The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin'.
— Mary Daly
Unpopular Patriarchal Society quotations
I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

Patriarchy's chief institution is the family.
It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole.

I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society — because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.
In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have.
Maybe this society, if anything, has become more patriarchal, and that has to be combated.

It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.
All patriarchal societies are either preparing for war, at war, or recovering from war.
I call myself a feminist when people ask me if I am, and of course I am 'cause it's about equality, so I hope everyone is. You know you're working in a patriarchal society when the word "feminist" has a weird connotation.

As you get closer to equality, you get more pornography.
True patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia do not allow pornography because women are not allowed to turn their bodies into a commodity; women are chattel.
I don't know if I have any particular views about women in positions of power, though I do think it's more difficult for women, particularly in a Medieval setting. They have the additional problem that they're a woman and people don't want them in a position of power in an essentially patriarchal society.
I was first sexually exploited when I was seven, by a distant cousin at a family wedding. Even after that I was routinely molested by older cousins and their friends. See, my innocence was taken away and I became mature at one bloody incident. I believe I never had a childhood. I grew up as an elderly person. And that's what my femininity brought upon me. Of course, in a patriarchal society, hijras' bodies are thought of as toys.

When women gain access to higher education and then suddenly start doing better at it than the men, that can really throw the prevailing social order out of balance. That's exactly what's happened in South Korea, which is a highly patriarchal society. They started educating women, and then they were no longer the women that society wants them to be. That caused a real cultural crisis.
Men realize that they have work to do, to pull up women and take ownership on where we are as a society, and that they have work to do to help their female relatives and friends - to give a voice to women, not in a patriarchal way, but in a supportive way. It is all of our jobs to make sure that women's rights are human rights, and that they do have a place at the table, and we all push toward equality.
The matriarchal society 1300 years ago in Egypt was a peaceful society;
that's where you had no war for thousands of years! When they switched to patriarchal society, when the male energy ruled, we became obsessed with the greed. Now we are in this time of intense greed!

The patriarchal society has made women believe, first of all, you're only valid and valuable when you're young.
Even now, for women to be contemplating the act of ending their life is considered horrific because they are the giver of life. They're seen in a patriarchal society as the one who offers life and has to nurture a child and have a child within them. That's your only role.
Being part of a patriarchal society, it kind of helped me figure out what I was all about.

It's going to take a while because for the last 500 years patriarchal societies have been devoted to controlling reproduction and that means controlling women. So we got into this masculine/feminine, dominant/passive paradigm, and it's going to take a while to get out.
We are still in various kinds of patriarchal systems.
The very definition of patriarchy is that men control women as the means of reproduction, so the idea that a woman's main role is to have children often means society wants more workers, more soldiers. The idea that how many children we have should be controlled by the family, the church, the nation - by anyone but women themselves - is still very deep and very strong.
Motherhood goes back in history to a time when a father had no way of knowing his children. Fatherhood only became known when class patriarchal society had established itself and imposed monogamous marriage on women. Motherhood is like sun and rain and plants, a quality and product of nature which does not require laws or systems in order to exist.

I hate how box-office failures are blamed on an actress, yet I don't see a box-office failure blamed on men.
People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film... Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or the counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?
I hate how box office failures are blamed on an actress, yet I don’t see a box office failure blamed on men. I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools, supporters for that. I guess it’s because we live in a patriarchal society, where feminism is a dirty word.

They wanted black women to conform to the gender norms set by white society.
They wanted to be recognized as 'men,' as patriarchs, by other men, including white men. Yet they could not assume this position if black women were not willing to conform to prevailing sexist gender norms. Many black women who has endured white-supremacist patriarchal domination during slavery did not want to be dominated by black men after manumission.
Want to talk third-wave feminism, you could cite Ariel Levy and the idea that women have internalized male oppression. Going to spring break at Fort Lauderdale, getting drunk, and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to even know she's in distress.