Protofeminism Quotes

“I do think it is their husbands’ faults if wives do fall: say that they slack their duties and pour our treasures into foreign laps, or else break out in peevish jealousies, throwing restraint upon us, or say they strike us, or scant our former having in despite. Why, we have galls; and though we have some grace, yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know their wives have sense like them: they see and smell and have their palates both for sweet and sour, as husbands have. What is it that they do when they change us for others? Is it sport? I think it is. And doth affection breed it? I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs? It is so too. And have not we affections, desires for sport, and frailty, as men have? Then let them use us well, else let them know the ills we do their ills instruct us so.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“No! Who takes me, refuse that I am, and as I well deserve to be . . . shall take me, as this man does, with no art of mine put forth to lure him. He sees me at the auction, and he thinks it well to buy me. Let him! When he came to view me - perhaps to bid- he required to see the roll of my accomplishments. I gave it to him. When he would have me show one of them, to justify his purchase to his men, I require of him to say which he demands, and I exhibit it. I will do no more. He makes the purchase of his own will, and with his own sense of its worth, and the power of his money; and I hope it may never disappoint him.”
― Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

“Never had it occurred to Widdowson that a wife remains an individual, with rights and obligations independent of their wifely condition.”
― George Gissing, The Odd Women

“People as a rule were not happy, nor meant apparently to be happy, and the married state especially stood before her mind as a state of natural and inevitable discomfort - one in which there was always a more or less troublesome and unmanageable male to be fed, looked after, and put up with generally. That it possessed any counterbalancing advantages; that it could, even at the start, be, for a woman, a state of especial happiness, she simply did not, for a moment, believe . . . Her own private opinion was that all that was an invention got up by the men. They persuaded the women to believe there was something pleasant in it, and the silly creatures were fools enough to believe them.”
― Emily Lawless, Grania: The Story of an Island