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.
If a woman likes another woman, she's cordial. If she doesn't like her, she's very cordial.
How long in women lasts the flame of love,
If sight and touch do not relume it oft.
But being women, it is understood
That be they fair or dark, they all are good.
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
Alas! the love of women! it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing!
She with all the charm of woman,
She with all the breadth of man.