She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance – a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering...

Oh! What honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole Kingdom – now recovered and made safe by...

charmingly” with Miss Howe. Many women did.

Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said — and I...

It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.

I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser.

a woman suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer whose pregnancy worsens the underlying pathology may be denied a medically indicated therapeutic abortion under the statute because death is not certain.

In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent, obedient, and beautiful. You can always get...

An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.

That she was now more tired and forgetful, while able to do three times what she had been able to do when she was somewhat less tired and forgetful but also stressed, guilty, grouchy, and...

Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher’s stone or the grand panacea: and the...

Henry glared at Anastasia. ‘You quit planning on a rich husband, Anastasia. You’re gonna get rich on your own. You and me, if we want husbands, fine. But we won’t need them. Like our mothers....

Although I believe identity politics ‘”produces limited but real empowerment for its participants,” it is important to note that it contains significant problems: first, its essentialist tendency; second, its fixed _we-they_ binary position; third, its...

I have seen enormous changes. I have not seen enough change. I, too, can hardly wait.

Whatever is deeply, essentially female–the life in a woman’s expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin–is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease....

The surgeons’ market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women’s faces or bodies that social change won’t cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

Freedom, or individual liberty, was a basic premise of the Spanish anarchist tradition. “Individual sovereignty” is a prime tenet of most anarchist writing; the free development of one’ s individual potential is one of the...

So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize foot-binding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of...

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to...

I don’t understand all the nuances of the women’s movement. But I do understand that there are feminists who want to challenge the dominant paradigm, not only of patriarchy, but of where the original wealth...

It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is. … That was the...

…Mary, fresh with feminist appropriations, has the potential to undergird women’s reformations.

I am a warrior in the time of women warriors; the longing for justice is the sword I carry.

I hate to say it, but all that stuff they try to tell you about women being empowered and how it’s fine for a woman to ask a man out, well, it’s crap.’ I look...

The lipstick is a dark, dark red. The kind Hollywood stars wear. Not a shade good girls in Davisburg wear to the movies. I try it on anyway and gaze at my reflection in the...

We heard of this woman who was out of control. We heard that she was led by her feelings. That her emotions were violent. That she was impetuous. That she violated tradition and overrode convention....

Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins...

When it comes to sexuality, romantic love plays a large part in feminine sexual scripts. Research suggests that women make sense of sexual encounters in terms of the amount of intimacy experienced; love becomes a...

People say to me, ‘Has being a woman helped or hindered your career?’ And the answer is yes.

I like being a woman in a man’s world. After all, men can’t wear dresses, but we can wear the pants.

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a...

Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that...

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance”.

A self-made man” – not of woman born but alchemized, through sheer force of will, by the man himself. This is what I want to be. I want to be a self-made woman. I want...

All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.

What’s that she’s fiddling with when she ought to be listening? I do believe it’s a pair of tweezers. She’s plucking the hairs off her arms. Off her arms, of all places. Not even legs...

something about giving himself over to a woman was worse than having lunch with the devil…

Marxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. It’s been hard to say why. What I’ve learned from women’s experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange...

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking,...

I’m not a concept. Too many guys think I’m a concept or I complete them or I’m going to make them alive, but I’m just a fucked up girl who is looking for my own...

…the consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

On ladies’ nights they watch frozen-faced while their men embrace and fool about commenting to each other that they are all overgrown boys. Of the love of fellows they know nothing. They cannot love each...

But a girl’s love is not a woman’s love; above all, it is not a modern woman’s love. I, at thirty, cannot accept your views, adopt your methods, and believe your heresies, as you might...

Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.

Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.

While parenthood served as no disadvantage at all to men, there was evidence of a substantial “motherhood penalty”. Mothers received only half as many callbacks as their identically qualified childless counterparts.

It never occurs to one to think whether she is pretty or ugly. One just surrenders to her charm.

When we consider that women are treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.

If I am capable of loving you Lord MacCaulay, of devoting myself to you, it will never be under the terms to which other women submit, for I am battle-born – a female warrior sworn...