J. B. Priestley Quotes

Politics was my hobby, and I really spent 25 years as a full-time homemaker. I tell the feminists the only person's permission I had to get was my husband's.

The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.

Motherhood goes back in history to a time when a father had no way of knowing his children. Fatherhood only became known when class patriarchal society had established itself and imposed monogamous marriage on women. Motherhood is like sun and rain and plants, a quality and product of nature which does not require laws or systems in order to exist.

I've never yet met a man who could look after me. I don't need a husband. What I need is a wife.

It is an act of hubris to believe that marriage can be infinitely malleable, that it can be pushed and pulled around like silly-putty without destroying its essential stability and what it means to our society, and if marriage goes, then the family goes, and if the family goes, we have none of the decency or ordered liberty which Americans have been brought up to enjoy and to appreciate.

The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman.

My husband is a feminist!

I actually think women are stronger and more capable than men, that men are actually dancing in the palms of women, who are running the show.

If you are confiding in someone, it needs to be the woman in your life. If that woman is your mother, you may as well scuttle back under her petticoats and let the real women in pencil skirts and tortuous heels get on with the job of husband-hunting.

All mankind rules its women, and we rule all mankind, but our women rule us.

I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society — because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.

Fletch then kisses me on the forehead before opening the cabinet under the coffeemaker to grab placemats and napkins. Retrieving these items is his job because I kind of don't like to bend. I also refuse to carry anything heavier than my purse.

My father was a patriarch inside a matriarchy, but never knew it.

A woman ought to look up to her husband, if only a half-inch.

Formerly, many men dominated women within marriage. Now, despite a much wider acceptance of women as workers, men dominate women anonymously outside the marriage. Patriarchy has not disappeared; it has changed form. In the old form, women were forced to obey an overbearing husband in the privacy of an unjust marriage. In the new form, the working single mother is economically abandoned by her former husband and ignored by a patriarchal society at large.

Woman is the crown of all creation, but Man is the head who wears it, and even the servant is master in his house.

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.

A woman usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared him.

It was the duty of wives to submit to husbands, not of husbands to submit to wives. . . men have stronger muscles than women.

But she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.

Man is potentially a son, and woman is potentially a mother; woman depends on the dependence of man. The spinster, if pathetic at all, is pathetic because she has no one to look after, not because there is no one to look after her. Bear in mind that the conventional spinster keeps a canaary as a substitute for a husband.

What's for dinner is the only question many husbands ask their wives, and the only one to which they care about the answer.

Perhaps a reign of powerful women is necessary to make, or unmake when need be, powerful men. Women would not waste so readily and uselessly the lives they had such care and pain in bearing. Why should they submit to the massacre of the innocent, one generation after another ... and allow them to be brought up as live-stock for the inevitable killing?

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 appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession