When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free.

As females, we are under constant social and cultural surveillance. We are told that we belong to everybody else except to ourselves. This is the foundation of hetero normativity, and too many women have accepted this fraud.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

had the social instinct of a woman — that of being dependent upon a man. You were afraid,

Even though laws have changed we still have so many social constraints and so many rules that we set for ourselves and that society sets for us. It’s very difficult still to be a woman.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.

There are in all ages men born to be in bondage to the opinions of the society in which they live.

She was convinced that women were as often victims of themselves as they were of men.

Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.

Women can consider themselves free, feminist, and liberated in so many ways — yet still be controlled by the notion of an ideal body of which their own continually falls short.

Being frozen into the passive position of an object whose very existence depends on the eye of its beholder turn the educated modern Western women into a harem slave.