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.
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
For women with a mischief to their kind,
Pervert with bad advice our better mind.
O woman, woman, when to ill thy mind
Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend.
One woman reads another's character
Without the tedious trouble of deciphering.
The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves.
Grace was in all her steps, heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love.