quotations about women
Women are slaves to their beauty.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Any woman may act the part of a coquette successfully who has the reputation without the scruples of modesty. If a woman passes the bounds of propriety for our sakes, and throws herself unblushingly at our heads, we conclude it is either from a sudden and violent liking, or from extraordinary merit on our parts, either of which is enough to turn any man's head who has a single spark of gallantry or vanity in his composition.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain fatally downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.
VLADIMIR LENIN
"The Tasks of the Working Women's Movement in the Soviet Republic", Collected Works
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Room of One's Own
The change needed to restore good feeling cannot be reached by remanding women to the spinning wheel, and the contentment of her grandmother, but by conceding to her every right which the spirit of the age demands. Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
introduction, History of Woman Suffrage
The government runs the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, so they must know a thing or two about satisfying women.
SCOTT ADAMS
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!
All the world's a stage, and it's a dead easy guess which sex has all the speaking parts.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
NORMAN MAILER
attributed, The Book of Poisonous Quotes
When women express darker emotions, they are told to calm down, that their emotions are simply the result of "their time of the month," or that the emotional frustration they feel is not based in a rational (i.e., masculine) worldview. While men's emotional expression is marginalized as feminine, women's emotional expression is infantilized. It is in this repressed emotional space that the alarming sense of being gaslighted can emerge for women.
MARK GREENE
"Women Are Better At Expressing Emotions, Right? Why It's Not That Simple", Yes Magazine, January 27, 2016
Whatever may be thought of "woman's sphere," it is certain that its boundaries have been steadily enlarged; that an increased liberty, not only of secular employments and civil rights, but also of social intercourse, has been accorded to her with increasing civilization; and that, so far from losing, either in the delicacy and refinement of her own character, or in the chivalric homage paid to her by man, she has gained in both respects in the same ratio in which she has been freed from the trammels of an unnatural conventionalism, and elevated to a position of real equality with the dominant sex.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
A good woman's arms round a man's neck is a lifebelt thrown out to him from heaven.
JEROME K. JEROME
"A Charming Woman"
There is such a thing as the wrong woman. She makes a man a fraction.... But the right woman! She multiplies a man.
HORACE HOLLEY
"The Genius"
A woman's heart is much like the moon, always changing but always has a man in it.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
A reproof entereth more into a woman of sense than an hundred compliments into a fool.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, February 19, 1937
Woman, thou art a river, deep and wide,
Of waters soft and sweet:
Alas! I've never reached the other side;
Though oft I've wet my feet!
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Epigram", Imogen and Other Poems
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Three Guineas
Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month that I can be myself.
ROSEANNE BARR
attributed, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Health Fair
If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
PLATO
The Republic
A man in love ... is the master, so it seems, but only if his lady friend permits it! The need to interchange the roles of slave and master for the sake of the relationship is never more clearly demonstrated than in the course of an affair. Never is the complicity between victim and executioner more essential. Even chained, down on her knees, begging for mercy, it is the woman, finally, who is in command ... the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the ground at her master's heels, is now really the god. The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling of her displeasure.
PAULINE RÉAGE
introduction, The Image