“I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.”
“The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.”
“The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.”
“If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.”
“I have always found women difficult. I don't really understand them. To begin with, few women tell the truth.”
“Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.”
“The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.”
“There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
“I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.”
“Women have no wilderness in them. They are provident instead content in the tight hot cell of their hearts. To eat dusty bread.”
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
“If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.”
“Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women it is simply a good excuse not to play football.”
“Women are a sisterhood. They make common cause in behalf of the sex; and, indeed, this is natural enough, when we consider the vast power that the law gives us over them.”
“Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
“To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.”
“Women are most fascinating between the ages of 35 and 40, after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass 40, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely.”
“To me the ''female principle'' is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.”
“Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man -- it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country.”
“A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless -- for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.”
“I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.”
“Eve is a twofold mystery.”
“Woman is the Nigger of the World.”
“Most women have no characters at all.”
“The Woman-Soul leadeth us upward and on!”
“The girl with a future avoids a man with a past.”
“I buy women shoes and they use them to walk away from me.”
“Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?”
“I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.”
“You don't know a woman until you have received a letter from her.”