Gloria Steinem Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Gloria Steinem.
Famous Quotes By Gloria Steinem
You have no choice but to live in the present, if you're really being open to events and people as they come along. — Gloria Steinem
Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt. — Gloria Steinem
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 — Gloria Steinem
I think if we could raise one generation of kids without violence and shaming, we don't know what might be possible. — Gloria Steinem
Now, we've made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children. — Gloria Steinem
When you say something in a wrong group - it will never be right, so you can not say anything wrong, when you don't belong to a group. — Gloria Steinem
I'm not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression. — Gloria Steinem
Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother - so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally. — Gloria Steinem
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
Economics anxiety may be even more common than the often identified 'math anxiety,' for unlike math, which has its personal uses, economics is seen as a mysterious set of forces manipulated from above. — Gloria Steinem
I'm so happy that we're finally hearing the stories and voices of women who make America. We do what we see, not what we're told, so an incomplete story of this country damages everyone. — Gloria Steinem
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. — Gloria Steinem
Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it - and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That's why Native people were guarding it. — Gloria Steinem
It's the biggest economic influence in a woman's life whether she can decide when and whether to have children or not. — Gloria Steinem
If you ask men about their body image, they will tell you they look better than they do. And if you ask a woman, she'll tell you she looks worse. — Gloria Steinem
I've finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long. — Gloria Steinem
If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate. — Gloria Steinem
Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part! — Gloria Steinem
We need to return and go forward to the understanding that there is God in all living things, not more in men than women, and not more in humans than in nature. To believe otherwise is only an excuse for dominating women and nature. — 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 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
Only women could bleed without injury or death; only they rose from the gore each month like a phoenix; only their bodies were in tune with the ululations of the universe and the timing of the tides. Without this innate lunar cycle, how could men have a sense of time, tides, space, seasons, movement of the universe, or the ability to measure anything at all? How could men mistress the skills of measurement necessary for mathematics, engineering, architecture, surveying - and so many other professions? In Christian churches, how could males, lacking monthly evidence of Her death and resurrection, serve the Daughter of the Goddess? In Judaism, how could they honor the Matriarch without the symbol of Her sacrifices recorded in the Old Ovariment? Thus insensible to the movements of the planets and the turning of the universe, how could men become astronomers, naturalists, scientists - or much of anything at all? — Gloria Steinem
Feminism isn't called the longest revolution for nothing. — Gloria Steinem
Transformation happens in small groups. Each person can speak and all listen. — Gloria Steinem
It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit. — 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
It's a big gift to be recognizable as part of something that matters to people, but that's not the same as being responsible for something. — Gloria Steinem
Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself. Fashion in the present means being individual and finding oneself. — Gloria Steinem
In thirty years or so, the majority will no longer be European Americans; the first generation of mostly babies of color has already been born. This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. — Gloria Steinem
Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women's movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step. — Gloria Steinem
For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn't yet ready for editorials in the Daily News. — Gloria Steinem
Surrealism is the triumph of form over content. — Gloria Steinem
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. — Gloria Steinem
That's a huge fear for middle-class women. It's not so much a fear for poor women, because poor women have always assumed that they are going to have to support themselves. It's middle-class women who have this fantasy that somebody else is going to support them. — 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
Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts. — Gloria Steinem
When the gender role starts to descend, boys get into the masculine box. — Gloria Steinem
It was the first female-style revolution: no violence and we all went shopping. — