“ The less there is of sex about a woman, the more she is to be dreaded. ”
 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872). copy citation

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“I return to the previous question,—said I,—if our friend the Member of the House of Representatives will allow me to borrow the phrase. Womanly women are very kindly critics, except to themselves and now and then to their own sex. The less there is of sex about a woman, the more she is to be dreaded. But take a real woman at her best moment,—well dressed enough to be pleased with herself, not so resplendent as to be a show and a sensation, with those varied outside influences which set vibrating the harmonic notes of her nature stirring in the air about her, and what has social life to compare with one of those vital interchanges of thought and feeling with her that make an hour memorable?” source