Women

Charolette Whitton:

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Madonna (Madonna Ciccone):

I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.

Marya Mannes

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive.

Jane Galvin Lewis:

You don’t have to be anti-man to be pro-woman.

Marya Mannes:

Women are repeatedly accused of taking things personally. I cannot see any other honest way of taking them.

Anne Bradstreet:

Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are.

Betty Friedan:

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

Alice Walker:

Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.

Ding Ling:

When will it no longer be necessary to attach special weight to the word “woman” and raise it specially?

Dolores Hitchens:

If you are going to generalize about women, you’ll find yourself up to here in exceptions.

Eva Figes:

There is a hidden fear that somehow, if they are only given a chance, women will suddenly do as they have been done by.

Gloria Steinem:

We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

Helen Reddy:

I am woman, hear me roar / In numbers too big to ignore, / And I know too much / To go back and pretend.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:

Well-behaved women rarely make history.

Irina Dunn:

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Iris Murdoch:

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you’re important and nice but you take second place all the same.

Ivy Baker Priest:

Any woman who has a career and a family automatically develops something in the way of two personalities, like two sides of a dollar bill, each different in designHer problem is to keep one from draining the life from the other.

Jill Ruckelshaus:

It occurred to me when I was thirteen and wearing white gloves and Mary Janes and going to dancing school, that no one should have to dance backward all their lives.

Gloria Steinem:

If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?

Julie M. Lippmann:

I’m all for women myself. I believe they’re the comin’ man.

Louisa May Alcott:

Now we are expected to be as wise as men who have had generations of all the help there is, and we scarcely anything.

Margaret Culkin Banning:

Sentences that begin with “all women” are never, never true.

Marya Mannes:

Long before Playboy, Woman was not the sum of her parts:

her parts were her sum.

Maya Angelou:

I’m a woman / Phenomenally. / Phenomenal woman, / That’s me.

Patricia Schroeder:

I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.

Pearl S. Buck:

The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and women.

Rita Mae Brown:

Consider the “new” woman. She’s trying to be Pollyanna Borgia, clearly a conflict of interest. She’s supposed to be a ruthless winner at work and a bundle of nurturing sweetness at home.

Robin Morgan:

Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We’re not inherently anything but human.

Shirley Williams:

Society, while willing to make room for women, is not willing to make changes for them.

Shelagh Delaney:

Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old.

Anais Nin:

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.