9 Quotes by Sheila Rowbotham

It is only when women start to organize in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society in which every human being can be brave, responsible, thinking and diligent in the struggle to live at once freely and unselfishly. Such a democracy would be communism, and is beyond our present imagining.

Language conveys a certain power. It is one of the instruments of domination. It is carefully guarded by the superior people because it is one of the means through which they conserve their supremacy.

Values linger on after the social structures which conceived them.

Power in the hands of particular groups and classes serves like a prism to refract reality through their own perspective.

There is no “beginning” of feminism in the sense that there is no beginning to defiance in women.

In order to create an alternative an oppressed group must at once shatter the self-reflecting world which encircles it and, at the same time, project its own image onto history.

When a man curls his lip, when he uses ridicule, when he grows angry, you have touched a raw nerve in domination.

Men will often admit other women are oppressed but not you.

Innocence is impossible when people have never had the choice of becoming corrupt by dominating others.