quotations about women
When a hen cackles, she's either layin' or lyin'.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Be delicate, little wife-woman. Never be without your veil, without many veils. Veil yourself in a thousand veils, all shimmering and glittering with costly textures and precious jewels. Never let the last veil be drawn. Against the morrow array yourself with more veils, ever more veils, veils without end. Yet the many veils must not seem many. Each veil must seem the only one between you and your hungry lover who will have nothing less than all of you. Each time he must seem to get all, to tear aside the last veil that hides you. He must think so. It must not be so. Then there will be no satiety, for on the morrow he will find another last veil that has escaped him.
JACK LONDON
The Valley of the Moon
If I could remake the world, I'd banish women, send them away with all their trouble. Then children would come from a purer source.
EURIPIDES
Medea
It is often asserted that as woman has always been man's slave--subject--inferior--dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition. This might have some weight had not the vast majority of men also been enslaved for centuries to kings and popes, and orders of nobility, who, in the progress of civilization, have reached complete equality.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
introduction, History of Woman Suffrage
The fear of women is the beginning of knowledge.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
We don't really have to go out of our way as parents to teach our kids how to respect men in the same way we do women because they're already growing up in a world where men are people and women are pretty toys.
CHRISSY BOBIC
"10 Ways Millennial Feminists Are Raising Sons Who Respect Women", Romper, February 9, 2016
Woman is like a diamond with many facets: the imagination of man, the light which produces from them innumerable permutations and combinations of color. The character of woman is comparatively simple, but man imagines much and attributes it to her.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.
HENRIK IBSEN
From Ibsen's Workshop
Great ladies ... are like the best sauces -- it is better not to know how they are made.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
I am not one of those who believe -- broadly speaking -- that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.
JANE ADDAMS
address before the Chicago Political Equality League, 1897
I'm a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me, because of the image they've made of me -- and that I've made of myself -- as a sex symbol. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman's and I can't live up to it.
MARILYN MONROE
attributed, Marilyn, 1962
Men are often like that. They grow bored with simple goodness and want a woman who is dangerous, a challenge.
SUSANNE ALLEYN
Game of Patience
Prejudice, in which there is truth, does cast, throughout the world but especially in France, a great stigma on the woman with whom no man has been willing to share the blessings or endure the ills of life. Now, there comes to all unmarried women a period when the world, be it right or wrong, condemns them on the fact of this contempt, this rejection. If they are ugly, the goodness of their characters ought to have compensated for their natural imperfections; if, on the contrary, they are handsome, that fact argues that their misfortune has some serious cause. It is impossible to say which of the two classes is most deserving of rejection. If, on the other hand, their celibacy is deliberate, if it proceeds from a desire for independence, neither men nor mothers will forgive their disloyalty to womanly devotion, evidenced in their refusal to feed those passions which render their sex so affecting. To renounce the pangs of womanhood is to abjure its poetry and cease to merit the consolations to which mothers have inalienable rights.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
The woman born to physical subjection and degradation can never seek or use knowledge as her birthright. Never till she holds her sex in honor, as man holds his, can she be his equal, even in her own realm.
MARY CLEMMER AMES
Outlines of Men, Women, and Things
Women are seldom silent. Their beauty is forever speaking for them.
PHILIP MOELLER
Helena's Husband
Women have traditionally been either put on pedestals or damned as the source of all sexual temptation and sin. These are two sides of the same coin, since both place women in a nonhuman role. Playboy has opposed these warped sexual values and, in so doing, helped women step down from their pedestals and enjoy their natural sexuality as much as men.
HUGH HEFNER
Playboy, January 1974
Almost all women will give a sympathizing hearing to men who are in love. Be they ever so old, they grow young again with that conversation, and renew their own early times.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Philip
I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
TONI MORRISON
Newsweek, March 30, 1981
Women use lovers as they do cards; they play with them a while, and when they have got all they can by them, throw them away, call for new ones, and then perhaps lose by the new all they got by the old ones.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"