Top 33 Jessica Valenti Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Jessica Valenti Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

If feminism wasn't powerful, if feminism wasn't influen

If feminism wasn’t powerful, if feminism wasn’t influential, people wouldn’t spend so much time putting it down.
Jessica Valenti
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!
Jessica Valenti
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
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.
Jessica Valenti
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
You come to a point where you give up on holding yourself to a perfect feminist ideal – it just feels stifling.
Jessica Valenti
I revisit old favorites like ‘Buffy’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica’ when I’m bored. I am obsessed with ‘Scandal.’ I love TV.
Jessica Valenti
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.
Jessica Valenti
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
Social media is not just another way to connect feminist and activist voices – it amplifies our messages as well.
Jessica Valenti
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.
Jessica Valenti
There is no public space for women; the whole world is a prison where you have to be constantly aware at all times that you’re a potential victim. What’s more terrifying is that it’s not necessarily preventative.
Jessica Valenti
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.
Jessica Valenti
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.
Jessica Valenti
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
Women are brought up to believe you are going to be the better parent and you know what’s best. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. As much as we have to ask men to step it up, we have to take a look at ourselves and be willing to give up some of that parental power.
Jessica Valenti
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.
Jessica Valenti
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.
Jessica Valenti
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.
Jessica Valenti
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
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.
Jessica Valenti
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.
Jessica Valenti
It’s become impossible to enjoy most quality television shows because the hurt or endangered women device is so frequently used.
Jessica Valenti
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!
Jessica Valenti
The truth about parenting is that the reality of our lives needs to be enough.
Jessica Valenti
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
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.
Jessica Valenti
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.
Jessica Valenti
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.
Jessica Valenti
How insulting is it to suggest the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things?
Jessica Valenti
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
Bra-burning never happened. It was completely made up b

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
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.
Jessica Valenti