“The nature of women's oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children — we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”

Woman Hating, ch. 9, p. 23, E.P. Dutton, New York (1974).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The nature of women's oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have …" by Andrea Dworkin?
Andrea Dworkin photo
Andrea Dworkin 84
Feminist writer 1946–2005

Related quotes

Bell Hooks photo
Bell Hooks photo
Taslima Nasrin photo

“Religion is against women's rights and women's freedom. In all societies women are oppressed by all religions.”

Taslima Nasrin (1962) Poet, columnist, novelist

" Taslima Nasrin: A Writer On Trial http://atheistfoundation.org.au/article/taslima-nasrin-a-writer-on-trial/", Interview with Kerry O'Brien on "Lateline", ABC TV (1995).

Letty Cottin Pogrebin photo

“When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.”

Letty Cottin Pogrebin (1939) American author, journalist, lecturer, and social justice activist

Source: Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America

Matt Ridley photo

“Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity.”

Matt Ridley (1958) economist

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 7

Bell Hooks photo

“We resist hegemonic dominance of feminist thought by insisting that it is a theory in the making, that we must necessarily criticize, question, re-examine, and explore new possibilities. My persistent critique has been informed by my status as a member of an oppressed group, experience of sexist exploitation and discrimination, and the sense that prevailing feminist analysis has not been the force shaping my feminist consciousness. This is true for many women. There are white women who had never considered resisting male dominance until the feminist movement created an awareness that they could and should. My awareness of feminist struggle was stimulated by social circumstance. Growing up in a Southern, black, father-dominated, working class household, I experienced (as did my mother, my sisters, and my brother) varying degrees of patriarchal tyranny and it made me angry-it made us all angry. Anger led me to question the politics of male dominance and enabled me to resist sexist socialization. Frequently, white feminists act as if black women did not know sexist oppression existed until they voiced feminist sentiment. They believe they are providing black women with "the" analysis and "the" program for liberation. They do not understand, cannot even imagine, that black women, as well as other groups of women who live daily in oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived experience, just as they develop strategies of resistance (even though they may not resist on a sustained or organized basis). These black women observed white feminist focus on male tyranny and women's oppression as if it were a "new" revelation and felt such a focus had little impact on their lives. To them it was just another indication of the privileged living conditions of middle and upper class white women that they would need a theory to inform them that they were "oppressed." The implication being that people who are truly oppressed know it even though they may not be engaged in organized resistance or are unable to articulate in written form the nature of their oppression. These black women saw nothing liberatory in party line analyses of women's oppression. Neither the fact that black women have not organized collectively in huge numbers around the issues of "feminism" (many of us do not know or use the term) nor the fact that we have not had access to the machinery of power that would allow us to share our analyses or theories about gender with the American public negate its presence in our lives or place us in a position of dependency in relationship to those white and non-white feminists who address a larger audience.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 10.

Donald J. Trump photo

“How can Crooked Hillary say she cares about women when she is silent on radical Islam, which horribly oppresses women?”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Tweet https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/734468142303305728 (22 May 2016)
2010s, 2016, May

Related topics