Billie Jean King Quotes

I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.

There aren't good roles for women: the female parts aren't developed: the women are serving the men.

I was called a misogynist because I was reducing women to mothers. 'Reducing women to mothers' - now there is possibly the most anti-women statement I've heard.

Men are very tough, very critical of me. I think they expect you to basically just be a picture. They don't want to hear you speak.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

I don't think women are better than men, I think men are a lot worse than women.

We don't have enough young, female antiheroes. We don't accept women as antiheroes the way we do the men.

Men don't oppress women any more than women oppress men.

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

This is still a man's profession, with a lot of men who intellectually and emotionally have not accepted that the military could be women's work.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

I think where men are credited for being strong, women are divas. I just think it's such a cop out.

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

Too often, women are portrayed in two ways: as prizes to be won by men or as damsels in distress.

When women criticized men, I called it 'insight'... When men criticized women, I called it 'sexism' and 'backlash.'

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

And the first commandment of feminism is: I am woman; thou shalt not tolerate strange gods who assert that women have capabilities or often choose roles that are different from men's.

One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category.

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

I even felt like I liked guys better than women - that men were relevant and women weren't. It took me a while to realize I'd been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender.

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman.

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'll never forget when I was running, when I was knocking on doors for my first office as I served as a Cleveland city councilwoman and to have older men say to me, 'Can you do this and be a wife and a mother?' Excuse me? Women make the world go round. We multitask... But to have that kind of condescending question asked of me in modern times.

I used to be very interested in the history of women's rights in this country and in other countries. I tried to learn as much as I could about it, and more than anything, I would be called gay. It was phenomenal. But if a boy has something to say, he is appreciated; he's even popular. If a girl says something, it's instantly a threat.