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 reimagining African women as independent, liberated, self-confident, and empowered
I am interested in women’s stories and my work seeks to subsume those stories wherever I go.
I would like to see an end to wars and women presidents who would better develop our continent.
Yet even her tyranny had such a grace,
The women pardoned all, except her face.
Women complain about men, and men complain about women. Who is right?
Girls bored me — they still do. I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.
They don't patronize me for being a woman. Nobody puts me down.
Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.