Anna Julia Cooper Quotes

Growing up in Texas, you were either pretty or smart. Smart didn't get you very far, because there weren't too many job opportunities for women. I wondered why you couldn't be both.

Growing up, I was told I could be anything I wanted to be. There were no limitations restraining me just because I was a girl. Then I joined the military.

One of the interesting things about being a female police officer in the '60s is they really didn't have opportunities to do any serious police work - they filed, and they made coffee, and they were treated like secretaries.

... the majority of colored men do not yet think it worth while that women aspire to higher education.... The three R's, a littlemusic and a good deal of dancing, a first rate dress-maker and a bottle of magnolia balm, are quite enough generally to render charming any woman possessed of tact and the capacity for worshipping masculinity.

We didn't educate women, because the leaders then didn't think they were educable. That changed when a shortage of teachers developed, because men didn't get paid enough to teach school. Then men, who held the positions of power, sent women to teachers' colleges.

The only sexism involved in the Miers nomination is the administration's claim that once they decided they wanted a woman, Miers was the best they could do. Let me just say, if the top male lawyer in the country is John Roberts and the top female lawyer is Harriet Miers, we may as well stop allowing girls to go to law school.

There are not many good roles for women.

When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn't a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn't be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge.

...The men eyed her with the automatic mix of curiosity, lust, and aesthetic judgment they always gave young women, subject to object, the way you'd stare at an animal. She pretended not to notice. To remind them she was a person was too much effort. Objects bore no guilt.

This specter of the female politician, who abandons her family to neglect for the sake of passing bills in parliament, is just as complete an illusion of the masculine brain, as the other specter whom Sydney Smith laid by a joke,--the woman who would forsake an infant for a quadratic equation.

He shook his head. "The next time I hear a women going on about how neurotic men are, I'm going to remember this. You tell me you like my body, and what do I say? I say, thank you. Then I tell you I like yours and what do I hear? A long lists of grievances.

Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.

There were male colleges, and there were very few female colleges.

No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature.

It's acceptable for men to act the fool. When women try, they're considered aggressive and opinionated.

Gentlemen ... Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman?

I've known white Australian girls from wealthy families who were sent to posh private schools, who knew all of that stuff, and I think would recognise much in Jefferson's book. What I related to most strongly was the sexism and misogyny Margo Jefferson had to battle.

What is asserted by a man is an opinion; what is asserted by a woman is opinionated. A woman with ideas and the ability to express them is something of a social embarrassment, like an unhousebroken pet.

The noble woman is half a man, even a complete one. Only their imperfections make them women.

Why can't a woman be more like a man? Men are so honest, so thoroughly square; Eternally noble, historically fair; Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat. Why can't a woman be like that?

I never want anything more than what's fair. The problem is, I never want anything less either. In the old-boy school of business, if a woman walks away from the table with what's rightfully hers, the man feels screwed.

Every time a journalist will say: "Can women be funny? Can women be pilots? Can women be scientists?" It's less of a question and more of a statement after a while that makes you believe that maybe we can't. I think that's dangerous. I was really happy that I didn't have those barriers, but now I recognize the barriers of many other people.

It's always fascinating to me, one, when they like to throw President [Bill] Clinton's behavior in Secretary [Hillary] Clinton's face, I've never seen anything like it before in my entire career, of watching a woman have to defend the behavior of her husband, because she chose to make her marriage work. That is just outrageous.

There are so many actors that I've worked with that I'd like to work with again and there are so many girls. So often when you're up for a role, you're the only girl, and people think that a positive thing: "You get to be the only girl here!" That's not an exciting kind of idea to me.

Women are from their very infancy debarred those advantages with the want of which they are aftewards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them. So partial are men as to expect bricks when they afford no straw.