that they got liberated too fast. They never learned to be straightforward about life because they had to sneak around for about a thousand years tricking men into doing things they wanted. So they manipulate you instead of telling you what they want, so you never know where the hell you are. And then they get mad at you and bitch.
Jennifer Crusie (Manhunting)
—so much more opportunity now." Her voice trails off. "Hurrah for women's lib, eh?" "The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed." The apocalyptic word jars my attention. "What do you mean, doomed?" She glances at me as if I weren't hanging straight either and says vaguely, "Oh …" "Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?" Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different. "Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see." Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons. "Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch." No answering smile. "That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a—a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine." "Sounds like a guerrilla operation." I'm not really joking, here in the 'gator den. In fact, I'm wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs. "Guerrillas have something to hope for." Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. "Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City." I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one. "Men and women aren't different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do." "Do they?" Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be "My Lai" and looks away. "All the endless wars …" Her voice is a whisper. "All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we're just part of the battlefield. It'll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—" She checks and abruptly changes voice. "Forgive me, Don, it's so stupid saying all this." "Men hate wars too, Ruth," I say as gently as I can. "I know." She shrugs and climbs to her feet. "But that's your problem, isn't it?" End of communication. Mrs. Ruth Parsons isn't even living in the same world with me.
James Tiptree Jr.
The only problem with the Angels' new image was that the outlaws themselves didn't understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common. Yet they were gaining access to a whole reservoir of women, booze, drugs and new action -- which they were eager to get their hands on, and symbolism be damned. But they could never get the hang of the role they were expected to play, and insisted on ad-libbing the lines. This fouled their channels of communication, which made them nervous ... and after a brief whirl on the hipster party circuit, all but a few decided it was both cheaper and easier, in the long run, to buy their own booze and hustle a less complicated breed of pussy.
Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's Angels)
In 1970, Women's Lib preached universal sisterhood and resistance to "patriarchy" anywhere and in any form; today, Women's Studies, like contemporary establishment feminism generally, is meekly multicultural, treating non-Western social practices with deference even when they involve the brutal subjection of females.
Bruce Bawer (The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind)
From having nursed alongside a variety of women, Lib knew that self-mastery counted for more than almost any other talent. She
Emma Donoghue (The Wonder)
This women’s lib stuff works for rich girls, but all you’ve got going for you is your face and your figure. You need to take advantage of both before you lose them.
Karin Slaughter (Cop Town)
For years in this country there was no one for black men to vent their rage on except black women. And for years black women accepted that rage—even regarded that acceptance as their unpleasant duty. But in doing so, they frequently kicked back, and they seem never to have become the “true slave” that white women see in their own history. True, the black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept. And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself. —Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” The New York Times, 1971
Tara M. Stringfellow (Memphis)
On April 30. 1789, George Washington stood on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, the temporary national capital. He took the oath of office on a Masonic Bible, ad-libbing the words “So help me God,” which the oath of office as specified in the Constitution does not require.
Kenneth C. Davis (America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation)
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
There was a criticism written millennia ago but it is usually not considered, and that is in Aristophanes’ Assembly of Women, where they tried to establish a fully egalitarian society. And the women do that,and for this purpose: the women must rule. So this kind of inequality of the two sexes must prevail, just as the women’s lib movement would also lead in practice to gynecocracy, not to equality. All right, then we have this beautiful situation: everyone is equal and the women are the mothers who feed their children, the males. And a part of this, the feeding, is of course also sexual gratification. And here there comes in the difference between women who are attractive and women who are not attractive. A natural inequality. Therefore the legislator has to make a special law in order to equalize that inequality. So that (if I may be so crude, but since Aristophanes has done it before me I have some excuse) if a young man cannot sleep with a young girl before he has slept with an ugly one, there is a privilege given to the inferior to equalize people. That is the problem.
