Gail Sheehy Quotes

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

The very same people who 40 years ago were saying that feminism was unnatural and unnecessary are now saying “Well, it used to be necessary, but it’s not any more.”

Girls were nothing in the '70s.

I really hope that men read 'The Power' and watch 'The Handmaid's Tale' and read 'The Handmaid's Tale.'

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

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.

I'm sure a few marriages broke up because of feminism; it doesn't make feminism a cult.

It's unfortunate when people say you can't wear skirts or do item numbers, or a girl can't dress in a certain way. Are we going back to dark ages?

One of the things that interests me about the Regency period is how women began to stir under the thumbs of men, wanting more and bigger freedoms.

Whether it's repro rights, violence against women, or just plain old vanilla sexism, most issues affecting women have one thing in common - they exist to keep women 'in their place.' To make sure that we're acting 'appropriately,' whatever that means.

Obviously, the anti-ERA people are tickled about my ordeal because it proves that the ERA breaks up families. When they point out that feminism is a dangerous thing, I just say marriage is pretty precarious too.

I don't think a man should try to suppress a woman just because he's married to her.

Women are not stupid, but they were not clever enough to realise that feminism did not bring freedom, but the opposite. That's why I'm glad feminism is dead.

The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.

There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them.

Of all the social revolutions now abroad in the world, that of the American women is the least dynamic, the least predictable, the most aimless and divided – in short the most feminine…. As a class, they are today themselves the greatest obstacle to their own advancement.... They are simply ridiculous.

I’m furious about the Women’s Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket.

During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects.

It was not seen that woman’s place was in the home until she began to go out of it; the statement was a reply to an unspoken challenge, it was attempted resistance to irresistible change.

Knowing the horror that most women have of anything approaching irreverence, the Bible has been called out to play the part of a scarecrow on the rich fields of men’s monopolies…Men have had the management of all things human for six thousand years…Has the result been so eminently successful that we need dread a little change?

The women’s movement is at heart revolutionary for it aims at a fundamental reorganization of all forms of human living together, a reorganization that perhaps Social Democracy does not even dream of.

This is our historical task … To make evident that the category “woman” as well as the category “man” are political and economic categories and not eternal ones. Our aim is to suppress men as a class, not through a genocidal, but a political struggle. Once the class “man” disappears, “woman” as a class will disappear as well, for there are no slaves without masters.

I didn't see a woman drive until I visited my sister and brother-in-law in Tempe, Ariz., in 1976.

Now that Arab women are pouring into the streets by the million, men discover with dismay that they, not women, were the captives of the harem dream.

The struggle to conquer oppression in our country is the weaker for the traditionalist, conservative, and primitive restraints imposed on women by man-dominated structures within our movement, as also because of equally traditionalist attitudes of surrender and submission on the part of women.