Jessica Valenti quotes:

Feminism isn't simply about being a woman in a position of power. It's battling systemic inequities; it's a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged.

Dismissing socialization and gender roles as piddling compared to this amorphous idea of 'maternal imperative' is part of the reason progress is stalled for family-friendly policies.

Wanting to be liked means being a supporting character in your own life, using the cues of the actors around you to determine your next line rather than your own script. It means that your self-worth will always be tied to what someone else thinks about you, forever out of your control.

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.

There have been women who stumbled across Feministing randomly, through a bizarre Google search or something, and had no idea what feminism was. They thought it was something older women do, or bought into the hairy bra-burning man-hating stereotype 100 percent. Anything that deviates from that is very exciting for them.

As I grew up and began identifying myself as a feminist, there were plenty of issues that continued to make me question marriage: the father 'giving' the bride away, women taking their husband's last name, the white dress, the vows promising to 'obey' the groom. And that only covers the wedding.

There's something really terrible about having your BlackBerry next to your bed or having your laptop in the living room when you're talking to someone. The biggest source of stress in my life is the screen, the blogging.

My parents have a wonderful marriage, but they have been together since my mother was 12, married when they were just teenagers and are barely ever separated. They even work together. As a result, I have always thought of marriage as involving the loss of a certain amount of autonomy.

Whether it appears in a story about a man killing his girlfriend while calling her a whore or in trying to battle conservative claims that emergency contraception or the HPV vaccine will make girls promiscuous, the purity myth in America underlies more misogyny than most people would like to admit

If feminism wasn't powerful, if feminism wasn't influential, people wouldn't spend so much time putting it down.

When I started blogging in 2004, I responded to every comment no matter how nasty the reader was. I was generally polite, believing that these critics would be so charmed by my professionalism that they would see the error of their misogynist ways and swiftly run out to read a bell hooks book. Ha!

I think day care is terrific. Kids get to be around other kids, and they're playing, and they're teaching each other. When I was in college, my summer job was being a preschool teacher. I loved it, and after that experience, I said I can't wait to put my kid in day care because I could see how much they loved it.

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.

Value yourself for what the media doesn't - your intelligence, your street smarts, your ability to play a kick-ass game of pool, whatever. So long as it's not just valuing yourself for your ability to look hot in a bikini and be available to men, it's an improvement.

The stereotypes of feminists as ugly, or man-haters, or hairy, or whatever it is - that's really strategic. That's a really smart way to keep young women away from feminism, is to kind of put out this idea that all feminists hate men, or all feminists are ugly; and that they really come from a place of fear.

Wedding fever is one of the scariest diseases I have ever seen.

My problem with the wedding industry started when I studied in college and liked to have the television on in the background, and 'A Wedding Story' on TLC always came on, and I'd get irritated that the story of two people making a lifelong commitment to each other could be encapsulated in a half-hour show about the party they throw.

I hope that by modeling feminism in my own life, work and relationships that it will haut become an organic part of my daughter's life. But I'm also fully prepared for her to become a Republican as a way to rebel as a teenager - that would be just my luck!

A huge part of keeping women in their place has to do with creating a really limited definition of what a 'real' woman is like. And a ton of that what-makes-a-woman nonsense is attached to motherhood. Apparently, by virtue of having ovaries and a uterus, women are automatic mommies or mommies-to-be.

Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won't have sex, but rather that they'll have it without pleasure.

The only purpose of an engagement ring is to show you 'belong' to someone, and your man makes bank.

Child-rearing can be a tedious and thankless undertaking.

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.

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.

How insulting is it to suggest the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things?

I've seen straight, partnered women explain their decision to stay at home by noting that childcare would have taken too much out of their paycheck - as if this cost was just theirs to bear!

There's a reason why the assumed goal for women in virginity-movement screeds is marriage and motherhood only: The movement only believes that's the only thing women are meant for.

The less obvious hurdle is that of preparing parents emotionally and putting forward realistic images of parenthood and motherhood. There also needs to be some sort of acknowledgement that not everyone should parent - when parenting is a given, it's not fully considered or thought out, and it gives way too easily to parental ambivalence and unhappiness.

It seems odd that we continue to worry about the reputations of men who are accused of sexual wrong-doings.

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.

