Gloria Steinem Quotes

In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: 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? I leave further improvisation up to you.) ~ Gloria Steinem

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

Now, we are becoming the men we wanted to marry. Once, women were trained to marry a doctor, not be one. ~ Gloria Steinem

Yeah, equal pay for equal work and our bodies ourselves and Gloria Steinem and all that jazz ... but in that dusty dark little corner of every woman's heart where we keep our maps of Tierra del Fuego lives the hunger to fetch a powerful man his slippers on her hands and knees. ~ Tiffany Reisz

I respect Gloria Steinem enormously. But I never wanted to be in any kind of movement - and if you're over a certain age, you better keep your bra on because nothing's worse than saggy duds. ~ Carmen Dell'Orefice

For me, those weeks in Boston, with Wilma, became a lesson in her ability to be "of good mind," in her phrase, which also meant a people's ability to survive. ~ Gloria Steinem

Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is. ~ Gloria Steinem

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. ~ Gloria Steinem

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. ~ Gloria Steinem

People now ask me if I'm passing the torch. I always explain that no, I'm keeping my torch, thank you very much. And I'm using it to light the torches of others.

Because the truth is that the old image of one person with a torch is part of the problem, not the solution. We each need a torch if we are to see where we're going.

And together, we create so much more light. ~ Gloria Steinem

The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look instead of by our heads and our hearts. ~ Gloria Steinem

Obviously there is no such thing as race, and in many ways, sex is a continuum, not a binary. So it doesn't make sense to label people in that way. ~ Gloria Steinem

Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular. ~ Gloria Steinem

I can only tell you the kind of power I want, which is the power to persuade. But I do not want the power to tell other people what to do. Persuade assumes that the other person is going to make the decision. Especially as a writer and an activist, I want the power to put ideas and possibilities out there, but I understand that they will only work if they are freely chosen, so I don't want the power to dictate or to force the choice, ever. ~ Gloria Steinem

if you've experienced discrimination in one form, you're more likely to recognize it in another. Also ~ Gloria Steinem

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. ~ Gloria Steinem

Not even in a movie had I ever seen a wife with a journey of her own. Marriage was always the happy end, not the beginning. It was the 1950s, and I confused growing up with settling down. ~ Gloria Steinem

Between what is and what could be? ~ Gloria Steinem

This is a crucial job of being an organizer. You leave a dark basement and try to explain to people in the sunshine what it's like to live down there. I've learned this is best done by bringing these different groups of people together. Those with extra money discover how much more satisfying it is to see talent and fairness grow then to see objects accumulate. Those without money learn the valuable lesson that money doesn't cure all woes. Instead, it may actually insulate and isolate. ~ Gloria Steinem

YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING. - Native Elders ~ Gloria Steinem

Women used to be elected only when their husbands died and they became widows. The men found this was too hard on them. That's why they've become feminists. ~ Gloria Steinem

In the late '60s, people were saying we need power to, not power over. Power to do, accomplish, create, not power over other people. ~ Gloria Steinem

God knows (She knows) that women try. ~ Gloria Steinem

There is a healthier self within each of us, just wating for encouragement ~ Gloria Steinem

You are the leader you've been waiting for. ~ Gloria Steinem

I guess 35 years ago, I thought we had more of a democracy than we actually do. Majority support doesn't help unless the majority is active and votes - but the opposition minority votes a much greater proportion, so we often lose by a narrow margin. ~ Gloria Steinem

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

Women well understood how to restrict birth through timing of sexual intercourse, herbs and abortifacients. I suspect the focus on men's control of women as the means of reproduction came later, in the last five percent or so of human history, with the idea of children as property and labor. One needed to have as many as possible, never mind about women's health or mobility or brainpower. Women's freedom was restricted in order to make sure of the paternity and ownership of children. ~ Gloria Steinem

I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again. ~ Gloria Steinem

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

Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers. ~ Gloria Steinem

In a general way, anything that affects men is taken more seriously than anything that affects only women. ~ Gloria Steinem

Logic is in the eye of the logician. ~ Gloria Steinem

After feminism, I suddenly realised: not everyone has to live the same way. Imagine that! ~ Gloria Steinem

I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are discriminated against,' and I got so mad. ~ Gloria Steinem

