18 quotes
The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
They still say "fuck you" as a venomous insult; they still find "cunt" the most degrading epithet outside the dictionary.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Nobody wants a girl whose beauty is imperceptible to all but him...
The Female Eunuch (1970)
If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood — if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
The principle of the brotherhood of man is that narcissistic one, for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the sexual object sought by all men, and all women. She is of neither sex for she herself has no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice. This is a woman born to be abandoned by her ungrateful husband at the very pinnacle of success she helped to make for him, for a shameless hussy of nineteen.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
In that mysterious dimension where the body meets the soul the stereotype is born and has her being. She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the very word beauty itself. All that exists, exists to beautify her.
The Female Eunuch (1970)