Making women the sexual gatekeepers and telling men they just can't help themselves not only drives home the point that women's sexuality is unnatural, but also sets up a disturbing dynamic in which women are expected to be responsible for men's sexual behavior.

claims about what's 'natural' have long been used to reinforce traditional gender roles and values. ... 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.

Hearing the Beastie Boys speak out against sexism made me feel like if these men who had once sung about getting girls to 'do the laundry' and 'clean up my room' could understand, maybe the rest of the world would follow suit. It made me hopeful in the best way.

It's time to teach our daughters that their ability to be good people depends on their being good people, not on whether or not they're sexually active.

As Feministing.com commenter electron-Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article Studentsof Virginity, on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, There were aWHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought thatthat was special enough to start a club about it, for pete's sake.

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.

You come to a point where you give up on holding yourself to a perfect feminist ideal - it just feels stifling.

If your husband is cheating on you, it doesn't mean that you need to get prettier -- it means he's a scumbag.

Given the reality of unintended parenthood and parental unhappiness, one would think that women and men who make the decision not to have children - who are deliberate and thoughtful about the choice to bring another person into the world - would be seen as less selfish than those who unthinkingly have children. Yet the stigma remains.

My informal writing style is a political choice, because I want feminism to be more accessible.

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.

I grew up in Long Island City. When I was growing up, my parents owned a women's clothing store in Queens. It was for older women. I got my bras there, until I realized I didn't want those huge, taupe bras. Everything was beige, with massive amounts of hooks.

I revisit old favorites like 'Buffy' and 'Battlestar Galactica' when I'm bored. I am obsessed with 'Scandal.' I love TV.

The implications of likability are long-lasting and serious. Women adjust their behavior to be likable and as a result have less power in the world. And this desire to be liked and accepted goes beyond the boardroom - it's an issue that comes up for women in their personal lives as well, especially as they become more opinionated and outspoken.

Once you get married, women are still implicitly expected to do the majority of the housework and take care of any future children.

The truth is that we don't need everyone to like us; we need a few people to love us. Because what's better than being roundly liked is being fully known - an impossibility both professionally and personally if you're so busy being likable that you forget to be yourself.

In 2008, I was one of the young feminist whippersnappers who voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries - or as many of my older counterparts called me at the time, a traitor.

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.

In 'The Purity Myth,' I not only discuss what the purity myth is and reveal its consequences for women, but also outline a new way for us to think about young women as moral actors, one that doesn't include their bodies.

When you ask most American parents why they want to have kids, it's to bring more joy into their lives. So, when you don't feel that all-encompassing joy, it must be that something is wrong with you. I think it's dissatisfaction that the expectation was different than the reality.

It's become impossible to enjoy most quality television shows because the hurt or endangered women device is so frequently used.

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.

I think talking is as casual as blogging, and sometimes writing can be as casual as talking. My informal writing style is a political choice, because I want feminism to be more accessible.

One of the difficult things, especially about blogging, is that you put all of your personal out there, into the political. And what's been difficult, for me at least, is trying to keep some of the personal for myself.

When are we going to realize that hating other women - no matter how much money they have or how far they've fallen - is just as bad for ourselves as it is for anyone else?

I think it is effective when activists work from the margins, and I think that's the best way to go about it. And I do think that it's increasingly being more effective with the work that's being done online, that it is a bit more democratized, that whatever kind of activism is being done, it's not necessarily coming from one centralized place.

Men take what women make and claim it as their own.Men don't love childrenThey kill them in a heartbeat to hurt a woman

Men in their hearts hate women. It doesn't matter how much we love them. They hate us"

I don't get much career advice at all, and I would like some.

Present-day American society-whether through pop culture, religion, or institutions-conflates sexuality and morality constantly. Idolizing virginity as a stand-in for women's morality means that nothing else matters-not what we accomplish, not what we think, not what we care about and work for. Just if/how/whom we have sex with. That's all.

Something you hear a lot is that feminism dead. But if feminism is dead, why do people try so hard to kill it?

If there's an article about sexual assault, if there's a video about feminism on YouTube, you're going to get the most horrible, disgusting comments ever. And sometimes the comments are pornographic, and sometimes the comments are really harassing. So I think that it's kind of a difficult place for women to write sometimes.

Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don't get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren't careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.

