A Quote by Maxine Kumin

Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

Maxine Kumin

Quote Topics

Poems Supposed Women Women Are

Quote Author

Maxine Kumin
American - Poet
June 6, 1925 - February 6, 2014

It is not a dirty word, "feminism." I just think that women belong in the human population with the same rights as everybody else... The problem is, "A feminist looks like this, or is like that." We are taught not to like ourselves as women, we are taught what we're supposed to look like, what our measurements are supposed to be. I never hear what measurements men are supposed to be. Just women.

Cyndi Lauper

Women really are not supposed to be imaginative. That creativity of this kind is supposed to belong to men. You know, because women make babies. I find the double standards shocking.

Siri Hustvedt

Well into the 19th century there were pronouncements from just about every branch of science and medicine that reading, writing, and thinking were dangerous for women. Articles in the Lancet declared that women's brains would burst and their uteruses atrophy if they engaged in any form of rigorous thinking. The famous physician J.D. Kellogg insisted that novel reading was the greatest cause of uterine disease among young women and urged parents to protect their daughters from the dreaded consequences of print.

Dale Spender

We want to make legislation; we want to put laws on women's uteruses and whether or not they can protect themselves from pregnancy or whatever, but we don't want to protect you once you're pregnant.

Madeline Brewer

[On husband Phil Donahue:] The man does not know the meaning of the word tidy. He asked me one day, 'Where are my shoes?' So I asked him, 'Where are my shoes?' I don't know what it is about men. They think that women have radar attached to our uteruses.

Marlo Thomas

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

Robert Morgan

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Matthea Harvey

My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.

Anna Journey

Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions.

Claire Messud

I know, basketball is a dance. I didn't understand the significance of that type of training at first. I was supposed to read poems.

Dirk Nowitzki

I have a problem with men that are supposed to be R&B artists that talk about women in a certain way, because you're supposed in the cornerstone of uplifting love in a sense.

The-Dream

If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.

Ralph Fletcher

My days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.

Deborah Landau

I think so many people give us ideas of what we are. I think as women especially, because we're sensitive by nature, we're more vulnerable, we absorb other people's ideas about what we're supposed to think or who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to act.

Gwyneth Paltrow

As far as I was concerned, it was the absence of women in the poetic tradition which allowed women in the poems to be simplified. The voice of a woman poet would, I was sure, have precluded such distortion. It did not exist.