Claudel: You are sinning against the Virgin Mary, Violaine, Eve, the divine nature of woman, the timeless myths men have created.
Simone: And will create still! We will have new myths to fit new realities. Do you have so little faith in sex, in love, in men and women, to think that they rest on certain traditional safeguards, and will be destroyed without them? Have a little courage that the new patterns will be good, at least as good as ours. Giving and taking, conquering and yielding, will always have a meaning.
Helen Gurley Brown: Careful what you mess around with, Simone. Sex isn't only traditional, its basic. The most fundamental division of the human species. Man-and-woman. One and one makes two. Daddy and mommy. Sperm and egg. You can't get away from all that and with all that comes a lot of other things. Superior and inferior, for instance, stronger--
Socrates, Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Rimbaud, Wilde, Gide: What was that, Miss Brown?
Brown: It's all in my new movie. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Susan Sontag: This girl is too much!
Susan B. Anthony: I don't think this discussion is being carried on in the proper spirit. The cause of women's rights is a true and noble one, and should not be confused with the degrading clamor one hears nowadays from certain brazen young women for sexual equality. Let us not be distracted from our work, let us on to full female employment, more girls to medical school--
Simone: You may have been right at one time, but what you are forgetting is the revolution in contraception. Sex is a part of modern woman's birthright, for it is no longer inseparable from procreation, Miss Anthony. It no longer carries with it for women the torturous uncertainties and back-breaking obligations of pregnancy.
Marx: A revolution in control of the means of production!
Simone: I love you. Karl.
Aldous Huxley: But what you are suggesting leads ultimately to testtube babies--the ultimate divorce of sex and procreation.
Chorus: Hell and damnation!
Simone: It could happen. But for the time being, we have to make life as easy as possible for mothers. Let them serve the species for a short term, but don't make that be their whole life.
Valentina Tereshkova: Serve state better than serve species.
Margaret Mead: But motherhood is the highest form of creation. Housework is artistry, cooking is magic. A woman must be a creative genius to fill her role. All of men's accomplishments are but mere compensations for not being able to give birth. Womb envy.
Shakespeare, Mozart, and Einstein: (soft chuckles then breaking into song): Three little frustrated mothers are we...
Master Finley: I often think that a woman's mind is rather like a matzah not kosher for passover...
Assorted Deans: We really can't accept them. They're too great a risk. Even the best of them drop out and get married.
Simone: Oh, everything you're saying is true! There have not been any really great women. Maybe one Joan of Arc here, one Emily Bronte there, but no female Tolstoys, Napoleons, Buddhas. But all of this is in our past, not our future; in our social, economic, political condition, not in our bodies; in our situation, not in our stars. In this we are like other depressed groups who have also not contributed their full share to the culture of mankind. The working classes, the Negroes, the Chinese peasants. But with the liberation and the equality of all of us, with the new fraternity and the new individuality, generations will grow up that will be great!
James Baldwin: And if you think the ones who first escape are a little shrill, a little one-sided, a little extreme in their reaction, just have confidence that the next generation will reap the harvest of our self-consciousness