Gloria Steinem Quotations

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

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.

The error that we tend to make is that we think that women's magazines are what editors want and what their readers want - and thus are social indicators - when, in fact, they are what advertisers want. They're just advertising indicators.

After feminism, I suddenly realised: not everyone has to live the same way. Imagine that!

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years - about twice as long as other bears - between having cubs. And after they're pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.

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.

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

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.

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.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.

I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are discriminated against,' and I got so mad.

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home.

Whatever each individual woman is facing - only she knows her biggest challenge.

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.

Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.

Nothing changes the gender equation more significantly than women's economic freedom.

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.

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.

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.

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

There is nothing more fundamental than the idea that the government does not have a right to decide when and whether we have children.

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.

The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.

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.

A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.

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.

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.

Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.

Being misunderstood by people whose opinions you value is absolutely the most painful.

To say 'radical feminist' is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system is a root of race and class and other divisions.

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time.

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.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

Movements are like rivers. Dipping into them is never the same twice.

In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.

The electoral system is not where change starts - it usually starts in communities and from the bottom up - but it is where change can be stopped.

Women are more than smart enough to see that McCain's policies are a disaster... He is anti- every reproductive issue we've ever fought for.

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.

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.

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

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 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.

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

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.

We're never going to have democratic countries or peaceful countries until we have democratic or peaceful families.

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

Work is valued by the social value of the worker.

Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is.

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.

I'm so happy that we're finally hearing the stories and voices of women who make America. We do what we see, not what we're told, so an incomplete story of this country damages everyone.

As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot.

If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child, therefore take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54," then it's another story.

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.

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married.

If I read the word 'problematize' one more time, I'm going to vomit.

The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

Even before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking, 'Which candidate are Americans more ready for: a white woman or a black man?'

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.

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.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.

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.

A bad facelift is like a bad toupee.

Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part!

A parking lot attendant who's a guy makes a lot more money than a child-care attendant who's a woman.

There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female.

I supported Hillary Clinton. She would have made an excellent president. I didn't think she could get elected. I thought it was too soon.

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.

Obviously, no LGBT person should be denied the ability to be who they are because their boss disagrees.

There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

Law and justice are not always the same.

Because we are communal creatures, if you're with people who think you're smart, you're smart, and if they think you're dumb, you're dumb.

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

I'm a freelance person, and I've always been able to support myself.

In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.

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.

The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.

The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture.

It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.

Most women are one man away from welfare.

A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.

The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.

I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.

We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.

If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.