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.
It is a woman looking out to see if the weather is good enough to hang out her wash.
England is the paradise of women, the purgatory of men, and the hell of horses.
The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
This woman was as necessary to his life as eating and drinking.
History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
What a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.
A woman should be good for everything at home, but abroad good for nothing.
Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.
Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.