Bell Hooks Quotes

I'm not that big a fan of marriage as an institution and I don't know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings.

Women—one half the human race at least—care fifty times more for a marriage than for a ministry.

The common man thinks that the marriage is like appointing one to do his work. The husband thinks so! The husband’s family thinks so. Every one thinks that a girl is coming to the family to do work. Even the girl’s family trains the girl to do the household work

In marriage, a woman becomes the weaker sex, even if her husband doesn't want her to be. This happens because of the way society has built the institution.

Sex was for men. Marriage, like lifeboats, was for women and children.

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.

I have noticed... that men usually leave married women alone and are inclined to treat all wives with respect. This is no great credit to married women.

Women will never be as successful as men because they have no wives to advise them.

While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.

Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention.

A woman's place in public is to sit beside her husband, be silent, and be sure her hat is on straight.

Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions.

Men never get free from morality, only women.

In the '50s, too many women, even though they were very smart, they tried to make the man feel that he was brainier. It was a sad thing.

I think, especially growing up in the South, we are taught that women are supposed to be soft, gentle and kind of just goes along with everything and is submissive.

Women are a strange thing. Like watches, houses, and cars, you really only need one at any moment in your life (French men disagree).

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

There is one group of people - social conservatives, religious conservatives - who honestly feel that women's place is in the home and that wives should submit to their husbands.

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, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weaknesses.

Mr. DeMille's theory of sexual difference was that marriage is an artificial state for women. The want to be taken, ruled, raped. That was his theory.

We do what we see and what we're told. If we haven't been raised in a family or in a community where women are treated as full human beings and men don't have to be superior anymore, we continue to think that it's not only natural but inevitable.

I think gender inequality is a problem that goes back a long, long time. In human society, as a whole, women have tended to have a kind of inferior position - very often combined with playing up women as great role [models].

Women can always think as much as they like, an' they could get up on a platform an' talk till they bust, as long as they didn't want the world to be made no better, an' they wouldn't be thought unwomanly. It's soon as a woman wants any practical good done that she is considered a unwomanly creature.

Anne Hutchinson’s preaching to both women and men in her home is a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God, nor fitting for her sex.

The dogma of woman's complete historical subjection to men must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created in the human mind.