Gloria Steinem Quotes

I would say that each of us has only one thing to gain from the feminist movement: Our whole humanity. Because gender has wrongly told us that some things are masculine and some things are feminine... which is bullshit.

Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it's amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects.

It was the first female-style revolution: no violence and we all went shopping.

God knows (She knows) that women try.

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

In the last 25 years, we've convinced ourselves and a majority of the country that women can do what men can do. Now we have to convince the majority of the country - and ourselves - that men can do what women can do. ... Let's face it: until men are fully equal inside the home, women will never be really equal outside it.

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.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.

The ends and means are a seamless web.

When unique voices are united in a common cause, they make history.

It doesn't matter what word we use, if it has the same content, it will be treated in the same way. There are other words - there's "womanist," there's "mujerista," there's "women's liberationist" - all mean the same thing and they get the same ridicule. I think we just need to choose what word we feel comfortable with that says women are full human beings, and whatever that word is, it will get a lot of opposition. But it will also attract a lot of support. But this is a revolution, not a public relations movement.

I think we're all enmeshed in this political system that is devoted to controlling reproduction. You didn't invent it; I didn't invent it. Thirty percent of us are trying to preserve it, and 70 percent are trying to change it. We're not active enough or voting enough or mad enough.

Voting isn't the most we can do. But it is the least.

The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights

In the U.S. for instance, the value of a homemaker's productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar and the big number was attributed to the husband's pain and suffering.

I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion.

A man can be called ruthless if he bombs a country to oblivion. A woman can be called ruthless if she puts you on hold.

Women are only half responsible for children. Men raise children as much as women do. Until men are as nurturing as women are, and until women are as active outside the home as men are, we won't have democratic families, and therefore we won't have democracy, and we will continue this hierarchical notion of life.

Being married is like having somebody permanently in your corner. It feels limitless, not limited.

I live in the land of delight - of just walking in the street, and the sun is shining, and I'm on my way to Starbucks and I'm feeling good. I also live for those aha! moments when you understand something new, when you see two things fitting together to make a surprising third. There's actually a chemical that's produced in the brain by learning that gives you that little ecstatic moment of, Oh, that's why.

I don't think there's any country that has equal pay, not even Sweden or Iceland.

In short, pornography is not about sex. It's about an imbalance of male-female power that allows and even requires sex to be used as a form of aggression. ... But until we finally untangle sexuality and aggression, there will be more pornography and less erotica. There will be little murders in our beds - and very little love.

She is a water bug on the surface of life.

It would be a disaster to have Sarah Palin or Carly Fiorina in the White House, so it's not just a woman, but a woman who stands for the majority needs of women. It's not just getting a job for one woman, it's making life better for all women.

Whoever has power takes over the noun - and the norm - while the less powerful get an adjective.

I wasn't even in a newspaper office where I was getting assignments in competition with other people. I remember earlier, though, that I knew a young woman who had been published in the New Yorker, and I was so jealous of her. It wasn't exactly a personal competition. I just envied that accomplishment.

There are many more women who identify as unique people as well as mothers, or instead of as mothers, than there used to be and, hopefully, there are more men who identify as fathers.

If the men in the room would only think how they would feel graduating with a 'spinster of arts' degree they would see how important this is.

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.

The Internet is an almost miraculous way of getting information, of finding and organizing with each other, both minutely and globally. A million times better than the phone and the mimeograph! Also much better than TV, which is one-way and passive.

Whatever a 'superior' group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an 'inferior' group has will be used to justify its plight. Black men were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'stronger' than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'weaker.

A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.

If you love your work, I'm not sure you have hobbies. I try to say no to things that other people could do and only say yes to things that only I could do.

I believe that change comes from the bottom, not the top.

It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standards that implies).

No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.

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

Society definitely encourages and condones men's violence toward women. Not as much as it used to be when it was less visible, and there were still laws on the books that made it alright for men to beat their wives, as long as it was within certain limits, and women were chattel.

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

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

But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child -- a true self who is waiting.

Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy.

Behave like everything you do matters.

Most women are one man away from welfare.

We need to stop raising boys to think that they need to prove their masculinity by being controlling or by not showing emotion or by not being little girls.

The voting booth is the only place that a pauper equals a billionaire, and any woman equals any man.

Whatever each individual woman is facing; only she knows her biggest challenge. However, if we add up the problems that affect the biggest numbers of women, then issues having to do with physical safety and reproduction are still the biggest. Female bodies are still the battleground, whether that means restricting freedom, birth control and safe abortion in order to turn them into factories, or abandoning female infants because females are less valuable for everything other than reproduction.

... if young women have a problem, it's only that they think there's no problem.