International Womens Day - Saturday 8 March
Nadia Boulanger, conductor [on becoming the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra] I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.
Photo: Sheelagh Daly, CEO Wicklow CEB, Pamela FitzMaurice, Blazing Salads, Claire Byrne, NewsTalk 106 and Minister for Enterprise Michael Martin at the launch of the National Womens Enterprise Day
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, American aviator, Gift from the Sea
By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off.
Diane Ackerman, poet
[quoted in Newsweek, September 22, 1986] I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer
Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are.
Margaret Thatcher, British politician
In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.
Susan Faludi, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness.
Simone de Beauvoir, French author, The Second Sex
One is not born a woman, one becomes one.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.
Aristotle, philosopher
If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.
James Thurber, American humorist
I hate women because they always know where things are.
Malcolm de Chazal, Mauritian writer
A woman knows how to keep quiet when she is in the right, whereas a man, when he is in the right, will keep on talking.
Jules Michelet, French historian
Woman is a miracle of divine contradictions.
Freya Stark, author
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.
Gloria Steinem, American feminist
Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
Gloria Steinem, feminist
[speech at Yale University] Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.