Nora Ephron Quotes

Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women's movement that liberated us, however.

Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.

I'm thankful for the work that feminists like Gloria Steinem have done. I am a feminist, but the geography for women today is vastly different than it was in the '60s.

I owe nothing to Women's Lib.

It's a little bit late in the day for men to object that women are getting outside their proper sphere.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

Sisters, I ain't clear what you be after. If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it?

When I went to college in the 1970s, the Women's Liberation movement was all the buzz.

'The Feminine Mystique' goads me to gratitude that, thanks to forerunners like Betty Friedan, I've had the opportunity to pursue a career.

Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was sill scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!

As women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman's proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially.

Men ruled the roost and women played a subservient role [in the 1960s]. Working wives were a rarity, because their place was in the home, bringing up the kids. The women who did work were treated as second-class citizens because it was a male-dominated society. That was a fact of life then. But it wouldn't be tolerated today, and that's quite right in my book... people look back on those days through a thick veil of nostalgia, but life was hard if you were anything other than a rich, powerful, white male.

I'd like us to deliver a little message to all the men still out there who think it's the '50s, and coming home simply means watching television with a beer.

If the preservation of the home means the enslavement of women, economically or morally, then we had better break it.

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.

I really think that women should be allowed to be more European, in this country.

I think, certainly in the more civilized societies, women's roles are growing in power all of the time.

For women in, say, Alabama, 'feminism' is a dirty word. They would never march in the streets. But although they don't think of themselves as the beneficiaries of feminism, they are.

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself; that is not what I meant by freedom, it is only social progress.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

One of the reasons I don't see eye to eye with Women's Lib is that women have it all on a plate if only they knew it. They don't have to be pretty either.

I was brought up with a very strong sense of what can happen if your society starts to chip away at the small victories women have won for themselves.

On the whole, as we readily acquiesce in the acknowledgment that the field and the cabinet are the proper spheres assigned to our Masters and our Lords, may we also deserve the dignified title and encomium of Mistress and Lady in our kitchens and in our parlours.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.