A secret passion defends the heart of a woman better than her moral sense.
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 women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
A woman's mind is cleaner than a man's—she changes it oftener.
A woman is more influenced by what she divines than by what she is told.
Character is what God and the angels know of us; reputation is what men and women think of us.
We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.
Society depends upon women. The nations who confine them are unsociable.
Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until you put them in hot water.
When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.
Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.