In Their Own Words: Feminists Claim the Family is ‘Oppressive’ to Women
SAVE
July 11, 2023
- “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” — Simone de Beauvoir, quoted in the Saturday Review, June 14, 1974, p. 18.
- “Romance itself serves a larger political purpose by offering at least a temporary reward for gender roles and threatening rebels with loneliness and rejection.” — Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, 1992, p. 260.
- “You become a semi-nonperson when you get married.” — Gloria Steinem
- “Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.” — Andrea Dworkin
- “The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.” — National NOW Times, January 1988
- “Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women’s movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage. ” — Sheila Cronan, Page 219.
- “Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession…The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn’t be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that.” — Vivian Gornick, University of Illinois, “The Daily Illini,” April 25, 1981.
- “In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.” — Mary Jo Bane, associate director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women
- “Marriage has existed for the benefit of men; and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women… We must work to destroy it. The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore, it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men” — The Declaration of Feminism, 1971.