Quotes About Women

In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.

Shouldn't he want to know about something that has happened to his mother, that will happen to his wife, his sisters, his daughter and, I went on morosely, if ever he has an affair, even to his mistress?

I have now become something of an expert in the ways of "decisive" men. They are not firm, they just seem to be. Because they have a formula for everything, which they forcibly impose, they seem confident. But they cannot face the unexpected. They can be far less capable in a crisis than the seemingly fragile women they bully and are secretly afraid of.

You know the rules, he said. Unaccompanied women cannot sit in this section.

It was then that the myth of Islamic feminism—a contradictory notion, attempting to reconcile the concept of women's rights with the tenets of Islam—took root.

Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away.

Ever since Clarissa Harlow and Sophia Western—two modest and seemingly obedient daughters—refused to marry men they did not love, they changed the course of narrative and laid open to question the most basic institutions of their times, beginning with marriage.

They come from a long line of defiant heroines, including Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre. These women create the main complications of the plot, through their refusal to comply. They are more complicated than the later, more obviously revolutionary, heroines of the twentieth century, because they make no claims to be radical.

I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history--whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline.

It was my turn to speak. I told the stories of a few of the men we had come to honor. "Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman," I concluded. "It has always been up to us." Turning back to look at the old men sitting behind me on the stage, I believed this to be true.

Then a bloody war was fought to decide whether property rights extended to treating Blacks as chattel. Movements were launched by workers, farmers, and women who had experienced firsthand how one man's liberty too often involved their own subjugation. A depression came, and people learned that being left to your own devices could mean penury and shame.

Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.

There is no historically consistent justification for the exclusion of women from healing roles. Witches were attacked for being pragmatic, empirical and immoral. But in the 19th century the rhetoric reversed: Women became too unscientific, delicate and sentimental. The stereotypes change to suit male convenience— we don't, and there is nothing in our innate feminine nature to justify our present subservience.

If we want developed societies with women doctors, political leaders, teachers, bus drivers, and computer programmers, we will need qualified people to give loving care to their children. And there is no reason why every society should not enjoy such loving paid child care.

Their first target was not the peasant healer, but the better off, literate woman healer who competed for the same urban clientele as that of the university-trained doctors.

A movement that recognizes our biological similarity but denies the diversity of our priorities cannot be a women's health movement, it can only be some women's health movement.

A Goddess religion should be out in the open, not underground as it is right now. A Goddess religion would cause men to look at women differently.

Our culture's official rejection of the Crone figure was related to rejection of women, particularly elder women. The gray-haired high priestesses, once respected tribal matriarchs of pre-Christian Europe, were transformed by the newly dominant patriarchy into minions of the devil. Through the Middle Ages, this trend gathered momentum, finally developing a frenzy that legally murdered millions of elder women from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries.

Until the Crone figure was suppressed, patriarchal religions could not achieve full control of men's minds. Such religions tended not only to ascetic rejection of the physical experiences of life, but also to fearful rejection of the Divine Old Woman, and by extension of old women generally.

Women so frequently turn out like their mothers I don't know why I was even surprised.

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world.

The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete.

How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn't much like to admit it, that God's world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women.