Great Feminist Quotes by Pearl S. Buck
By Taylor Jasmine | On March 23, 2015 | Updated March 17, 2023 | Comments (0)
A woman of deep wisdom and compassion, Pearl S. Buck (1892 – 1973) made her humanitarian views clear in both her fiction and nonfiction writings. Following is a selection of feminist quotes by Pearl S. Buck from her nonfiction and novels that were ahead of their time, and are still pertinent today
Pearl S. Buck brought attention to issues of gender, politics, and race, and dared nations and society to help those in need. (photo at right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published in 1930. The Good Earth (1931) her best-known work, was her second novel, and the one that cemented her reputation. It received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1932.
In 1938, she received the Nobel Prize in literature for her body of work, making her the first woman to win this award. Pearl Buck still had many years of writing ahead of her, and certainly didn’t rest on these laurels.
Having lived much of her formative years in China as the daughter of American missionaries, her eyes were opened early to other cultures. Her life and work were informed with both wisdom and compassion.
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“An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.” (“America’s Medieval Women,” Harper’s Magazine, August 1938)
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“Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.”
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“Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.”
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See also: Inspirational Quotes by Pearl S. Buck
(photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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“There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.”
“A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.”
“All through childhood and youth in America girls are … educated to believe that they are, if not the equals, the superiors of boys. And then, suddenly, the shock as they start to earn a living. Of course, if they stay in the home they do not necessarily make this discovery of inequality. But why should they stay in the home? They’re not taught to, particularly. Why should only the home be the stronghold for women?”
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You might also like: Quotes from The Good Earth
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“Do not test the measure of his love for you by the way he expresses his body’s heat. He is not thinking of you at those times. He is thinking of himself.” (Pavilion of Women, 1946)
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“I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it.” (Pavilion of Women, 1946)
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“Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.” (Of Men and Women, 1941)
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“Is man all man and is woman all woman? If so, they will never come together, since he lives for his own being and she lives for universal life, and these are opposites.”
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Pearl S. Buck USPS postage stamp, 1985
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