the treatment of women Quotes

“Now father and son could rest. There was a woman coming to the house. Never again would Wang Lung have to rise summer and winter at dawn to light the fire. He could lie in his bed and wait, and he also would have a bowl of water brought to him, and if the earth were fruitful there would be tea leaves in the water. ”

“She talks of the pain, grief, and horror of the past four years; of learning to cope with being the wife of a man so violent and unpredictable his touch made her skin crawl and of thinking, until quite recently, that she’d finally managed to do that. And then, finally, of how my appearance had forced her to realize she hadn’t learned to cope at all.”

“I’m not going to sit here and listen to you tell me that it’s okay for August to hit her because she’s his wife. Or that it’s not his fault because he’s insane. If he’s insane, that’s all the more reason she should stay away.”

“Let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers.”

“Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance [...] But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten, and flung about the room.”

“Yet to this day she regretted not having completed the course and received her diploma—“just to prove”—as she had told a friend, “that I once succeeded at something.” Instead, she had met and married Herb […].”

“Does it occur to you, that the girl has some feelings?”

“It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?”

“Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. ”

“It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”

“Well, the matter is, sir, that you can’t take a girl up like that as if you were picking up a pebble on the beach.”

“You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll”

“Thou want’st a rough pash and the shoots that I have, To be full like me: yet they say we are Almost as like as eggs; women say so, That will say anything but were they false As o’er-dyed blacks, as wind, as waters, false As dice are to be wish’d by one that fixes No bourn ‘twixt his and mine, yet were it true To say this boy were like me. Come, sir page, Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain!”

“Much of traditional religious imagery has represented women as inferior, even evil. It is only an enlightened spiritual worldview that reveals both men and women in all our true glory.”

“Women are still in emotional bondage as long as we need to worry that we might have to make a choice between being heard and being loved.”

“We are afraid to allow ourselves to blossom fully because of the general disapproval that fills our air whenever a ‘little lady’ forgets her place.”

“We don’t know how to be women because we were taught it was not OK to be girls. Our most natural impulses were thwarted and distorted.”

“...the more of us who understand the game and see through the lie and forge ahead in support of every other woman’s right to a passionate response to life, the more we will hasten the end of our jail term.”

“So I said, ‘Yes, I will go,’ though in my heart I will never understand why we women are always assigned the task of peacemaking. ‘I will go, but I will not forgive Ann Putnam. You cannot ask me to do that, husband’ I told him. And I wonder, now that I am here, how I can look on her face again without seeing the faces of all whom she destroyed. ”

“Tom clears his throat. “What I mean to say is, did something happen to you? Did he…are you quite all right?” […] “You want to know if I’m still chaste?” “If you want to put it so plainly, yes.” Now I see that […] He’s only concerned that I haven’t shamed the family somehow.”

“A sudden fear takes root […] conversations I’ve overhead in my father’s study—tales […] about the fate of an unescorted woman, overpowered by bad men, her life ruined forever.”

″[…] A man wants a woman who will make life easy for him. She should be attractive, well groomed, knowledgeable in music, painting, and running a house, but above all, she should keep his name above scandal and never call attention to herself.”

“Then, masking the pain in our hearts, we’d put on a smile and ask you, ‘How did the Assembly go today? Any decision about a rider to the peace treaty?’ And my husband would say, ‘What’s that to you? Shut up!’ And I’d shut up.”

Magistrate: “If you hadn’t shut up you’d have got a beating!” Lysistrata: “Well, that’s why I did shut up—then. But later on we began to hear about even worse decisions you’d made, and then we would ask, ‘Husband, how come you’re handling this so stupidly?’ And right away he’d glare at me and tell me to get back to my sewing if I didn’t want major damage to my head: ‘War shall be the business of menfolk,’ unquote.”

“After that we women decided to lose no more time, and to band together to save Greece. What was the point of waiting any longer? So, if you’re ready to listen in your turn as we give you good advice, and to shut up as we had to, we can put you on the right track.”

“Before now, and for quite some time, we maintained our decorum and suffered in silence whatever you men did, because you wouldn’t let us make a sound.”

“How could he be right, you sorry fool, when we were forbidden to offer advice even when your policy was wrong?”

“That’s quite a different story. When a man comes home he can quickly find a girl to marry, even if he’s a graybeard. But a woman’s prime is brief; if she doesn’t seize it, no one wants to marry her, and she sits at home looking for good omens.”

“It’s shocking, you know, that they’re lecturing the citizens now, and running their mouths—mere women!—about brazen shields. And to top it off they’re trying to make peace between us and the men of Sparta, who are no more trustworthy than a starving wolf.”

“If any man among us gives these women even the tiniest handhold, there’s no limit to what their nimble hands will do. Why, they’ll even be building frigates and launching naval attacks, cruising against us like Artemisia.”

“If you live long enough, you’ll get many surprises, yes sir! Well, Strymodorus, who in the world ever thought we’d hear that women, the blatant nuisance we’ve reared in our homes,now control the Sacred Image and occupy my Acropolis, And to top it all, with bolts and bars close off the citadel gates?”

“Well, sir, you shouldn’t lift your hand against your neighbors just anytime you feel like it. If you do, you’re going to end up with a black eye. You see, I’d rather be sitting modestly at home like a maiden, bothering no one here, stirring not a single blade of grass. But if anyone annoys me and rifles my nest, they’ll find a wasp inside.”

Magistrate: “You’ll manage the money?” Lysistrata: “What’s so strange about that? Don’t we manage the household finances for you already?” Magistrate: “That’s different.” Lysistrata: “How so?” Magistrate: “These are war funds!”

Cinesias: “And what a long time it’s been since you’ve celebrated Aphrodite’s holy mysteries. Won’t you come home?” Myrrhine: “I certainly will not, not until you men agree to a settlement and stop the war.”

“I remained on the ladder, looking at the figurine in my hand. You’re wrong, Aunt Josie, I thought. It’s not pride I’m feeling. It’s another sin. Worse than all the other ones, which are immediate, violent, and hot. This one sits inside you quietly and eats you from the inside out like the trichina worms the pigs get. It’s the Eighth Deadly Sin. The one God left out. Hope.”

“It wasn’t like this when Mamma was alive. Somehow she provided good meals all through the winter and still managed to have meat left in the cellar come spring. I am nowhere near as capable as my mother was, and if I ever forget it, I have Lou to remind me. Or Pa. Not that he says the sorts of things Lou does, but you can tell by the look on his face when he sits down to eat that he isn’t fond of mush day in and day out.”