Shirley Chisholm
“When I die, I want to be remembered as a woman who lived in the twentieth century and who dared to be a catalyst of change. I don’t want to be remembered as the first black woman who went to Congress. And I don’t even want to be remembered as the first woman who happened to be black to make a bid for the Presidency. I want to be remembered as a woman who fought for change in the twentieth century. That’s what I want.”
– Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005), who became the first African-American Congresswoman in 1968 and competed for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1972
Betty Friedan
“In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination – tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she `adjust’ to prejudice and discrimination.”
– Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963
Simone de Beauvoir
“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.”
– Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949
Kate Millet
“It is interesting that many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.”
– Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, 1970
Germaine Greer
“Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?”
– Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 1970
Gloria Steinem
“For sad if obvious reasons, women (especially white women who are seduced by access to the powerful) are the only discriminated-against group whose members seem to think that, if they don’t take themselves seriously, someone else will.”
– Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 1983