I think that online harassment has become so ubiquitous on the Internet that a lot of women do feel safer, whatever that means, in spaces where they know like people are not going to bother them in that kind of way.

If you don't identify as a feminist, you're missing out on this whole community that's out there that could really help you with your work, help you with your personal life, and just give you support.

If you go to places like YouTube, it's a cesspool, and a lot of the comments are really horrifying and misogynist and harassing.

I think that almost all traditional institutions are sexist, and they're probably racist and homophobic, and they're all of these things. But a lot of them, like marriage, are too embedded into the culture to give up.

And really, how insulting is it that to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I'm betting some of those women would like to do great things of their own.

I don't think that there's a guy behind the desk at every newspaper saying "No, woman" and sending her on her way, but that's what's systemic about it, right, like that people don't quite realize that maybe they're attracted to a male op-ed more than a female op-ed, or because of networking they know this person from going out to a bar with them.

Be as pissed off as you want to be. Don't hold back because you think it's unladylike or some such nonsense. We shouldn't be shamed out of our anger. We should be using it. Using it to make change in our own lives, and using it to make change in the lives around us. (I know, I'm cheesy.) So the next time someone calls you emotional, or asks if you're PMSing, call them on their bullshit.

There is something to be said for the power of figureheads. After Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, a record number of countries posted female ambassadors to the U.S. - some of whom have dubbed this 'the Hillary effect.'

I think the biggest hurdle American feminists have in terms of taking a more global approach is that too often when you hear American feminists talk about international feminism or women in other countries, it kind of goes along with this condescending point of view like we have to save the women of such-and-such country; we have to help them.

While falling in love is fun, it's not everything, and it's not the antidote to an unfulfilled life, despite what Reese Witherspoon movies may tell you.

...idea at play here is that of "morality." When young women are taught about morality, there's not often talk of compassion, kindness, courage, or integrity. There is, however, a lot of talk about hymens

When women's sexuality is imagined to be passive or "dirty," it also means that men's sexuality is automatically positioned as aggressive and right-no matter what form it takes. And when one of the conditions of masculinity, a concept that is already so fragile in men's minds, is that men dissociate from women and prove their manliness through aggression, we're encouraging a culture of violence and sexuality that's detrimental to both men and women.

I think feminism has always been global. I think there's feminism everywhere throughout the world.

The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best.

There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete's sake.

It used to be that if someone was to get involved in feminism, it was probably because they were already interested. They were already interested in feminism; they were already interested in being an activist, and they found their way to like a NOW meeting or to a consciousness-raising group or something like that.

The cultural insistence that parenting is the 'most important' job in the world is a smart way to satiate unappreciated women without doing a damn thing for them.

I saw an article where the manager of the Pussycat Dolls, which is kind of this like striptease band, girl band, said, oh well, the girls are totally third-wave feminist. This is what third-wave feminism is about. Like you don't get to use that word. You don't get to say that something is feminist as a way to sell back sexism to women, as a way to further consumerist ideas.

I think that the ideal of parenting can make people unhappy. It's that this lie that they're being told by society that parenting is one thing - and when parenting is something completely different - that's what makes them unhappy.

You're not too fat. You're not too loud. You're not too smart. You're not unladylike. There is nothing wrong with you.

As indicated by the increase in maternal mortality in 2010, right now it's more dangerous to give birth in California than in Kuwait or Bosnia. Amnesty International reports that women in [the United States] have a higher risk of dying due to pregnancy complications than women in forty-nine other countries (black women are almost four times as likely to die as white women). The United States spends more than any other country on maternal health care, yet our risk of dying or coming close to death during pregnancy or in childbirth remains unreasonably high.

According to the virginity movement, men have no self-control when it comes to anything sexual.

[Virginity is] a cultural ideology that conflates passivity - the act of not having sex - with superior morality.

As much as I disagree with Sarah Palin, there's no denying that she was the victim of sexism.

In 1986, Gloria Steinem wrote that if men got periods, they 'would brag about how long and how much': that boys would talk about their menstruation as the beginning of their manhood, that there would be 'gifts, religious ceremonies' and sanitary supplies would be 'federally funded and free'. I could live without the menstrual bragging - though mine is particularly impressive - and ceremonial parties, but seriously: Why aren't tampons free?

