362 Quotes About Patriarchy

That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.

It is more like carrying something really heavy, forever. You do not get to put it down: you have to carry it, and so you carry it the way you need to, however it fits best.

One way or another, we spend our whole lives being conditioned into accepting some line or order, some position of domination or subjection. It’s hard to unlearn such hierarchy, to undo such control. It’s implicit.

Dancing falls into the same category as poetry for a woman – it equals dreaming, which may inspire thoughts about such banned topics as love and desire.

One of the lies of patriarchy is that the sickness is our fault as individuals. That sickness is shameful and should be suffered in silence, so as not to bring others down. When in truth sickness is all around us all the time. It runs down family lines, it runs through communities, it runs along rivers, it is carried in the air, by touch. Illness, mental or physical, is very, very rarely an individual thing. The shame and fear we carry in silence is a burden to our healing.

The patriarchy longs for the days 'when men were men' and women were oppressed, subservient - and they can see no wrong in it. It justifies its former power and lust to hold on to it - and if possible, to regain it by quoting fundamentalist and radical religion and tradition and calling it 'love'. Some love. How can oppression and power over another person's life ever be 'love'?

You can try and stop boys all you want, but in this world they all have a mind of their own and act on it. We girls can't afford that.

In a society where women are truly equal to men, a kid bred by a theist mother and an atheist father is born an agnostic. In a patriarchal society, the kid is automatically an atheist.

It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.