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.
I am a woman—therefore I may not
Call to him, cry to him,
Fly to him,
Bid him delay not.
Let me not be sad because I am born a woman
In this world; many saints suffer in this way.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.
Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.
The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.