She would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed! she knew they were superior.
~
Cranford
by
Elizabeth Gaskell
The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his--attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.
~
The Portrait of a Lady
by
Henry James
There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help, the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs, meets a continual want of the imagination.
~
The Mill on the Floss
by
George Eliot
"I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean."
~
Lady Windermere's Fan
by
Oscar Wilde
"Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody."
~
My Antonia
by
Willa Cather
'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.
~
The History of Henry Esmond
by
William Makepeace Thackeray
He had not yet learned that the only safe male rebuke to a scornful female is to stay away from her--especially if that is what she desires.
~
Penrod
by
Booth Tarkington
"Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women."
~
Washington Square
by
Henry James
"I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out."
~
The Mill on the Floss
by
George Eliot
I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it.
~
The Small House at Allington
by
Anthony Trollope