Leo Strauss (Leo Strauss on Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil)
It was a sad fact that the commonest complaint in the outpatient department was “Rasehn . . . libehn . . . hodehn,” literally, “My head . . . my heart . . . and my stomach,” with the patient’s hand touching each part as she pronounced the words. Ghosh called it the RLH syndrome. The RLH sufferers were often young women or the elderly. If pressed to be more specific, the patients might offer that their heads were spinning (rasehn yazoregnal) or burning (yakatelegnal ), or their hearts were tired (lib dekam), or they had abdominal discomfort or cramps (hod kurteth), but these symptoms were reported as an aside and grudgingly, because rasehn-libehn-hodehn should have been enough for any doctor worth his salt. It had taken Matron her first year in Addis to understand that this was how stress, anxiety, marital strife, and depression were expressed in Ethiopia—somatization was what Ghosh said the experts called this phenomenon. Psychic distress was projected onto a body part, because culturally it was the way to express that kind of suffering. Patients might see no connection between the abusive husband, or meddlesome mother-in-law, or the recent death of their infant, and their dizziness or palpitations. And they all knew just the cure for what ailed them: an injection. They might settle for mistura carminativa or else a magnesium trisilicate and belladonna mixture, or some other mixture that came to the doctor’s mind, but nothing cured like the marfey—the needle. Ghosh was dead against injections of vitamin B for the RLH syndrome, but Matron had convinced him it was better for Missing to do it than have the dissatisfied patient get an unsterilized hypodermic from a quack in the Merkato. The orange B-complex injection was cheap, and its effect was instantaneous, with patients grinning and skipping down the hill. T
Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone)
As she decays, Eris hears a new track by the reformed Goose featuring Madlib that says the following ad lib in verse: 1. It is hard not to want to kill yourself because trans women are a joke in society; billed as crazed sex pervert pedophiles; and even trans women themselves reinforce this narrative. 2. Constantly thinking about killing yourself makes you constantly think about death causing the shattering of your resolutions in the face of your own thrown aloneness in the world and in the face of dying your own death. 3. The only authentic way, connected fundamentally to your own death and the fact that only you can die your own death, to ground yourself in the world is to choose people who have taken up the same type of destining as you and use their lineage to make your path easier to walk. Maybe the thesis is that there is no authentic consolation for the shattering and anxiety of the trans//sexual in society save for the ability to pick your hero.
Eris S. Nyx (Eristocracy: a Confederacy of Peepants)
It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique of [Paulo] Freire’s work (which I needed so that as a young reader of his work I did not passively absorb the worldview presented) and yet there are many other standpoints from which I approach his work that enable me to experience its value, that make it possible for that work to touch me at the very core of my being. In talking with academic feminists (usually white women) who feel they must either dismiss or devalue the work of Freire because of sexism, I see clearly how our different responses are shaped by the standpoint that we bring to the work. I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to break the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. To have work that promotes one’s lib­eration is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. For me this is an experience that corresponds very much to the way individuals of privilege respond to the use of water in the First World context. When you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justify your dispos­al of something that you consider impure. Look at what most people do with water in this country. Many people purchase special water because they consider tap water unclean—and of course this purchasing is a luxury. Even our ability to see the water that come through the tap as unclean is itself informed by an imperialist consumer per­ spective. It is an expression of luxury and not just simply a response to the condition of water. If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the peo­ ple in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. Paulo’s work has been living water for me.
bell hooks (Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Harvest in Translation))
heard someone yell, “Man overboard.” Technically, he was wrong, but this didn’t seem the time to go all women’s lib on him.
Cindy Sample (Dying for a Daiquiri (Laurel McKay Mysteries, #3))
Women's lib does not mean imitating men's worst qualities just so we can lower ourselves and be equal to them.
Kim Gruenenfelder (A Total Waste of Makeup (Charlize Edwards, #1))
Largely to spare his feelings, she’d spoken in rather vague terms about wanting to “find herself,” and Yates concluded that she’d become a “womens’-libbing bitch” as he sometimes put it. He couldn’t speak calmly on the subject; partly, perhaps, because his mother’s “independence” had caused him so much grief, Yates’s hatred for all “feminist horseshit” bordered on the pathological.
Blake Bailey (A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates)
At the bitter end of an era of liberation—women’s lib, kids’ lib, animal lib, and everything-but-ethics lib—America has apparently been liberated from its moral foundations. But for too many, the good life has become a living hell.
Billy Graham (Billy Graham in Quotes)
Why was it that nine men out of ten thought women were incapable of doing anything but boiling potatoes? she thought furiously, and felt a savage sympathy for members of the Women's Lib movement, which up until now she had always faintly despised.
Sue Peters (Wheels of Conflict)
When women's lib hit the headlines many of these second-generation ranch women sniffed around its edges and pitched it back like a dead carp. If equality meant doing a man's work, you could have it. That brand of equality had dug their mothers an early grave and was three feet down on their own. They'd come a long way baby, and were on the road back to being real ladies -- or so it appeared.
Judy Blunt (Breaking Clean)
That line of reasoning, however, is patently bogus. Discussion of women’s ordination among Adventists predated the “women’s lib” movement by 70 or more years: we already noted that the 1881 General Conference Session considered a resolution favoring ordaining qualified women pastors. Furthermore, the current push among us comes not from women but from men, especially ordained ministers in several different countries who have surrendered their credentials in solidarity with their female counterparts.
William G. Johnsson (Where Are We Headed?: Adventism after San Antonio)
In December 1969, Susan wrote a freelance piece for Playboy on women’s lib, but it never ran—Hugh Hefner spiked it. Hef’s memo as to why he didn’t like the piece was later leaked to the press by a Playboy secretary (who was promptly fired) and it became a cause célèbre. “What I want,” Hef said, “is a devastating piece that takes militants apart.... What I’m interested in is the highly irrational, kooky trend that feminism has taken. These chicks are our natural enemy.... It is time to do battle with them.... All of the most basic premises of the extreme form of the new feminism [are] unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.
