Susan Straight Quotes

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more.

I decided that if I want to write about a female hero in the 1920s, I'm going to have to give her all the advantages I can because she has serious disadvantages in being a woman. I wasn't going to have her cowed or overawed by class, so she had to be titled.

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.

In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

England is the paradise of women, the purgatory of men, and the hell of horses.

I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.

Women are at once the guardians and the well-spring of the world's faith, morality, and tenderness; and if ever they are degraded to a commonplace level with men, this fine essential quality will be impaired, and their weakness will have to beg and follow where now it guides and controls.

Do women compete for the favours of men? Yes. They've spent 5,000 years competing.

Women's roles are diminished for obvious reasons. It's the men whose names are on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and who were generals and soldiers.

As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice.

It's possible that you have been told a time or 10 that you don't appreciate how tough your elders had it. It's true that, if you had been coming of age back in, say, 1960, you would probably be feeling more restricted, if only because you were doomed to spend your days in a skirt, nylon stockings and girdle.

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

In the 18th century, most people believed that God had ordained specific and different spheres for men and women relative to their roles in life. Some people still feel that way.

My grandmother grew up in a 19th-century world, and my daughter has grown up in a 21st-century world, and some issues, problems, dilemmas that these women face have not changed.

How can you respect a culture if the woman has to walk several steps behind her man, has to stay in the kitchen and keep her mouth shut?

I don't think men realize that when a woman walks out every single day, there's an unconscious way we cater to making some man comfortable. That's our experience.

I love my sons, I love my husband, and I love my country. But in kingdoms of men, there are few - if any - choices for women. Or the choices are such that there is no greater pain than having to choose.

I'm really interested in women of different generations... I think there is no one female experience.

My father's generation of Saudi men are more liberal than the men of my generation. But with women, it's the opposite.

We're really taught to be followers from a very young age - men lead and women follow.

We live in a culture that does not encourage women to be epic heroes of their own Big Stories but the mothers and lovers and wives and mistresses and muses and personal assistants, the femme fatales and fantasies and manic pixie dream girls, in someone else's Big Story, and this someone else is usually a dude.