Mary Shelley Quotes

It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weaknesses.

I was frustrated in general with the way women are always portrayed. And it's always through a man's eyes.

Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out.

I'll do shoes for the lady who lunches, but it would be, like, a really nasty lunch, talking about men.

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

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

Control of females is mandatory for a successful, civilized, humane and compassionate society

The GOP will not be satisfied until women are barefoot, pregnant and back home by 5 o'clock P.M. to cook dinner.

Since a woman must wear chains, I would have the pleasure of hearing 'em rattle a little.

But as to women, who can penetrate the real sufferings of their she condition? Man's very sympathy with their estate has much of selfishness and more suspicion. Their love, their virtue, beauty, education, but form good housekeepers, to breed a nation.

The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

The nature of women's oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children - we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.

The older we women grow, the more clearly we see what men really are: hypocrites, boasters, he-goats. The older men grow, the more they doll us up with every perfection.

I get quite disappointed that we're still telling stories that I think are problematic in terms of what they're saying about women.

Woman: the peg on which the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch and the sinner his justification.

I don't know if I have any particular views about women in positions of power, though I do think it's more difficult for women, particularly in a Medieval setting. They have the additional problem that they're a woman and people don't want them in a position of power in an essentially patriarchal society.

Man is a question; woman is an answer. The mistake women make today is to offer themselves as answers before being questioned.

I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.

Women do kids. Women do cooking. Women doing everything. And yet, their position in society is totally unacceptable.

There aren't good roles for women: the female parts aren't developed: the women are serving the men.

Women are oppressed in the east, in the west, in the south, in the north. Women are oppressed inside, outside home, a woman is oppressed in religion, she is oppressed outside religion.

A woman who does not become the slave of just one man becomes the slave of all men.

Women will never be as successful as men because they have no wives to advise them.

I've been writing about misogyny for 20 years and trying to understand what femininity means for my entire career.