Sourced and curated.

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.

The Subjection of Women · 1869

★ 4.5

Magazine

Robert Mueller

1957

★ 4.3

Historical literature

Your great glory is not to be inferior to what God has made you, and the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticizing you.

Pericles

Thucydides, Funeral Oration, History of the Peloponnesian War · 430 BC

★ 3.7

Woman's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customers, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

1860

★ 3.7

Women have been called queens a long time, but the kingdom given them isn't worth ruling.

Louisa May Alcott

1869

★ 3.7

Play

I don't know that women are always rewarded for being charming. I think they are usually punished for it!

Oscar Wilde

An Ideal Husband · 1895

★ 3.7

In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.

1776

★ 3.6

Patriotism in the female Sex is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honours and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Goverment from having held a place of Eminence...Yet all History and every age exhibit Instances of patriotick virtue in the female Sex; which considering our situation equals the most Heroick of yours.

The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.

Letter to John Adams, June 17, 1782 · 1782

★ 3.6

Essay · Political literature

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion that has breathed upon this earth, has degraded woman. There is not one that has not always made her subject to man.

The Subjection of Women · 1869

★ 3.6

Speech

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

1885

★ 3.6

Feminist literature

If God is male, then the male is God.

Mary Daly

Beyond God the Father · 1973

★ 3.6

Poem

From the first dawn of life unto the grave, Poor womankind's in every state a slave.

Sarah Egerton

1703

★ 3.5

Political literature

It is humbling to reflect, that in those countries in which the fondness for the mere persons of women is carried to the highest excess, they are slaves; and that their moral and intellectual degradation increases in direct proportion to the adoration which is paid to mere external charms.

Hannah More

1799

★ 3.5

What a misfortune it is to be born a woman!... Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show us the narrow limits, the Gothic structure, the impenetrable barriers of our prison.

Maria Edgeworth

1806

★ 3.5

Economic literature

The labour of women in the house, certainly enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1898

★ 3.5

Pamphlet · Political literature

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

James Connolly

1915

★ 3.5

Feminist literature

Men may have had their own very good reasons for bringing women up in servitude, but the soul of a servant is not an attractive thing, and one of the most infuriating aspects of women's constricted upbringing is that it has made them less attractive, even in the eyes of their constrictors, than they should have been. Man has twisted and pruned women out of all recognition and then not liked the results.

Janet Radcliffe Richards

The Sceptical Feminst · 1980

★ 3.5

Essay · Feminist literature

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

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 2.1

Poem

Wife and Servant are the same, But only differ in the name.

Mary Chudleigh

To the Ladies · 1703

★ 2.0

Essay

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?

Mary Astell

Some Reflections Upon Marriage · 1706

★ 2.0

Political literature · Feminist literature

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.

Mary Wollstonecraft

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 2.0

Religion is an all-important matter in a public school for girls. Whatever people say, it is the mother's safeguard, and the husband's. What we ask of education is not that girls should think, but that they should believe.

Napoleon Bonaparte

1807

★ 2.0

Essay · Political literature

The generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

The Subjection of Women · 1869

★ 2.0

Magazine

Florynce Kennedy

1973

★ 2.0

Whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives. But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken-and notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims we have it in our power not only to be free ourselves but to subdue our masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.

With the present system of education for girls any genius who happens to be born a woman can make no contribution to public happiness.

Letter to John Adams, 1776 · 1776

★ 1.9

Essay

Stendhal

1822

★ 1.9

Speech

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

1848

★ 1.9

A woman can hardly ever choose...she is dependent on what happens to her. She must take meaner things, because only meaner things are within her reach.

George Eliot

Felix Holt, the Radical · 1866

★ 1.9

Essay · Political literature

What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.

The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his—attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.

The Subjection of Women · 1869

★ 1.9

Novel · Magazine

Henry James

The Atlantic Monthly/Macmillan's Magazine · 1881

★ 1.9

Of my two "handicaps," being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.

Shirley Chisholm

Unbought and Unbossed · 1970

★ 1.9

Feminist literature

Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice.

Robin Morgan

1977

★ 1.9

Film · Animation (film) · Musical (film) · Animation · Musical

It's not right for a woman to read. Soon she starts getting ideas and thinking.

Gaston

Beauty and the Beast · 1991

★ 1.9

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

Our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination...rationalized by an attitude of "romantic paternalism" which, in practical effect, put women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

William J. Brennan, Jr.

Frontiero v. Richardson · 1973

★ 1.8

Essay

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.

Laura Mulvey

1975

★ 1.8

Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relationships with men, in their relationships with women, all men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.

Marilyn French

1977

★ 1.8

Scripture · Religious literature

Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for God's guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious, admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them.

Muhammad

The Quran, The Koran, 4:34 · 632

★ 1.2

It is really mortifying, sir, when a woman possessed of a common share of understanding considers the difference of education between the male and female sex, even in those families where education is attended to... Nay why should your sex wish for such a disparity in those whom they one day intend for companions and associates. Pardon me, sir, if I cannot help sometimes suspecting that this neglect arises in some measure from an ungenerous jealousy of rivals near the throne.