That's why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change. ~ Gloria Steinem

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

Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production. ~ Gloria Steinem

We need to raise our sons more like our daughters. We need to relieve them of this burden of the idea that to be masculine they have to be superior, which is what they get addicted to, and why both racism and sexism are crimes that I call superiority crimes. ~ Gloria Steinem

There's no emotion more revolutionary than empathy. ~ Gloria Steinem

If I read the word 'problematize' one more time, I'm going to vomit. ~ Gloria Steinem

Some women and men seem to need each other. ~ Gloria Steinem

I think one of the great innovations of sexual harassment law was that it did not use the word "consent." It used the word "welcome." ~ Gloria Steinem

I'd just begun to be taken seriously as a freelance writer, but after the Playboy article, I mostly got requests to go underground in some other semi-sexual way. It was so bad that I returned an advance to turn the Playboy article into a paperback, even though I had to borrow the money. ~ Gloria Steinem

It wasn't the victory of one man or the death of another. It was the death of the future, and of our youth, because we might be rather old before the conservers left and the compassionate men came back. Saturday. ~ Gloria Steinem

All movements need a few people who can't be fired. ~ Gloria Steinem

What we're told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides. ~ Gloria Steinem

The androcentric, patriarchal cultures, whatever you want to call it, are quite new. So, every economic statement should start with reproduction, not production. Every statement for human rights ought to include reproduction as a basic human right, like freedom of speech. ~ Gloria Steinem

For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn't yet ready for editorials in the Daily News. ~ Gloria Steinem

Writing is always harder than talking. ~ Gloria Steinem

I think that part of everybody's success is due to their looks, but it just works in different ways. If you're whatever society calls attractive, then people say that you got ahead because of your looks-especially if you're a woman. If you're whatever society says is not attractive, then they say you got ahead because you're compensating, you couldn't get a man or whatever. So everybody pays the same penalty for the fact that women are assessed for their outsides rather than for what's in our heads and our hearts. ~ Gloria Steinem

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

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. ~ Gloria Steinem

the Catholic Church not only didn't oppose abortion but actually regulated it until the mid-nineteenth century. It was made a mortal sin mostly for population reasons.8 Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools - plus the doctrine of papal infallibility - so they traded. Also, ~ Gloria Steinem

Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger - and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn't usually mean including women. ~ Gloria Steinem

Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasn't for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out. ~ Gloria Steinem

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. ~ Gloria Steinem

If each person in the room promises that in the twenty-four hours beginning the very next day she or he will do at least one outrageous thing in the name of simple justice, then I promise I will, too. It doesn't matter whether the act is as small as saying, "Pick yourself up" (a major step for those of us who have been our family's servants) or as large as calling for a strike. The point is that, if each of us does as promised, we can be pretty sure of two results. First, the world one day later won't be quite the same.
Second, we will have such a good time doing it that we will never again get up in the morning saying, "WILL I do anything outrageous?" but only "WHAT outrageous act will I do today ~ Gloria Steinem

Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least. ~ Gloria Steinem

Take public speaking: I spent all of my twenties and early thirties avoiding it. When I once asked a speech teacher about my aversion, she explained that dancers and writers were especially difficult to teach to speak in public, since both had chosen a profession in which they didn't have to talk - and I had been both. ~ Gloria Steinem

There were never that many women stand-up comics in the past because the power to make people laugh is also a power that gets people upset. ~ Gloria Steinem

I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives. ~ Gloria Steinem

[On gender-rating by insurance companies:] They say the reason they get to charge more is we have children. I would say having children is a socially useful act. Being female is not a preexisting condition. ~ Gloria Steinem

The mark, to me, of a constructive argument is one that looks at a specific problem and says, 'What shall we do about this?' And a nonconstructive one is one that tries to label people. ~ Gloria Steinem

What happens at 50, more or less, you lose what you need to create another person, to sustain another person; you keep what you need to sustain yourself. And there's something wonderful about that. ~ Gloria Steinem

Because we are communal creatures, if you're with people who think you're smart, you're smart, and if they think you're dumb, you're dumb. ~ Gloria Steinem

Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight. ~ Gloria Steinem

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal. ~ Gloria Steinem

Men can be just as loving and nurturing as women-- it's a libel on men to say they can't-- but we all learn by example. Boys just need nurturing men in their lives so they know it's okay for them to be nurturing. ~ Gloria Steinem

Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys. ~ Gloria Steinem

There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things. ~ Gloria Steinem

Decisions are best made by the people affected by them. ~ Gloria Steinem

When you're dependent, it's very hard not to be worried about the approval of whoever and whatever you're dependent on. For ~ Gloria Steinem

I think I've wasted some of my time, but used most of it well, and have realized that my life is not separate from other people's lives or from the universe. I think our moments of happiness really come from a feeling of unity. ~ Gloria Steinem

Thanks to her, I began to learn about the Trickster, a common figure in Native myhtologies, a boundary crosser who can go anywhere. Unlike the Jester and the Clown, who are at the bottom of a hieractchical pile and surivive only by making the king laugh, the Trickster is free, a paradox, a break of boundaries who makes us laugh- and laughter lets the sacred it. ~ Gloria Steinem

Patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all
even as we forge different individual choices within them
just as do themegapatterns of nationalism or racism. ~ Gloria Steinem

You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it. ~ Gloria Steinem

I love the coffee shops and reading rooms where one can sit and talk or browse forever. I ~ Gloria Steinem

In almost any situation, if you have been the powerful one, which would tend to be men more than women but not always, it's very important to listen as much as you talk. If you have been the less powerful one, it's very important to talk as much as you listen. ~ Gloria Steinem

Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective-women's bank, women's music, women's studies, women's caucus. That adjective did more than change a phrase. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics. ~ Gloria Steinem

If you are in a place where you're more powerful than the people around you, listen as much as you talk. And if you're less powerful, talk as much as you listen, Gloria Steinem ~ Oprah Winfrey

Whatever you want to do,do it now. ~ Gloria Steinem

There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better. ~ Gloria Steinem

The final word on the political non-implications of group differences must go to Gloria Steinem: There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other occupations should be open to everyone. ~ Steven Pinker

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. ~ Gloria Steinem

I was surprised to find myself in tears. Because these women had trusted me to help as a writer, I began to see a way of bringing together two things - writing and activism - that until then had torn me apart in everyday life. ~ Gloria Steinem

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square. ~ Gloria Steinem

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. ~ Gloria Steinem

In 2012, Gloria Steinem sat down in her home for an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Gloria reiterated that progress for women in the home has trailed progress in the workplace, explaining, "Now we know that women can do what men can do, but we don't know that men can do what women can do."34 I believe they can and we should give them more chances to prove it. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Unequal access to money and media plus bias, external and internalized, and male-dominant religions and illegality at the polls - all those are reasons for women's wildly unequal political power. ~ Gloria Steinem

Flo kept reminding me that they gave us an opportunity to teach, though each one was also punishing to the soul. ~ Gloria Steinem

You're afraid to be close to women. Because it's not masculine to be close to women. The last time you were close to a woman, you were a child. ~ Gloria Steinem

The word 'still' has entered my life. People say to me, 'You're still traveling, you're still wearing blue jeans. ~ Gloria Steinem

But I realize now that the art of living in the present is not so much controlling time, it's losing track of time. This is most likely to happen when we surrender to something we love to do: not because it's a demand, or an emergency, or an inability to do anything else. Seeking out what we love so much that we lose track of time when we're doing it - that goes beyond Einstein's theory and puts us into his life. He loved his work so much that he had to be careful while shaving; otherwise, he cut himself when a spontaneous idea struck. That is a hint of the timeless Now. ~ Gloria Steinem

When she visited me in New York during her sixties and seventies, she always told taxi drivers that she was eighty years old ("so they will tell me how young I look"), and convinced theater ticket sellers that she had difficulty in hearing long before she really did ("so they'll give us seats in the front row"). ~ Gloria Steinem

At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry. ~ Gloria Steinem

Everyone is unique and each experience is different. ~ Gloria Steinem

The surest way to be alone is to get married. ~ Gloria Steinem

I think that we have successfully said that rape is not sex, it's violence. But what we have not successfully said is that pornography is not erotica. Porne means female slaves. Eros has an idea of love and mutual pleasure and free choice. I fear that pornography is taking over sex when in fact it's way more about domination. ~ Gloria Steinem

Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise. ~ Gloria Steinem