Women do not get raped because they weren't careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.

Stress from blogging keeps me up at night.

People are not going to give up marriage. But we can try to make it more fair. We can try to change that institution and make it more equal.

At the end of the day, though, the entire basis for consent laws doesn't make sense. We're not old enough to decide if we don't want a baby, but we are old enough to have one?

When I did get married, and specifically after I got married and the New York Times style section featured my wedding in the vows column, which is really traditionally kind of seen as an elitist column, and it is, but I was happy to be in it. I thought it was good that they were covering a feminist wedding.

The truth about parenting is that the reality of our lives needs to be enough.

Because there's no accountability on line in the same way there is in real life, all of a sudden you can say like, yeah, I hate women; I want to kill women. And you can say that online, and not only will you find a place to say it, but you'll find a place to say it where people are like, yeah, me too.

Social media is not just another way to connect feminist and activist voices - it amplifies our messages as well.

I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don't really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that's the point. I believe that a young woman's decision to have sex, or not, shouldn't impact how she's seen as a moral actor.

When it comes to people who are saying really extreme things online, we have the tendency to think that they are just kooks, or that you shouldn't pay attention to them, you shouldn't take them seriously.

I think that the ideal of young womanhood as it's seen in pop culture specifically is a really kind of vapid, conceited, concerned with money and looks kind of thing that you'll see in a lot of reality shows. And I think that's really damaging, not just because it's a terrible role model to put forth, but that it also puts across this idea to the American public that this is what young women are like, that this is what all young women in America are like.

I've been thinking a lot about Lady Gaga and what she means for feminism. I think - I find her completely fascinating, and I really like what she has to say.

People aren't comfortable thinking of women as people. Like we're not people, we're women, and that means something completely different, especially when you have power.

I certainly wouldn't be writing books if it hadn't been for the feminist blogosphere, and I think that's a really amazing thing.

I hear from a lot of young women, you know, I don't want to call myself a feminist because I don't want to get in an argument with someone. And it's just not cool; like it's not a cool thing to be associated with.

For a lot of women who don't go to college, or for a lot of women who aren't in New York or D.C. or someplace where there's like a large feminist organization they can get involved in, they may be doing feminist work, right, like locally or with a grassroots organization or in their own lives, but if they don't have that support system and if they don't have that availability to feminist language, I think we're missing out on something.

I grew up definitely a feminist, but I didn't call myself a feminist until I took my first women's studies class in college.

Whether people identify as feminists or not, if they're doing work that furthers a feminist cause, I think that's wonderful, like if it works for me, right, it works for the movement.

I think the idea that feminism is dead is dangerous because it leads women and men to believe that (1) they don't have to do anything; the work has been done, and that everything is okay now; and (2) it leaves them kind of alone, I think, in a struggle, and that's something I've seen a lot when I go to colleges and I speak to young women.

I always go with the dictionary definition of feminism, which is just social, political and economic equality for women.

If you're fighting to limit other women's rights, then you can't really call yourself a feminist.

There's no benefit to saying that you're a feminist. But you do kind of get a nice patriarchal pat on the head if you say, oh, I'm not like that, like I'm not one of those crazy feminists, which is something that happens a lot, where young women or young men will express some sort of feminist ideal, will say, you know, I think it's crap that Wal-Mart won't give out emergency contraception, but I'm not one of those crazy feminists.

I don't find the wave model very productive, because I think it kind of serves to fan the flames of generational tension, or make it seem like there's more generational tension than there actually is.

I'm glad that we have a history at all and that we can talk about feminist history. But I do think that it doesn't really pay attention to the complexity and the nuance that is feminist thought.

I'm really aware of how feminism and feminist rhetoric has been appropriated by the right.

I do think that more people are feminists than they realize.

Something I say a lot when it comes to anti-feminist stereotypes is that they exist for a reason.

One of the things I really like about doing work online, and the thing I like about the work I'm doing now, is that I get to meet feminists all the time and I get to read new feminists every day on the blogosphere.

There's going to be biological differences between the genders. There's going to be biological differences between two women or two men. There's biological differences between all of us. My concern is, why are we so concerned about it?

The studies about differences between the sexes that you see kind of get propped up in the media are more often than not denigrating women in some way, saying that women really don't have any spatial understanding, and that's why they can't park.