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