Second Wave Feminism Quotes

“The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Women’s liberation did not see the female’s potential in terms of the male’s actual; the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Haunted house fictions play upon the complex fears and concerns about domestic issues that women have long grappled with.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Radical feminists didn’t need FBI infiltration — the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was already well under way.”
― Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

“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

“Women seek relief in tears where men seek relief in masturbation, which may be a distinction to be valued”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Those women who fought the original battles suffer more than most. Hated and opposed when originally pushing down the barriers, they now often have to face contempt from a society which takes for granted their achievements.”
― Rosalind Coward, Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium?

“Do you think you're well enough to do this job. You don't have to do it. No one's going to think any the less of you if you stay here with me. There's no point being so liberated you make yourself cry all the time. You stay and we'll get everything sorted out. What it is about sex, when we talk while it's happening I get to feel it's like a driving lesson. Left, right, a little faster, carry on, slow down...”
― Caryl Churchill, Cloud 9

“[...] 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

“The insistence that manmade women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“In a society constructed of self-perpetuating elites a grass roots movement exists to be walked on. Elites tumble down but the grass survives to spring again through the thickest pavement.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“The dilemmas Friedan described were fundamentally “problems of privilege.” And those afflicted were generally quite keen to keep their privilege: Despite railing against suburban life, the women who sympathized with Friedan’s critique were generally disinterested in living in the kinds of households or communities these “other” women lived in (nor in having “others” move into their own neighborhoods). Nor did they have any interest in taking on the kinds of jobs these “other” women worked in. They wanted well-compensated and socially respected professional jobs, befitting their social status. And they ultimately achieved that goal by offloading unwanted domestic responsibilities onto other women—lower-income women, typically immigrants and women of color. Nonetheless, elite women sought to conflate their own interests with the interests of “women” writ large. The campaign to enhance the position of upper-middle-class women was (and continues to be) carried out in the name of feminism per se.”
― Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite