A rosebud set with little wilful thorns,
And sweet as English air could make her, she.
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 you resent, and wish a woman ill,
But turn her o’er one moment to her will.
And when a lady's in the case,
You know all other things give place.
I love beautiful women, and beautiful women love me. It has to be both ways.
He’s got tired of her now, has Martin. He said she took so much worshipping she made his knees sore.
When toward the Devil's House we tread,
Woman's a thousand steps ahead.
Revenge we find,
The abject pleasure of an abject mind
And hence so dear to poor weak woman-kind.
Her gentle limbs did she undress,
And lay down in her loveliness.
On stage and off, we care what happens to a beautiful woman, whether she can act well or not.