Quotes by great women writers

I never warmed to the idea of one day being singled out for women of the world. It feels like tokenism to half of humanity for a battle women fight daily (not to become men, to burn bras, certainly not to hate men) but simply to live as different but equal humans alongside men, as our equal mates and friends on earth.

Consider this: globally, women still struggle for equal pay for equal work (women earn up to 20 per cent less than men), some 736 million women globally (one in three women) are subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, that a quarter of women in the developing world don’t have access to education, that though women comprise more than 50 per cent of the world’s population they only own one per cent of the world’s wealth, that women and girls perform long hours of unpaid domestic work, that women are outnumbered four to one in legislatures globally. (Source: Peace Corps).

Maybe we need March 8 to remind ourselves how far we’ve come and to remind men (many of whom are our champions) that we intend to be included. So, in honouring International Women’s Day 2024, I’m reproducing quotes by great women writers whose work I never tire of; women writers who nudge the human race towards equality, sometimes with humour, other times with rancour, but always with a piercing clarity, reminding us that women’s rights are human rights, starting with Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always, keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now, marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support, but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”

—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“The assumption that the men are the ones who matter and that the women exist only in relation to them is so silent and under-running that ever we never picked it up until recently. But after all, look at what we read. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Freud and Erikson; I read de Montherlant and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like Miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn’t question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world. I read or read about, without much question, the Hindus and the Jews, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Seneca, Cato, St Paul, Luther, Sam Johnson, Rousseau, Swift ... well, you understand.

For years, I didn’t take it personally. So now it is difficult for me to call others bigots when I am one myself. I tell people at once to warn them that I suffer from deformation of character. But the truth is I am sick unto death of four thousand years of males telling me how rotten my sex is. Especially, it makes me sick when I look around and see such rotten men and such magnificent women, all of whom have a sneaking suspicion that the four thousand years of remarks are correct.”

—Marilyn French, The Women’s Room

“If they want to flirt or initiate a friendship, women should carefully avoid giving the impression they are taking the initiative; men do not like tomboys, nor blue stockings, nor thinking women; too much audacity, culture, intelligence, or character frightens them. In most novels, as George Eliot observes, it is the dumb, blond heroine who outshines the virile brunette; and in The Mill on the Floss, Maggie tries in vain to reverse the roles; in the end, she dies and it is blond Lucy who marries Stephen. In The Last of the Mohicans, vapid Alice wins the hero’s heart and not valiant Cora; in Little Women kindly Jo is only a childhood friend for Laurie; he vows his love to curly-haired and insipid Amy. To be feminine is to show oneself as weak, futile, passive, and docile. The girl is supposed not only to primp and dress herself up but also to repress her spontaneity and substitute for it the grace and charm she has been taught by her elder sisters. Any self-assertion will take away from her femininity and her seductiveness.”

—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else.

You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

—Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word made flesh. And sometimes it happened for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day, and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know, too, why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”

—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“If we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come.”

—Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

This page celebrates women and their writing every week. I’ve delighted in supporting my fellow women writers, knowing that when we all support one another’s work, the tide rises, and we all rise with it.