Gail Collins Quotes

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.

We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.

I was a feminist in the Sixties, and can you imagine? The worst thing I could have done was to be in fashion. It was the most uncomfortable position.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don't know how much history young women today know about those battles.

For women in, say, Alabama, 'feminism' is a dirty word. They would never march in the streets. But although they don't think of themselves as the beneficiaries of feminism, they are.

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.

Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.

People ask me if I think Anne Boleyn was a feminist... but she wasn't striking out on behalf of women, and she wasn't particularly keen on them.

Bourgeois society is not fundamentally opposed to the bourgeois women's movement, which is proven by the fact that in various states reforms of private and public laws concerning women have been initiated.

Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women's movement that liberated us, however.

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.

For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, we have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier.

I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back 40 years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' They would say, 'No.'

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

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.

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.

Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.

In the early days of Islam, women were much more socially and politically active than they are today.

Every movement takes a century to make its mark. The women’s movement is only 40 some years old.

You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway. You can’t stop us, neither

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.

I was alive during the women's lib movement, and I do not remember anyone taking a position against cooking. I think they were talking about other things.