quotations about women
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
These women are always the same; they will, and they will not; their Yes so often merely a cowardly sort of a No; and their No, a coy sort of a Yes. One should be a diplomatist to understand them.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Altavona: Fact and Fiction From My Life in the Highlands
The most important thing in knowing that women are necessary is knowing that men are necessary too.
TAMARA ANGELA GRANT
"Women Are Necessary...", Huffington Post, March 9, 2017
The fear of women is the beginning of knowledge.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
GLORIA STEINEM
attributed, Quote Unquote
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
No woman is all good or all bad, entirely "pure" or entirely sexual, or just a mother or daughter or student or teacher or business woman or sex worker. Newsflash: It's 2017, and women can be lots of things at once. Refusing to understand this fact contributes to our culture's insistence on defining women in terms of their relationships with other people.
JULIA O'DONNELL
"Women are so much more than just sisters, mothers, wives", The Badger Herald, March 14, 2017
Great ladies ... are like the best sauces -- it is better not to know how they are made.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
Affection with some women amounts almost to disease.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Why couldn't I be more like other girls my age? Take Mrs. Brown's niece. She spent every waking hour sizing up this beau or that, stitching tea towels and petticoats and putting aside a little each month for a set of Spode Buttercup dishes.
KIRBY LARSON
Hattie Ever After
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
Over a lifetime of dealing with difficult women, I have learned it is often better to give into their demands immediately.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
When Demons Walk
Never mix your women.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
At some point in their career, it becomes obvious that women are more under-promoted than men are in the same field. There are many reasons as to why it happens and unfortunately, the result of this phenomenon actually perpetuates the problem. It's a cycle that's hard to break.
KAREN FRATTI
"Women Are More Under-Promoted Than Men & That's A Problem For Several Reasons", Romper, April 3, 2017
What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
It would take a hell of a wife to beat no wife at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
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
I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
GEORGE MEREDITH
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
You gotta respect a girl who realizes that romantic relationships are built on lies and goes to town with it!
PETE ABRAMS
"That Which Redeems", Sluggy Freelance, August 26, 2004
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