Lynn Povich (The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace)
Women's liberationists have the words of freedom, equality, human dignity, etc., but they haven't got the music at all. Perhaps this is due to the strongly anal and Germanic influence exerted by Karl Marx. But a young friend of mine, more ingeniously, explains it as the desiderata of the large number of ex-nuns in the women's lib camp who have brought with them the pontifical attitudes of the Roman patriarchy. Nonetheless, the movement is the latest wave of an obvious matrist floodtide and as such destined to play a large role in the next few decades. Let us hope that their shell of dogma will be softened by the noisy splashing of all the other odd and colorful fish swimming about in the free waters of Consciousness III.
Robert Anton Wilson (Coincidance: A Head Test)
And Maureen and Charlotte would stand guard if Al didn't, and to hell with that. The only good thing about Hammerfall, women's lib was dead milliseconds after Hammerstrike.
Larry Niven (Lucifer's Hammer)
He told me adamantly that once I’m married, our affair is over. He breaks my heart.” “We’ll see, Clare. They always come back for Coca-Cola.
Pamela L Hamilton (Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale)
You can be so courageous when you’re encouraging others to step into the fire.
Pamela L Hamilton (Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale)
I couldn’t seduce him with charm, so I slayed him with intellect.
Pamela L Hamilton (Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale)
Hemingway has an unquenchable thirst for women and war. You can feel satisfied knowing you’re the only one who gave him both.
Pamela L Hamilton (Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale)
I think we should be able to make our own choices and not be judged by any of them.” “I agree, Dorothy, even if the Catholic Church doesn’t.
Pamela L Hamilton (Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale)
She had seen the faces of shattered dreams, the zippy Ziegfeld girls, the doll-faced divorcées, the wellborn wives in opulent ivory towers, knocked down and knocked right out.
Pamela L Hamilton (Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale)
He’ll marry me within a year—such a vague commitment, as if he’s putting a suit on hold at Bergdorf’s.
Pamela L Hamilton (Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale)
Fat, broke, and unmarried,” she declared with pride, for she knew she had transcended the unwritten rules.
Pamela L Hamilton (Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale)
There must be a new kind of equality in the country, the egalitarians say; not the Founding Fathers’ equality of individual rights, or even the older reformists’ undefined “equality of opportunity,” but a militantly specific “equality of results”; the “results” must be equal for all, regardless of any man’s or group’s efforts, virtues, or merits. Men must be equal in goods and services, regardless of ability to pay. They must be equal in jobs and promotions, regardless of qualifications or performance (e.g., the quota system). They must be equal in college training regardless of academic preparation (open admissions); in cultural prestige regardless of talent (minority-group art subsidies); in authority regardless of knowledge (Student Power); in moral respectability regardless of behavior (Gay Lib); in credit for achievement regardless of achievement (Women’s Lib).
Leonard Peikoff (Ominous Parallels)
Millett was the author of Sexual Politics, her dissertation at the communist hotbed Columbia University. It became a cultural juggernaut when published in 1970. There, she decried the “patriarchy” of the monogamous nuclear family. The book landed Kate on the cover of Time magazine on August 31, 1970, which dubbed her the “high priestess” and “Mao Tse-tung of the Women’s Movement.” Her angry book served as the bible, the feminist-Marxist manifesto, of women’s lib.645 The New York Times referred to Sexual Politics as “the Bible of Women’s Liberation.”646
Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration)
If Women's Lib want a crack at the positions of power, they must forfeit their position of weakness. It will be men and children in future who will be helped solicitously into the first lifeboats, and the man who sits like a stuck pig in the car while his wife leaps out in the pouring rain, opens the door for him, and spikes her eyes out as she covers him with an umbrella.
Jilly Cooper (Jolly Super)
Summer said only men are allowed to sleep on the floor. Women just aren’t that special and have to have a bed. She said it’s like peeing outside.” He shrugged. “Some things women just can’t do.” They all looked at Grace. She was all for women’s lib, but not when it came to peeing outside and sleeping on the floor. Put
Katie Graykowski (Saving Grace (The Lone Stars, #2))
When God’s Lightning was first founded, as a splinter off Women’s Liberation, it had as its slogan “No More Sexism,” and its original targets were adult bookstores, sex-education programs, men’s magazines, and foreign movies. It was only after meeting “Smiling Jim” Trepomena of Knights of Christianity United in Faith that Atlanta discovered that both male supremacy and orgasms were part of the International Communist Conspiracy. It was at that point, really, that God’s Lightning and orthodox Women’s Lib totally parted company, for the orthodox faction, just then, were teaching that male supremacy and orgasms were part of the International Kapitalist Conspiracy.)
Robert Shea (The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan)