65 Women’S Rights Quotes

In a world that continuously strives for equality and justice, the powerful words of trailblazing women and their allies resonate louder than ever. Celebrating the voices that have championed women's rights throughout history, we present a curated collection of the top 65 Women’s Rights Quotes. These quotes not only inspire and empower but also reflect the resilient spirit and unwavering determination of those who have fought, and continue to fight, for gender equality. Join us on this journey through impactful words that have shaped the movement and continue to spark change today.

1. “I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.” - Charlotte Brontë

2. “I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.” - Jane Austen

3. “A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.” - Jostein Gaarder

4. “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.” - Mary Wollstonecraft

5. “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.” - Mary Wollstonecraft

6. “The test of whether or not you can hold a job should not be in the arrangement of your chromosomes” - Bella Abzug

7. “Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can’t take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can’t take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.” - Faye Wattleton

8. “As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only.” - Christopher Hitchens

9. “Uh.. you'er Sophie?" Mrianda ventured"That's me""How old areyou?"Sophie rolled ker wide brown eyes, "Ahunderd and forty-eight" she relied. "I got to live back when women coulden't vote, isn't that awesome?” - Dianne Sylvan

10. “After listening to Rick Santorum, I'm now for late-term abortions (say up to age 53).” - Quentin R. Bufogle

11. “While significant strides have been made in the pursuit of life expectancy, healthcare, educational opportunities, and constitutional protections for women, the Supreme Court, in particular, still wrestles with their status, as evidenced by their problems in pursuing equal opportunity in education and employment, reproductive freedom, the military, and violence against women.” - David E. Wilkins

12. “No nation can ever be worthy of its existence that cannot take its women along with the men. No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a great competition and rivalry between the two. There is a third power stronger than both, that of the women.” - Muhammad Ali Jinnah

13. “There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a great competition and rivalry between the two. There is a third power stronger than both, that of the women.” - Muhammad Ali Jinnah

14. “No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you. We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.” - Muhammad Ali Jinnah

15. “You can't really protect women or men from their choices, so let themhave their own lives and trust the process. Given the history ofsociety's efforts to control women's sexuality and reproduction, thisremained a revolutionary idea. No wonder it disturbed and frightenedsome people so deeply.” - Stephen Singular

16. “As with Randall Terry and other anti-abortion leaders, women simplydid not figure into [Roeder's] equations. If all the abortionproviders were dead, the problem would be solved, and he'd never haveto think about those who sought to end their pregnancies throughillegal or dangerous means.” - Stephen Singular

17. “Roe has been a good friend, one women could count on when in trouble. We are on uncertain ground after Casey. Women, justifiably, feel vulnerable at a time so many years after their journey for reproductive freedom started.” - Sarah Weddington

18. “[] it is unthinkable to allow complete strangers, whether individually or collectively as state legislators or others in government, to make such personal decisions for someone else.” - Sarah Weddington

19. “It is time to renew the battle for reproductive rights. We have been outmaneuvered, outspent, outpostured, and outvoted by a group of single-issue activists. It has taken them nearly two decades to turn back the principles of Roe. Let's make sure it takes us a shorter time to replace protection for reproductive choice.” - Sarah Weddington

20. “Then I will speak upon the ashes.” - Sojourner Truth

21. “I notice you have the assault proof vest -So it's my fault I guess.So apparently I didn't say 'no' as loud as my clothes could say 'yes.'You see I didn't know that my ‘no’ wasn't enough -I didn't understand that my body became less precious because certain dresses make me look hot.And I guess if I'm wearing the wrong topthen my ‘yes’ is the same as ‘stop.’And you shouldn't have to, just because I begged you to.I'm begging you -Tell me the magic outfit and I'll buy it.Apparently my ‘no’ wasn't heard,even when I screamed.So I need my clothes to be quiet.” - Connell, Steve

22. “She says it is a school for bluestockings which, according to her, is really only a fashionable way of saying it is a school for ugly girls who cannot find suitable husbands. To tease her, for I believe it is one of his greatest pleasures in this life, my father bought a pair of blue silk stockings for me the day we received my letter of acceptance. That evening and the next, father and I dined alone.” - Gwenn Wright

23. “It's not being a woman I mind so much," she said slowly. "'Tis the way men seem to always order my life." She leaned earnestly toward him. "Your hand, Papa, has wielded a sword and cradled a child and held power over hundreds of men." She held up her own hand. "This one has far fewer adventures before it.” - Barbara Samuel

24. “I find it strange that practicing law in a comfortable well-heated office is considered too demanding an occupation for women, yet laboring from dawn's first light in crowded, drafty, ill-lit sweatshops is not.” - Shirley Tallman

25. “The feminist story, she reminded me, is a counternarrative, a narrative of disobedience, a chronicle of battle, nto of surrender. Women who do not fit the mold are too often maneuvered, manipulated, and mangled into some culturally safe archetype. The makers of history transformed perpetua intoa cold, unfeeling mother - a villan of sorts. But who is to say that becoming a mother didn't also push Perpetua to become a martyr, didn't cause her to passionatley uphold her religious ideals because she wanted to offer her son the greatest gift she could - an ideal? Maybe, in the end, Perpetua's maternal instincts were precisely what gave her the strength to confront the burliest Roman gladiator and the to lie down with dignity?” - Stephanie Staal

26. “When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.” - Nicholas D. Kristof

27. “Skupljanje hrane nesumnjivo je bilo na prvom mjestu ženskih dužnosti budući da je taj zadatak održavao pleme na životu. Ni u jednom se trenutku pretpovijesne žene s djecom ili bez nje nisu oslanjale na svoje partnere, lovce, za nabavku hrane.” - Rosalind Miles

28. “...Obduracy can be overcome by determination. More insidious, and far harder to destroy, was women's internalizing of the notion that they were somehow inferior to men, a complementary species designed (in W.R. Greg's words) to 'complet[e], sweeten, and embellish the existence of others'. [Women] still chose to become nurses rather than doctors, secretaries rather than bosses: to be ill-paid facilitators for people no more talented nor, in many cases, better educated than themselves, but who simply happened to be men. The notion that they might be their bosses' equals penetrated only very slowly; the possibility that they might even be their superiors, though accepted in theory, has perhaps still not wholly sunk in.” - Ruth Brandon

29. “Humankind is made up of two sexes, women and men. Is it possible for humankind to grow by the improvement of only one part while the other part is ignored? Is it possible that if half of a mass is tied to earth with chains that the other half can soar into skies?” - Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

30. “I cried with pride as I looked into the face of a midwife from the next generation of baby catchers.” - Peggy Vincent

31. “Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is... bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.” - Sheryl WuDunn

32. “[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.” - Antonia Fraser

33. “The women in that ward were simple, ordinary refugee women. They came from villages or very small towns. Even before becoming refugees, they had been poor. They had no education. They had no notion of an outside world where life might be different. They were being treated for various ailments, but in the end, their gender was their ailment.In the first bed, a skinny fourteen-year-old girl lay rolled into her sheets in a state of almost catatonic unresponsiveness, eyes closed, not speaking even in reply to the doctor’s gentle greeting. Her family had brought her to be treated for mental illness, the doctor explained with regret. They had recently married her to a man in his seventies, a wealthy and influential personage by their standards. In their version of things, something had started mysteriously to go wrong with her mind as soon as the marriage was agreed upon – a case of demon possession, her family supposed. When, after repeated beatings, she still failed to cooperate gracefully with her new husband’s sexual demands, he had angrily returned her to her family and ordered them to fix this problem.They had taken the girl to a mullah, who had tried to expel the demon through prayers and by writing Quranic passages on little pieces of paper that had to be dissolved in water and then drunk, but this had brought no improvement, so the mullah had abandoned his diagnosis of demon possession and decided that the girl was sick. The family had brought her to the clinic, to be treated for insanity.” - Cheryl Benard

34. “The solution to women’s issues can only be achieved in a free and democratic society in which human energy is liberated, the energy of both women and men together. Our civilization is called human civilization and is not attributed only to men or women.” - توكل كرمان

35. “Women in my country take their rights for granted and completely dissociate themselves from the women's rights movement and feminism. But I think anything's possible. If I don't help the women in Afghanistan, they won't be around to help me.” - Cheryl Benard quoting Lorrie

36. “Like other women who sought equality, the amount of trouble I cause is inversely proportional to my physical size.” - Cassandra Duffy

37. “I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.” - Mary Wollstonecraft

38. “The word feminism has become synonymous with man-hating when in fact it has more to do with women than men.” - Aysha Taryam

39. “...religions all have the same timeline...First the people feel the need to worship something. The sun or the giant corn of ear. That's the first thing. Then the guys say okay, now that we've got the giant corn thing going, how can we use it to oppress women?” - Carol Anshaw

40. “Woman is deprived of rights from lack of education, and the lack of education results from the absence of rights. We must not forget that the subjection of women is so complete, and dates from such ages back that we are often unwilling to recognise the gulf that separates them from us.” - Leo Tolstoy

41. “Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers — and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.” - Margaret Sanger

42. “When all you know is pain you don’t know that that is not normal. It is not a woman’s lot to suffer, even if we’ve been raised that way.It is not OK to miss a part of your life because of pain and excessive bleeding.It is not OK to be bed-ridden for two-to-three days a month.It is not OK to pain during sex.It is not OK to have major bloating or nausea."(Address, 2011 Endometriosis Foundation of America Blossom Ball)” - Susan Sarandon

