Gloria Steinem

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

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
– Gloria Steinem

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.
– Gloria Steinem

Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
– Gloria Steinem

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.
– Gloria Steinem

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?
– Gloria Steinem

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
– Gloria Steinem

Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect.
– Gloria Steinem

We’ll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.
– Gloria Steinem

Marriage: A ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of
the gentleman.
– Gloria Steinem

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.
– Gloria Steinem

Women have two choices: Either she’s a feminist or a masochist.
– Gloria Steinem

We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons
more like our daughters.
– Gloria Steinem

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

There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all other
occupations should be open to everyone.
– Gloria Steinem

One day an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the Earth.
– Gloria Steinem

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

Marriage works best for men than women. The two happiest groups are married men and
unmarried women.
– Gloria Steinem

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.
– Gloria Steinem

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.
– Gloria Steinem

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

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

Most women are one man away from welfare.
– Gloria Steinem

Someone asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the
commonsensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true and incomplete
answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
– Gloria Steinem

Hope is a very unruly emotion.
– Gloria Steinem

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
– Gloria Steinem

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

Most women’s magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.
– Gloria Steinem

Self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.
– Gloria Steinem

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren’t, destroying the law may be the
first step toward changing it.
– Gloria Steinem

A woman who aspires to be something is called a bitch.
– Gloria Steinem

Men should think twice before making widowhood women’s only path to power.
– Gloria Steinem

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and
visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and
inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking
about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We
are really talking about humanism.
– Gloria Steinem

We are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud.
– Gloria Steinem

The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.
– Gloria Steinem

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

If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?
– Gloria Steinem

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.
– Gloria Steinem

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

But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don’t get young men
standing up and saying, “How can I combine career and family?”
– Gloria Steinem

I always wanted to be a writer. I got into activism just because it needed to be done.
– Gloria Steinem

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

Don’t worry about what you should do, worry about what you can do.
– Gloria Steinem

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

The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are
human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race
divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as
biological a full system of authoritarian government.
– Gloria Steinem

Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and
battered children are the practice.
– Gloria Steinem

The first resistance to social change is to say it’s not necessary.
– Gloria Steinem

I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of possibility, with no history to
guide them and a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond the
words to express it.
– Gloria Steinem

Women are always saying, “We can do anything that men can do.” But Men should be saying,
“We can do anything that women can do.”
– Gloria Steinem

Rich people plan for three generations. Poor people plan for Saturday night.
– Gloria Steinem

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

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

For women… bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of
a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can’t possibly
fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman’s body demands to be accepted
on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.
– Gloria Steinem

We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
– Gloria Steinem

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

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief
in some group’s greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class,
religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal
power and airtight roles within the family.
– Gloria Steinem

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

So whatever you want to do, just do it… making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely
essential.
– Gloria Steinem

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

Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.
– Gloria Steinem