Still an angel appear to each lover beside,
But still be a woman to you.
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.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild:
She was an aggravating child.
Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.
Would'st know men's greatest dangers? They are three:
Woman the first, then fire, and then sea.
A pretty girl is like a melody
That haunts you night and day.
You speak like a green girl,
Unsifted in such perilous circumstance.
The glowing dames of Zama's royal court
Have faces finsh'd with more exalted charms.
A woman, O my friends, has one desire—
To see secure, to live with, those she loves.
She’s as inconstant as the seas and winds,
Which ne’er are calm but to betray adventurers.