Gloria Steinem Quotes
Journalist
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?
Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.
Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.
Being misunderstood by people whose opinions you value is absolutely the most painful.
Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.
Nothing changes the gender equation more significantly than women's economic freedom.
Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.
Law and justice are not always the same.
The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.
Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.
A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.
There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.
It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.
I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.
Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother - so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally.
The thing about aging is all your old lovers, pretty much if they were really friends, become your family. It's great. You have those terrible feelings of possessiveness and uncertainty go out the window. You have what you shared. You know you would help each other in times of trouble no matter what.
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.
It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
Most women are one man away from welfare.
Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.
I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers.
All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.
If you ask men about their body image, they will tell you they look better than they do. And if you ask a woman, she'll tell you she looks worse.
Hope is a very unruly emotion.
I'm a freelance person, and I've always been able to support myself.
Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.
No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.
Logic is in the eye of the logician.
Liberation does not come from outside.
America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.
Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.
We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.
From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.
The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.
Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.
Perfectionism attaches to what is valued in the culture.
Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.
If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say. I'm a feminist, that's a transformation of society.
Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.'
The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.
Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.
Part of the reason that women go to college is to get out of the food service, clerical, pink-collar ghetto and into a more white-collar job. That does not necessarily mean they are being paid more than the blue-collar jobs men have.
For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.
Work is valued by the social value of the worker.
There is nothing more fundamental than the idea that the government does not have a right to decide when and whether we have children.
I'm not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression.
I want to help correct the inaccurate image of immigration in the media. There is an idea that women's issues are over here and immigration is over there. Three quarters of undocumented workers are women and children.
The Native American cultures on this continent, most of them, were matrilineal, and some women were the chiefs. Societies were about balance.
Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.
Burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle.
A majority of Americans want redemption for racism - for our terrible, destructive racist past - and so see a vote for Obama as redemptive.
The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.
When I'm talking to groups that are all men, we talk about how the masculine role limits them. They often want to talk about how they missed having real fathers, real loving, present fathers, because of the way that they tried to fit the picture of masculinity.
What happens at 50, more or less, you lose what you need to create another person, to sustain another person; you keep what you need to sustain yourself. And there's something wonderful about that.
We're never going to have democratic countries or peaceful countries until we have democratic or peaceful families.
Because women of color were more likely to be in the paid labor force, they were more likely to recognize discrimination, so they were always leading the women's movement.
Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part!
Age brings a freedom. When you're young, you're much more subject to the idea of what feminine is or how you should look or how you should behave.
You can see the absence of women in governing bodies from Congress to state legislators, on corporate boards, in tenured positions in academia, and as forepeople in factories.
The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.
Feminism began to dawn on my brain belatedly in life.
Actually, I believe there are more independents than either Republicans or Democrats, and yet those are the... that is the choice we have on the party ballot.
The most hurtful thing is not what comes from our adversaries, it's what comes from our friends.
The surest way to be alone is to get married.
Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist.
Movements are like rivers. Dipping into them is never the same twice.
People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We're clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven't reached true democracy yet.
I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner.
A bad facelift is like a bad toupee.
Diane Keaton is good for women in and of herself. She's smart and funny and real.
It's easier to blame the person with less power.
What is frustrating is being told that no matter how hard I've worked, it counts less than my appearance. Although if you're not considered conventionally attractive, that also becomes an issue: you know, you're a feminist because you couldn't get a man.
The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.
This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.
Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt.
The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.
There's no shortage of great young activists.
When I had a fellowship at the Smithsonian, I asked for a couch in the office because I liked to lie down and take a break.
Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.
The same way that racism is a white person's problem, violence against women is a men's problem.
What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group.
There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female.
In Sweden, both parents take care of the children.