Quotes About Gender

I remember thinking I wished it was a boy, because boys can't have children. I thought, "I gave birth to a little girl who's going to have to go through this, that poor little thing." I had always thought boys had it better than women. All my life, you know? And that whole experience made me feel even more so—that it's the girls who get punished, the girls who suffer through all of this stuff, and the girls who can't talk about it.

She must have been French, because she had more hair under her arm than I did. 

The unexpected makings of a smile tugged at her lips. Here he was, hurt and wounded, and he was concerned about his horse. How very like a man.

Nature has given woman so much power that the law cannot afford to give her more.

It was "The devil of a Sex." It was a cursed thing, he said, that a man could be neither happy with them, nor without them. Devil's baits was another of his compliments to us. He hardly mentioned my name.

If she be a woman, and love me, I shall surely catch her once tripping: for love was ever a traitor to its harbourer: and Love within, and I without, she will be more than a woman, as the poet says, or I less than man, if I succeed not.

Upon my word, I believe, you men think, it is no matter for us women to have any consciences, so as we do but study your wills, and do our duty by you. Men look upon themselves as gods of the earth, and on us women but as their ministring servants! — But I did not expect that you would be so unreasonable.

It is true, my Lucy, that we young women are too apt to be pleased with the admiration pretended for us by the other Sex. But I have always endeavour'd to keep down any foolish pride of this sort, by such considerations as these: That flattery is the vice of men: That they seek to raise us, in order to lower us, and in the end to exalt themselves on the ruins of the pride they either hope to find or inspire:

No-body, it seems, thinks of an husband for Miss Barnevelt. She is sneeringly spoken of rather as a young fellow, than as a woman; and who will one day look out for a wife for herself. One reason indeed, she every-where gives, for being satisfied with being a woman; which is, that she cannot be married to a WOMAN.

We always blame the woman when a man falls in love, as though no man had the courage of his inclinations.

A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

A man might not like it, but men had so many advantages that it didn't matter if occasionally they had to do stuff they didn't think was really fair.

And before you go labeling me an aggressive feminist, let me set you straight on that. I love being a woman. I wouldn't want to be anything else. But I want to be treated fairly and equally....

Marriage has taught me that women are the only ones who apologize.

Indeed, the exigencies of female tenderness are such as virtually to guarantee the man's absolution by the woman--not on her terms, but on his. Moreover, the man's confession of fear or failure tends to mystify the woman's understanding not only of the power dimensions of the relationship between herself and this particular man, but of the relations of power between men and women in general.

The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women.

for. We have feminist centers and feminist programs because we do not have feminist universities: that

I was profoundly shy growing up, and my sense of human sociality was of something from which I was barred: almost like a room with a locked door for which I did not have the key. Perhaps that was it: gender seemed like a key to a lock, which I did not have, or which I did not fit. Looking back, I think I decided to self-girl when I went to university, as I was exhausted by not fitting or not fitting in.

Misogyny was born of fear of women.

You're a teenage boy. I have boobs. What part of the equation is missing?

Macy: "In Truth," I said, "there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth." Wes: "How do you win?" he asked Macy: "That," I said, "is such a boy question.

All the bitchy girls in the world are just a training ground for what men can do to you.

She's a baby, Maggie told me. Babies wear pastels. Says who? I asked. ... Society. The same society, I might add, that dictates that little girls should always be sugar and spice and everything nice, which engourages them to not be assertive. And that, in turn, then leads to low self-esteem, which can lead to eating disorders and increased tolerance and acceptance of domestic, sexual, and substance abuse.

Maybe if I'd agreed to do the debutante thing like she wanted. Or taken up pageants instead of riding jump bikes with a bunch of grungy boys. I'd always tell her, why can't I do both? Who says you have to be either smart or pretty, or into girly stuff or sports? Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know?