Abigail Adams:

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

Adrienne Rich:

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

Adrienne Rich:

Life on the planet is born of woman.

Amy Johnson:

Had I been a man, I might have explored the Poles or climbed Mount Everest, but as it was, my spirit found outlet in the air.

aviator

Anna Garlin Spencer:

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement in a manner that would be amusingly absurd were it not so monstrously unjust and socially harmful.

Woman's Share in Social Culture, 1912

Anna Garlin Spencer:

The friendship between a man and a woman which does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life long experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in lifelong friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to wed, to make such a three cornered comradeship a permanent success.

Anna Garlin Spencer:

A successful woman preacher was once asked "what special obstacles have you met as a woman in the ministry?" "Not one," she answered, "except the lack of a minister's wife."

Anna Garlin Spencer:

No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems.

Woman's Share in Social Culture, 1912

Anna Quindlen:

Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

"A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband."

(on the term "housewife")

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain the altar fire -- and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period -- has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet.

Charlotte Whitton:

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

Coco Chanel:

A woman has the age she deserves.

Dorothy Thompson:

A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

Campaign behavior for wives: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Lean back in the parade car so everybody can see the president.

Elizabeth Dole:

Women share with men the need for personal success, even the taste of power, and no longer are we willing to satisfy those needs through the achievements of surrogates, whether husbands, children, or merely role models.

Emma Goldman:

Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.

Erma Bombeck:

We've got a generation now who were born with semiequality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attache' cases and our three piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.

Faith Whittlesey:

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.

Faith Whittlesey:

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.

George Carlin:

Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.

George Santayana:

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Persons and Places: The Middle Span, 1945

George Santayana:

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.

The Life of Reason, 1905-1906

Gloria Steinem:

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

Harriet Beecher Stowe:

So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis:

I am a woman above everything else.

Jane Austen:

History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all - it is very tiresome. (spoken by Catherine Morland in 'Northanger Abbey')

Katharine Hepburn:

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

Kathryn Hughes:

Women do not always have to write about women, or gay men about gay men. Indeed, something good and new might happen if they did not.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:

Well behaved women rarely make history.

Louisa May Alcott:

When women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do; then they act upon it, and if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it; if it fails, they generously give her the whole.

in Little Women

Louise Otto:

The history of all times, and of today especially, teaches that ... women will be forgotten if they forget to think about themselves.

Margaret Atwood:

Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings. To me it's the latter, so I sign up.

Margaret Mead:

Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.

Margaret Sanger:

A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.

Margaret Thatcher:

If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.

Mary Wollstonecraft:

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

Maureen Reagan:

I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Woman is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacity.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

There is no occasion for women to consider themselves subordinate or inferior to men.

Pat Schroeder:

When people ask me why I am running as a woman, I always answer, "What choice do I have?"

Pearl S. Buck:

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

Robert A. Heinlein:

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

Robert Frost:

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

Sarah Grimke:

It would be as wise to set up an accomplished lawyer to saw wood as a business as to condemn an educated and sensible woman to spend all her time boiling potatoes and patching old garments. Yet this is the lot of many a one who incessantly stitches and boils and bakes, compelled to thrust back out of sight the aspirations which fill her soul.

Sigmund Freud:

Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, I have not been able to answer... the great question that has never been answered: what does a woman want?

Simone de Beauvoir:

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

Susan B. Anthony:

Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.

Tennesse Claflin:

The history of woman is the history of the continued and universal oppression of one sex by the other. The emancipation of woman is her restoration to equal rights and privileges with man.

Unknown:

Some leaders are born women.

Virginia Woolf:

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Virginia Woolf:

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Virginia Woolf:

Why are women ... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Vita Sackville-West:

I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong.

Walt Whitman:

In the faces of men and women I see God.