Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution—it is called pregnancy.
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.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
Women are more frequently charming than men, because they are less self-conscious.
It is a woman looking out to see if the weather is good enough to hang out her wash.
What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.
Only by being a man or woman for others does one become fully human.
I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognise.
I believe in loyalty. When a woman reaches a certain age she likes, she should stick with it.
The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
Women cannot increase their fecundity by taking more mates; men can.