Jane Fonda Quotes

There's a different expectation, not just on mothers but on women. We're expected to do it all, to have it all, and look good through the process and have a smile on our face, and that's not always the case.

It’s always surprising to me how many young women think they have to be perfect. I rarely meet a young man who doesn’t think he already is.

In society it is etiquette for ladies to have the best chairs and get handed things. In the home the reverse is the case. This is why ladies are more sociable than gentlemen.

Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.

Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can't be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.

Internalized sexism that makes us feel like we can't show ourselves not being perfect.

How true it is that men live for Things and women for People!

It's just that that feels discriminatory to me, "the ideal woman." The concept of ideal is fleeting. It's like "perfect." There's no such thing.

I don't think men try to make women be like them, but I think women try to make men be like them, a lot.

When Jo's conservative sister Meg says she must turn up her hair now that she is a "young lady," Jo shouts, "I'm not! and if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty.... I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China aster! It's bad enough to be a girl anyway, when I like boys' games and work and manners! I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy; and it's worse than ever now, for I'm dying to go and fight with Papa, and I can only stay at home and knit, like a poky old woman.

Would it upset men if they found out we weren't different? Are we? Aren't we? Damned if I know.

You know what the problem is? You can't put a woman into a man's role. A women's journey in life, I'm not speaking disrespectfully of women and their roles in life, but a woman's journey in life is very different from a man's. That doesn't mean a woman can't do a man's job, but it doesn't mean that a woman should do a man's job the way a man handles it. The things that men question themselves about in life are quite different from the things women question themselves about.

Women have hunger two-fold, shyness four-fold, daring six-fold, and lust eight-fold as compared to men.

A strange alternative * * *Must women have a doctor or a dance?

I am a feminist. I reject wholeheartedly the way we are taught to perceive women. The beauty of women, how a woman should act or behave. Women are strong and fragile. Women are beautiful and ugly. We are soft-spoken and loud, all at once. There is something mind-controlling about the way we're taught to view women.

We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.

Men want success and sex. Women want everything.

What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary

Men subsequently put whatever is newly learned or experienced to use as a plowshare, perhaps even as a weapon: but women immediately include it among their ornaments.

I never thought about that ever throughout the entire course of my career about choosing a specific role because it would make me seem more man-like.

One can't help thinking, Daddy, what a colourless life a man is forced to lead, when one reflects that chiffon and Venetian point and hand embroidery and Irish crochet are to him mere empty words. Whereas a woman- whether she is interested in babies or microbes or husbands or poetry or servants or parallelograms or gardens or Plato or bridge- is fundamentally and always interested in clothes.

Marriage is made out to be so important for girls but the focus has to shift at some point from marriage to the real challenges of life which are the same for women and men, so we have to prepare our girls just the way we prepare our boys.

There's a reason why trainspotters are not girls, there's a reason why there's the myth of the slightly autistic male genius, there's a reason why Gertrude Stein believed that her self-presentation was male. One could argue that was Susan Sontag also. The things that we associate with femaleness are not the single-minded, exclusive pursuit of a vocation, whether it be art or anything else. It is not a model that is widespread in our culture, it's not something we think of for women.

Men like me because I dont wear a brassiere. Women like me because I dont look like a girl who would steal a husband. At least not for long.

I think women are just as gifted when it comes to science as men are. But I think their wishes and desires are different and this is also shaped by the society in which they live.