Richard Norton Smith Quotes

For 150 years a woman was regarded as some kind of prostitute if she wanted to go into business….Young girls were supposed to have their focus on motherhood and babies.

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.

Under capitalism the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed … firstly because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly—and this is the main thing—they remain in ‘household bondage’; they continue to be ‘household slaves’, for they are overburdened with the drudgery if the most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen in the family household.

Two thousand years ago, we lived in a world of Gods and Goddesses. Today, we live in a world solely of Gods. Women in most cultures have been stripped of their spiritual power.

I remember becoming aware of women's issues and inequality. It became glaringly clear to me when I was living in America that women are regarded as less intelligent than men.

No longer is the female destined solely for the home and the rearing of the family and only the male for the marketplace and the world of ideas.

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.

Suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.... The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.

Women have to stand up to tremendous discriminatory practices, whether inherited traditions, whether imposed norms, male perceptions of power and control. The women always have to go through that and cannot take any privilege for granted.

I don’t have any respect to men who send women out to do their fighting for them.

The oppression of women is based on custom and tradition—not religion.

We're not sexists, we're chauvinists -- we're male chauvinist pigs, and we're happy to be because we think that's what men were destined to be. We think that's what women want.

Half a century ago women were at an infinite disadvantage in regard to their occupations. The idea that their sphere was at home, and only at home, was like a band of steel on society.

The press, many-tongued, surpassed itself in reproaches upon these women who had so far departed from their sphere as to speak in public.

Women, go your ways! Seek not to beguile us of our imperial privileges. Content yourself with your little feminine trifles -- your babies, your benevolent societies and your knitting--and let your natural bosses do the voting. Stand back -- you will be wanting to go to war next. We will let you teach school as much as you want to, and we will pay you half wages for it, too, but beware! we don't want you to crowd us too much.

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

Both the Army and the Navy are closed to our sex. Nor, again, are we allowed to be members of the Stock Exchange. Thus we cannot use either the pressure of force or the pressure of money. We cannot preach sermons or negotiate treaties. Then again, although it is true that we can write articles or send letters to the press, the control of the press … is entirely in the hands of your sex …

There will never be any really great women writers in the theatre, because women do not know as much as men.

Women played no part in Athenian high culture. They could not vote, attend the theatre, or walk in the stoa talking philosophy. But the male orientation of Greek culture was inseparable of its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

Could it be that women in the United States have become too independent – that they have followed the lead of women like Margaret Sanger by neglecting family life for career?.

I grew up in a time when many people believed that men and women should not always be treated equally.

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

I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

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.