Gloria Steinem Quotes

Where men come to and women come together most intimately in sexuality in the home has become suffused with violence.

Women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage

We need to take violence against women seriously. It is the biggest indicator of whether a country is violent inside itself, and whether it will be militarily violent against another country.

If you listen to the Catholic bishops you would think that Catholics are against contraception and legal abortion, but if you ask actual Catholics, you discover that more than 90% of Catholic women use contraception and Catholic women seem to need and choose legal abortion at about the same rate as everybody else. The problem is that the backlash occupies positions of power, not that it represents the majority of people.

The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.

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

it's possible to be pro-sex and anti-pornography.

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

Each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms.

I don't remember being thought of as good-looking until I became a feminist. It's more of a comment on people's expectations than of what a feminist would look like. They assumed that if you could get a man, you wouldn't want anything else - what else could you possibly want? So that feminists who were talking about such things as equal pay must be doing so because they were unable to get a husband to support them, and therefore they must be ugl - this was the sort of train of thought. So because I looked different from the stereotype, then people would comment.

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

You are the leader you've been waiting for.

There is bias and sexism everywhere, just like there are problems of racism and homophobia stemming from the whole notion that we're arranged in a hierarchy, that we're ranked rather than linked.

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Looking at traditional marriages, it seems the surest way for a woman to be alone is to get married.

the less powerful group usually knows the powerful one much better than vice versa - blacks have had to understand whites in order to survive, women have had to know men - yet the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.

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

I hate when people say, "Have fun at the press preview." Fun is talking to you.

I'm not saying that all women are blameless - all women are not. There are women with despicable characters who are cruel and terrible and some of them are mothers. But why do we blame our mothers more than our fathers? We let our fathers get away scot-free. We hardly even knew who they were in many cases, given the way this culture raises kids, and they may have been quite cruel. They may even have raped us as children, but even if they raped us, we will blame our mothers for not protecting us instead of blaming our fathers who actually did it.

If we're isolated, we come to feel powerless when we're not.

Power in this country is often like hemophilia; it passes through women and then men get it.

why is the word 'qualified' applied only to those who have to be more so?

The anti-equality right wing has interests. We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money.

When I'm talking to people, I find myself quoting the three organizing rules of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter was initiated by three young women, and too few people know that. But, anyway, the first one is lead with love. The second is low ego, high impact. The third is move with the speed of trust. I must say those make me feel very hopeful for the future.

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.

Now we know that women can do what men can do..., but we don't know that men can do what women can do.

A good friendship is a conversation that never ends.

What we have been raised to think of as inevitable - division and hierarchy, monotheism and nation states - actually accounts for less than 10 percent of human history.

Feminism is about friends and sisters and community.

I think if we could raise one generation of kids without violence and shaming, we don't know what might be possible.

Think about the pressure to "pass" by lying about one's agethat familiar temptation to falsify a condition of one's birth oridentity and pretend to be part of a more favored group. Fair-skinned blacks invented "passing" as a term, Jews escaping anti-Semitism perfected the art, and the sexual closet continues the punishment, but pretending to be a younger age is probably the most encouraged form of "passing," with the least organized support for "coming out" as one's true generational self.

If we're by ourselves we come to feel crazy and alone. We need to make alternate families of small groups of women who support each other, talk to each other regularly, can speak their truths and their experiences and find they're not alone in them, that other women have them, too ... It makes such a huge difference.

I'm completely happy not having children. I mean, everybody does not have to live in the same way. And as somebody said, "Everybody with a womb doesn't have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer."

It feels as if childhood sexual abuse or domestic abuse of women in the home has increased but actually if you ask women of 60 or 70 years old, the incidence is about the same. We just didn't know it.

Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers or mindless policy-makers in politics.

We teach what we need to learn.

I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.

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.

I wouldn't want to generalize, but we still do live in a society that's sexist and racist and addicted to class and has the ridiculous idea that if you have money you're smarter, which Donald Trump by himself should be able to disprove.

Writers are notorious for using any reason to keep from working: over-researching, retyping, going to meetings, waxing the floors - anything.

The problem with Superwoman is that she has to do it all, inside the home and outside the home. If there is a man there doing half of it, that's a different world.

The most impersonal seeming audiences eventually just say such intimate, smart, wise, amazing, totally surprising, funny things. It's empowering, in the sense of feeling like you're a part of something really important.

Superwoman is the adversary of the women's movement.

It's not that women are less corruptible than men are, it's that women have had less chance to become corrupt.

It's endlessly interesting to be organizing and hearing possible solutions or thinking of possible solutions and how to put efforts together. It makes everything else boring, actually.

The young women seem to think that they can only go out with or marry a man who is superior to them. The problem there is that they are wanting to be defeated, as opposed to finding a partner.

For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness.

I think it's important to see the parallels, and to understand that our masculine and feminine roles are relatively new in human history. Both gender and race are inventions that go deep because we have been raised with them, but they are still inventions.