Gerda Lerner Quotes

I find it extraordinary that contemporary dramatists don't find women interesting. Women are rarely, if ever, the central dramatic engine; they're there as an adjunct, and that hasn't changed at all.

Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out.

There aren't good roles for women: the female parts aren't developed: the women are serving the men.

Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention.

Feminism justified female 'victim power' by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world.

There will never be any really great women writers in the theatre, because women do not know as much as men.

Half the world is full of women, but it's rare to hear a narrative that doesn't speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man's daughter. A man's wife.

It is frustrating that religion in general includes components that treat women as a support system for a man rather than a leader or equal player in the relationship.

I was used to being the only woman in everything... I didn't even think about it. Men were my role models - there's nothing wrong with that.

Women all live a double standard, but this is actually sort of a beautifully grotesque parody of it. There's a weird kind of joy that I have in seeing [Hillary Clinton] trounce this essence of male bullshit.

Women have to define themselves in the eyes of men. They have to fight for their rights, especially in a society that will pretend that there is no fight or no battle, that it's a cliché, that feminists are reactionary, all these things.

Man's world' and 'woman's place' have confronted each other since Scylla first faced Charybdis. ... if women have only a place, clearly the rest of the world must belong to someone else and, therefore, in default of God, to men.

I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology.

For an author to show that only traditional male power and place matter is to discount and belittle the hard and complex lives of our peers and our ancestresses.

It is of very doubtful value to enlist the gifts of a woman into fields that have been defined as male; it frightens the men, unsexes the women, and muffles and distorts the contribution women could make.

I don't know if I have any particular views about women in positions of power, though I do think it's more difficult for women, particularly in a Medieval setting. They have the additional problem that they're a woman and people don't want them in a position of power in an essentially patriarchal society.

Most executives are male, so it's always sort of their vision of stuff. I'm constantly fighting against that even when I play the wife or the girlfriend or the best friend. I always try my hardest to bring as much layering in and not make things stereotypical, but it's hard.

I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.

As long as male behavior is taken to be the norm, there can be no serious questioning of male traits and behavior. A norm is by definition a standard for judging; it is not itself subject to judgment.

In the USA there is no female equivalent to god.

At least through most of the 1960s, I basically lived in a man's world, hardly speaking to a woman all day except to the secretaries. But I was almost totally unaware of myself as an oddity and had no comprehension of the difficulties faced by working women in our organization and elsewhere.

When women are in positions of power it's a hard place to be, especially when that position involves bossing men around.

Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

In a lot of TV shows out there, the women are the weak ones, and the men are the strong ones.