People ask me a lot, ‘Well, can you be pro-life and be feminist? Can you be conservative and be feminist?’ And I think that, yeah, maybe personally you can be those things. But I think if you’re advocating for legislation, or if you’re fighting to limit other women’s rights, then you can’t really call yourself a feminist. Jessica Valenti Read Quote
I kind of love that there’s not really a feminist canon; or maybe there is, but it’s being changed, that it’s a constantly moving canon in the feminist blogosphere. I love that. Jessica Valenti Read Quote
Bra-burning never happened. It was completely made up by the media. A couple of women protesting a Miss America pageant threw some bras into a garbage can, and somehow that became this longstanding idea of feminists as bra-burners. Jessica Valenti Read Quote
There’s no one right way to parent, and there’s no magic combination of genders that produces the most well-adjusted child. We all do the best we can at loving our kids and building our families. Jessica Valenti Read Quote
The widely held belief that the heterosexual nuclear family is best for children has long been used as a smoke screen for homophobia and as a talking point to quash marriage-equality efforts. Jessica Valenti Read Quote
It’s not always easy being a full-time feminist – especially as a young woman – when you’re constantly being told that what you do is irrelevant. I’m on the defense all the time. Jessica Valenti Read Quote
Whether it’s repro rights, violence against women, or just plain old vanilla sexism, most issues affecting women have one thing in common – they exist to keep women ‘in their place.’ To make sure that we’re acting ‘appropriately,’ whatever that means. Jessica Valenti Read Quote
Once you get married, women are still implicitly expected to do the majority of the housework and take care of any future children. Jessica Valenti Read Quote
As a kid, I wasn’t sure that I would ever get married – I was not the kind of little girl who played at being a bride. Jessica Valenti Read Quote
Even the notion that women should have children at all is based on the idea that a woman’s inherent and most important role is that of mother. Shockingly, men’s ‘innate’ roles are a lot more fun than the ones bestowed on women. Jessica Valenti Read Quote