43. “لا يمكن أن يخلق الله رجال من أرحام النساء , ثم لا يجعل لهن كرامة فوق كرامة الرجال” - محمد دهشان

44. “While sports are indisputably a positive source of strength and self-development for girls, they can accomplish this only if the environment in which female athletes throw their javelins, kick their soccer balls, and swim their fast and furious laps is an environment that respects girls and takes them seriously as athletes.” - Leslie Heywood

45. “Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.” - Simone de Beauvoir

46. “The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time.” - Friedrich Engels

47. “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.” - Maya Angelou

48. “I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.” - Audrey Lorde

49. “Be careful if you make a women cry, because God counts her tears. The woman came out of a man’s ribs. Not from his feet to be walked on, not from his head to be superior, but from his side to be equal, under the arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved.” - Matthew Henry

50. “Are women human yet? If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York's brothels...? Would our genitals be sliced out to "cleanse" us...? When will women be human? When? ~ Half The Sky” - Catherine A. MacKinnon

51. “Behind tranquillity lies conquered unhappiness.” - J. William T. Youngs

52. “A fundamental error that I have noticed within a lot of independent women, is that by default, they must succeed. If not, their self-reflection in stagnation will overcome them. In striving to succeed immediately, they have failed successfully, and have fallen into the ocean of persistence and fluctuation. But it's not all in vain, for hope is a returning daydream. Unknown to them, their opposite is merely sleeping with time, awaiting the impending song of daybreak's bell.” - Lionel Suggs

53. “Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex.” - Mahatma Gandhi

54. “These days, however, I am much calmer - since I realised that it’s technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism, you wouldn’t be allowed to have a debate on women’s place in society. You’d be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor - biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men’s card game - before going back to quick-liming the dunny. This is why those female columnists in the Daily Mail - giving daily wail against feminism - amuse me. They paid you £1,600 for that, dear, I think. And I bet it’s going in your bank account, and not your husband’s. The more women argue loudly, against feminism, the more they both prove it exists and that they enjoy its hard-won privileges.” - Caitlin Moran

55. “The stewards, and then the bailiffs, and then finally the lawyers meet. They wrangle, they agree, and we are to be married in June. It is no little decision for me - for the first time in my life I have my own lands in my own hands as a widow; once I become a wife everything becomes Lord Stanley's property. I have to struggle to reserve what I can from the law that rules that a wife has no rights, and I keep what I can, but I know that I am choosing my master.” - Philippa Gregory

56. “Consent to petting isn't consent to penetration.” - Kate McGuinness

57. “Perhaps you'll apprentice to a healer when you're older," Grete suggested. "I'd say you have the gift for it."Hen reddened, then seemed suddenly fascinated with a speck on her shoe. "Be nice to have a gift for something," she said after a moment. "But they don't let girls apprentice, now, do they?"Grete harrumphed. "A bunch of fools, the lot who came up with that system. You lose half the world's brainpower that way.” - Frances O'Roark Dowell

58. “I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I'm supposed to take when I one day leave this house.” - Eve Ensler

59. “It was hard not to feel resentment that men weren't forced into these choices. Some days she felt that she would spend all her time trying to forget her life before children because she loved them too much to be reminded of the heat of Rome in the summer and a beautiful girl who turned heads as she walked down an Italian strada.” - Whitney Otto

60. “...Both Elizabeth [Smart] and Ruby [Jessop] were fourteen when they were kidnapped, raped and "kept captive by polygamous fanatics." The main difference in the girls' respective ordeals...is that "Elizabeth was brainwashed for nine months," while Ruby had been brainwashed by polygamist fanatics "since birth." Despite the similarity of their plights, Elizabeth's abusers were jailed and charged with sexual assault, aggravated burglary, and aggravated kidnapping, while Ruby... "was returned to her abusers, no real investigation was done, no charges brought against anyone" involved.” - Jon Krakauer

61. “Bah! Suffragettes. I've no time for suffragettes. They made the biggest mistake in history. They went for equality. They should have gone for power!” - Jennifer Worth

62. “I defend the authority of women and explore its meaning for them rather than assume they need to be more accommodating or sensitive.” - David Bedrick

63. “Women were born to be treasured.” - Lybian proverb

64. “When pockets were first added to women’s clothing in 1913, a Paris reporter wrote, “It’s all over with men’s superiority over women.” Pockets are indeed indispensable, and they come in two types: patch and set-in” - Claire B. Shaeffer

65. “The world will change when women reclaim their power as the sane, nurturing hands of love, which are ever reaching to cultivate a world of beauty, safety and harmony.” - Bryant McGill