223 Quotes by Naomi Wolf

Peaceful, lawful protest – if it is effective – is innately disruptive of ‘business as usual.’ That is why it is effective.

All labor systems that depend on coercing a work force into accepting bad conditions and unfair compensation have recognized the effectiveness of keeping that work force exhausted to keep it from making trouble.

To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long.

As soon as a woman’s primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

Maybe the less pain we inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us.

Some women have become far too proscriptive of other women’s pleasures and private arrangements, and the definition of feminism has become ideologically overloaded.

I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women’s appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically.

There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today’s power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women.

Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women’s hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete.