Gloria Steinem Quotes

Women with body image or eating disorders are not a special category; [they’re] just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.

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

To me, the model of success is not linear. Success is completing the full circle of yourself.

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

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

Girls are taught to view their bodies as unending projects to work on, whereas boys from a young age, are taught to view their bodies as tools to master their environment

For a man to say, "I have to leave work now because I need to do something with my kids," it's sometimes viewed as a career killer. He doesn't have the right drive. So when they depart from their gender roles, they face some of the same restrictions.

The patterns that are normalized in the family - the whole idea that some people cook and some people eat, that some listen and others talk, and even that some people control others in very economic or even violent ways - that kind of hierarchy is what makes us vulnerable to believing in class hierarchy, to believing in racial hierarchy, and so on.

Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.

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

We are still in various kinds of patriarchal systems. The very definition of patriarchy is that men control women as the means of reproduction, so the idea that a woman's main role is to have children often means society wants more workers, more soldiers. The idea that how many children we have should be controlled by the family, the church, the nation - by anyone but women themselves - is still very deep and very strong.

I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?

Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style.

You can't be what you can't see, so it's harder for women to say, "I'm going to be a [presidential] candidate," so we need to go to women who would be good candidates and say, "You would be a good candidate and I'll help you." It's not a passive question, it's not when will it happen, but an active question, when will we make it happen?

Self-esteem starts out as a personal blessing, but it becomes nothing less than an evolutionary force.

I’ve only ever met one woman who actually was a prostitute of her own free will. She didn’t have a pimp. She could pick and choose her customers. That’s so rare. So we have to look at the reality and not romanticize it. We have to be clear that you have the right to sell your own body but nobody has the right to sell anybody else’s body. No one has that right.

Since we're each unique, if we've shared many experiences, then it probably has something to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change. Revolutions that last don't happen from the top down. They happen from the bottom up.

When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was, and that my real parents were going to come get me. I was just too different from the rest of the family, so I lived in books and in my imagination.

The road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic "Odyssey," of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it's really about a man on the road. There's an assumption that the road is too dangerous for women.

When gender comes down upon us, male or female, it comes as a restriction.

Probably those three things affect the most people: reproductive freedom, freedom from violence, and democratic families. But there may well be someone sitting at this table who has a great idea to do something else that wouldn't come under those umbrellas and that would really be great, and make all kinds of change.

I always trust the microcosm over the macrocosm.

Religion is often politics made sacred.

Of course, we can change. We're very adaptable. But it takes a while.

If we keep on talking about masculine and feminine and following those stereotypes, then we will make women suppress and despise their so called masculine qualities and men suppress and despise their so called feminine ones, and that's where all the trouble starts.

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

Oppression has no logic--just a self-fulfilling prophecy, justified by a self-perpetuating system.

An education is not a thing one gets, but a lifelong process.

I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said 'maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.' It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole...patriarch!

The old languages - at least the ones I know - don't have gender. They don't have gendered pronouns. There's no "he" and "she." A human being is a human being.

Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.

We need to unlearn some of our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves.

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.

Some women and men seem to need each other.

You can hardly open a newspaper without seeing that a woman has been killed by a man for clearly gender-related reasons.

One day an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the Earth!

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

The need to treat ourselves as well as we treat others. It's women's version of the Golden Rule.

If you add up all the forms of genocide, from female infanticide and genital mutilation to so-called honor crimes, sex trafficking, and domestic abuse, everything, we lose about 6 million humans every year just because they were born female. That's a holocaust every year.

Gratitude never radicalized anybody. I don't care if they recognize the past, I just want them to get angry about the present and keep going.

Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.

I am terminally sentimental about graduations. They are more individual than weddings, more conscious than christenings, or bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs. They are almost as much a step into the unknown as funerals-though I assure you, there is life after graduation.

I'm more often confronted by women who come from religious traditions and don't feel that they have a place in the feminist movement. I've felt pressure when reporters asked me, "Do you believe in God?" I do say, "No. I believe in people."

Too much of our lives corresponds to the 'lost-wallet' theory of life. You lose something, spend a long time finding it, and then feel grateful to be back where you started.

We have to imagine change before we can begin to move toward it.