Women Quotes
This is a large page and a mixed one. Feminist theory, nineteenth-century verse, comedy and plain contempt sit side by side, and the source line is how you tell them apart. Warren Farrell has the most entries, then Shakespeare, Camille Paglia and Mignon McLaughlin.
Some of the best-sourced entries are the plainest. Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique (1963): “The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women.” Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), argued that women and love are underpinnings, and that examining them threatens the whole structure of a culture. Dorothy Parker, in Enough Rope (1926), observed that men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Two statements that are regularly credited to Catharine MacKinnon are flagged here as misattributed. If you are checking one of them, the notes on its page are the place to start.
We must shift the narrative from protecting women to unleashing women's leadership.
A strange alternative * * *
Must women have a doctor or a dance?
A morning Sun, and a Wine-bred child, and a Latin-bred woman seldom end well.
Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water the day after.
Wine and women corrupt the best of men; whoever frequents prostitutes loses all sense of shame.
Go—let thy less than woman's hand
Assume the distaff—not the brand.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband.
My lord, you know what Virgil sings—
Woman is various and most mutable.
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
They are women who are standing on their feet in spite of their circumstances, not because of it.
"You know, they’ll have their revenge."
"Who will?"
"The women, of course."