"I hate female men"
About this Quote
Agnes Smedley fires off a flare of contempt with "I hate female men", a phrase sharpened by her years among self-styled revolutionaries who still expected women to mother them, flatter them, and stay in their shadow. A radical journalist and novelist who came of age in early twentieth-century movements for labor rights, national liberation, and women’s emancipation, she saw up close how lofty political rhetoric often masked stubborn domestic hierarchies. The jab names a type: men who cling to the comforts assigned to women under patriarchy, demanding emotional service, purity, and obedience while withholding full reciprocity. They wanted public change without private transformation.
The wording relies on the gender binaries of Smedley’s time, equating certain traits with the feminine and then rejecting them when performed by men. Its polemical power lies in flipping the script: she exposes how dependency, prudishness, and moral policing are not inherently female, but learned behaviors that men adopted whenever it kept them secure. By calling such men “female,” she attacks the social script itself, not women; she is diagnosing a pattern where men outsource courage and care to the women around them yet claim authority over those same women’s bodies and choices.
Smedley’s own life, including the autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth, chronicles relationships with comrades who preached equality and then demanded possession, purity, or maternal attention. The phrase is a protest against that hypocrisy. It insists that political comradeship must be matched by intimate egalitarianism; otherwise, the revolution is theater.
Modern readers will hear the essentialism in her language and the way it can sound like a slight against femininity. Yet the thrust is aimed at power, not identity. Smedley rejects any masculinity that props itself up by pressing women into service, and any politics that reforms the state but not the self. The line is both a rebuke and a demand: no liberation worth having leaves the old gender bargain intact.
The wording relies on the gender binaries of Smedley’s time, equating certain traits with the feminine and then rejecting them when performed by men. Its polemical power lies in flipping the script: she exposes how dependency, prudishness, and moral policing are not inherently female, but learned behaviors that men adopted whenever it kept them secure. By calling such men “female,” she attacks the social script itself, not women; she is diagnosing a pattern where men outsource courage and care to the women around them yet claim authority over those same women’s bodies and choices.
Smedley’s own life, including the autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth, chronicles relationships with comrades who preached equality and then demanded possession, purity, or maternal attention. The phrase is a protest against that hypocrisy. It insists that political comradeship must be matched by intimate egalitarianism; otherwise, the revolution is theater.
Modern readers will hear the essentialism in her language and the way it can sound like a slight against femininity. Yet the thrust is aimed at power, not identity. Smedley rejects any masculinity that props itself up by pressing women into service, and any politics that reforms the state but not the self. The line is both a rebuke and a demand: no liberation worth having leaves the old gender bargain intact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Anger |
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