Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars — to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

Every woman becomes their mother. That's their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That's his tragedy.

I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind...

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

And I'm a woman made of sorrow.

To be dispensable is a woman's worst nightmare and I was beginning to live it.

I've hard conversation about being a woman and the things that come with it, and I couldn't believe it, trust me I couldn't have survived.

How sad it is to be a woman! </br> Nothing on earth is held so cheap.

How sorrowful is women's lot!" she cried.
"We all partake of woe, our common fate.

Women are not a hobby—they're a calamity.

My birth was my first misfortune.

We live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days when I think it has always been a strange and terrible time to be a woman.

O, how I wish I had never seen him! Loving is misery for women always.

You are a woman marked for sorrow.