Helene Deutsch Quotes

To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.

People are thrown off by someone who looks feminine, but is also strong. It's not that pretty girls aren't smart, it's that women aren't strong.

And then also I think it's harder for women because comedy is so opposite of being ladylike.

The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.

Being a woman has only bothered me in climbing trees.

One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category.

There is a sense that women are more anchored than men in our society.

I can't write - I can't think like a woman... it's not natural, but I've tried.

Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.

Never expect women to be sincere, so long as they are educated to think that their first aim in life is to please.

She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.

When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

The male society is letting the men think of the women as something pretty and soft and that kind of thing. So I just wanted to show what we were. Women are the ones who actually created the human race. I mean without us bringing up the new generation, there wouldn't be a human race.

[Women] ... is nothin' but little girls in long skirts, and their hair done up.

Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.

There's a reason why trainspotters are not girls, there's a reason why there's the myth of the slightly autistic male genius, there's a reason why Gertrude Stein believed that her self-presentation was male. One could argue that was Susan Sontag also. The things that we associate with femaleness are not the single-minded, exclusive pursuit of a vocation, whether it be art or anything else. It is not a model that is widespread in our culture, it's not something we think of for women.

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly

Women do feel like they're in a box. Society, Hollywood, some men-they want to wrap women up in a neat little package.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

Any woman who wishes to smash into the world of men isn't very feminine.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

'Single' is usually applied to women as though they are a problem to be fixed.

I think that there's a tendency for actors who play strong women to have them take on all the worst characteristics of men, to become cold and detached and hardened.

I have a problem with people saying feminine means anti-feminist, and I think it's counter-productive to immediately associate anything 'girly' with vanity or stupidity.

I think the fallacy is to think that Women's Liberation meant that men and women would become interchangeable. That has not happened, and most men and women would not want it to happen.