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.
A woman is always a woman, and will never be anything but a woman as long as the world endures.
A woman cannot be a pastor by the law of God. I say more, it is against the law of the realm.
Every woman is a pianoforte – only one must know how to play her.
Women give themselves to God when the devil wants nothing more to do with them.
Women, ever in extremes, are always either better or worse than men.
It is the nature of women to disdain those who love them, and to love those who abhor them.
I have always said it—Nature meant woman to be her masterpiece.
Every blue-stocking will remain a spinster as long as there are sensible men on the earth.
Of all the girls that are so smart,
There's none like pretty Sally.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
As if a woman of education bought things because she wanted 'em.