Life & Wisdom Quote by Rebecca West

West’s genius here is the way she makes “feminism” sound less like an ideology than a label gun people reach for when a woman refuses to lie flat. The opening feint - “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is” - isn’t ignorance; it’s a trap. She’s mocking how the term gets treated as both sacred doctrine and convenient insult, endlessly defined by whoever wants to police it. By claiming the definition is slippery, she exposes who benefits from keeping it slippery: the ones who’d rather argue semantics than concede women a spine.

The second half lands like a clean slap. “Whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat” isn’t just a punchline; it’s a diagnosis of the social contract. The bar for being branded a feminist, she implies, is embarrassingly low: basic self-respect. That’s the subtextual burn - if refusing humiliation is “feminism,” then the culture has already admitted what it expects from women.

Context matters. West came of age in Britain’s suffrage era and spent her career in a public sphere that treated sharp female intellect as a provocation. The line anticipates a modern dynamic: women’s ordinary boundary-setting getting recast as radical, strident, or ideological. West’s wit works because it flips the burden of proof. She doesn’t defend feminism; she indicts the conditions that make “doormat” the default setting.