Literary notes about women (AI summary)
Across literary history the word "women" has been employed in remarkably diverse and multifaceted ways. In some texts women are cast in roles that blend the mystical with the symbolic—as when women are described as married to supernatural beings, hinting at their mysterious or otherworldly associations ([1], [2]). In other works, however, authors use the term to evoke stereotypes or critique prevailing gender attitudes, as seen when women are characterized as fickle or even cowardly ([3], [4]), or when their supposed vulnerabilities are juxtaposed with societal expectations ([5]). Meanwhile, literature also documents the active and vital roles women play in social and political contexts, whether by contributing to communal projects ([6]) or by spearheading transformative movements ([7], [8]). Even as some authors extol their virtues or lament their treatment—celebrating pride and resilience ([9]) or warning of social injustice ([10])—the varied usage of "women" ultimately reflects a cultural negotiation of identity, power, and the contested nature of gender across time ([11], [12]).
- It deserves to be remarked that the supernatural being to whom women are married is often a god or spirit of water.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer - But if the message to the women, and their behaviour upon it, were true as related, there was something supernatural.
— from Boswell's Life of Johnson by James Boswell - "Women fancy wrong things sometimes."
— from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy - Women are said to be cowardly.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - Will she be now timid, [Footnote: Women’s timidity is yet another instinct of nature against the double risk she runs during pregnancy.]
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - When there is a social to be got up or a church tea or anything else to raise money the women have to turn to and do the work.
— from Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery - We would especially direct the attention of the Convention to the legal condition of married women.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - [75] The first Woman's Congress, afterwards called the Association for the Advancement of Women, was organized during the autumn of this year.
— from The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) by Ida Husted Harper - I shall be the proudest and the most joyous of women.
— from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo - To disfranchise women is deliberately to turn from knowledge and grope in ignorance.
— from Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. Du Bois - What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy, sin.
— from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde - Women's thoughts are thus as useful in giving reality to those of thinking men, as men's thoughts in giving width and largeness to those of women.
— from The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill
