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 represent the morbid side of the women's movement. I deal with the shit, the real shit.
One has lived long enough if one has had time to win the love of women and the esteem of men.
That society is badly arranged which forces nearly all women to be servants.
In response to the question “What do you think a woman's chief health concern should be?”
A beautiful woman should always be in contact with beautiful things.
I'm so rarely the arbiter of what all women want. I'm usually quite the outlier on that chart.
Women are the ones that bear the greatest burden. We are also the ones who nurture societies.
For a woman, forty is torture, the end. I think turning forty is miserable.