Anna Julia Cooper Quotes

Growing up in Texas, you were either pretty or smart. Smart didn't get you very far, because there weren't too many job opportunities for women. I wondered why you couldn't be both.

I think society, in general, is hard on women, period.

I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains taken in finding out proper employment and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements seem contrived for them rather as they are women than as they are reasonable creatures; and are more adapted to the sex than to the species.

It's absurd to think that desire for attention doesn't drive both women and men. Why are women scrutinized for it more, then?

As women, we're always supposed to be catty, or too cute to dance. And it sucks.

This specter of the female politician, who abandons her family to neglect for the sake of passing bills in parliament, is just as complete an illusion of the masculine brain, as the other specter whom Sydney Smith laid by a joke,--the woman who would forsake an infant for a quadratic equation.

I think that women should be decorative.

The sad thing about our society is that women are put in one of two categories. You're either in the beautiful category and you're seen as sexy and beautiful, or some version of that, or you're put into another category... The latter category affords women the opportunity to be smart, funny, independent, mean, strong, intelligent and opinionated. We take them seriously as politicians, if they fit into that latter category. We respect their opinions more and give them higher expectations. That latter category is what allows female actors to be characters.

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.

Thanks to feminism, women can now acquire status in two ways: through marriage or their own achievements. Cure cancer or marry the man who does, either way society will applaud. Unless he marries into the British royal family, it doesn't work that way for men. Wives shed no glory on their husbands. Having tea with Nancy Reagan is an honor; having tea with Denis Thatcher is a joke.

Not one man, in the million, shall I say? no, not in the hundred million, can rise above the belief that woman was made for man.

When a woman gets the idea of justice, there's no teaching her any sense.

Despite the strength of the feminist movement in the 1970s and beyond, a fable has persisted that educated women are rejected as marriage partners.

Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.

Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

So sometime the expectation of the female by a high expectation. Because peoples think that female were weak in term of, like, of the physically and compared to the men.

A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.

And then also I think it's harder for women because comedy is so opposite of being ladylike.

Some boys accepted me, some didn't. And my family had comments made to them. Brazil is still a very macho society, and sports are mainly for boys, so people would say to them: 'What is this girl doing? Why is she always out there in the soccer games with the boys?'

They had always told me that I wrote like a man.

There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

When a woman is very, very bad, she is awful, but when a man is correspondingly good, he is weird.

Basically, women have to prove they are strong at all times. And then when they go on the attack, they have to not appear mean because those women often get the label of being catty.

I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.