Louise Bogan

 

from What the Women Said

"I am not thinking of exceptional minds, like Cleopatra or Mrs. Carlyle or Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf; I am thinking of the 'ordinary' woman, undistinguished, often unintellectual and introspective. The minds of most women differ from the mind of most men in a way which I feel very distinctly, but which becomes rather indistinct as I try to describe it. Their minds seem to me to be gentler, more sensitive, more civilized. Even in many stupid, vain, tiresome women this quality is often preserved below the exasperating surface.” (Bogan, 1962)