Feminist Quotes
SEX
"Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature's demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a 'good' man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife?"
Emma Goldman "Marriage and Love," Anarchism and Other Essays, 1911.
"... it is only when the egoistic man fears that the unmated woman may be active and content, that his sensitive vanity is up in arms, and he is dismayed at the notion of a woman, of her free choice, forgoing man. He is content there should be millions of spinsters, if only they are unhappy."
H. M. Stanwick, The Future of the Women's Movement, 1913.
"Women are moved by sexual impulses towards particular men, not towards men as a whole, and men will never understand women so long as they do not recognize this."
ibid.
"[The husband's] idea of marriage is too often that of providing a home for a female who would in turn provide for his physical needs, including sexual satisfaction. Such a husband usually excludes such satisfaction from the category of hte wife's needs, physical or spiritual."
Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 1920.
"Upon the shoulders of the woman conscious of her freedom rests the responsibility of creating a new sex morality. The vital difference between a morality thus created by women and the so-called morality of to-day, is that the new standard will be based upon knowledge and freedom while the old is founded upon ignorance and submission."
ibid
"There is nothing in life to compare with this uniting of minds and bodies in men and women who have laid aside hostility and fear and seek in love the fullest understanding of themselves and the universe."
Dora Russell, Hypatia, 1925
"Just as he wants her to be at once warm and cool in bed, he requires her to be wholly his and yet no burden; he wishes her to establish him in a fixed place on earth and to leave him free, to assume the monotonous daily round and not to bore him, to be always at hand and never importunate; he wants to have her all to himself and not to belong to her; to live as one of a couple and to remain alone."
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1952
"Masculine society has insisted on seeing in sexuality that same sense of conflict and competition that it has imposed upon its relation to the planet as a whole. From the bedroom to the board room to the international conference table, separateness, differentiation, opposition, exclusion, antithesis have been the cause and goal of the male politics of power."
Betty Roszak, "The Human Condition," Masculine/Feminine, ed. B. and T. Roszak, 1969.
"Sex must be rescued from the traffic between powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered, sexual and neutral, to become a form of communication between potent, gentle, tender people..."
Germain Greer, The Female Eunuch 1971.
"From an early age, we are alienated from ourselves as sexual beings by a male society's ambivalent definition of our sexuality; we are sexy but we are pure; we are insatiable but we are frigid; we have beautiful bodies but we must shave and anoint them."
Linda Phelps, "Female Sexual Alienation," Women: A Journal of Liberation, III, circa 1972.
"Men would think it was ridiculous if psychiatrists went around saying that many of them don't really need orgasms. They should be content just to be affectionate and share love, etc., etc. Yet unfortunately, many men still hope or believe that this male supremacist myth about women is true."
Barbara Seaman, Free and Female, 1972.
© 1997 womenofkali@yahoo.com
This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page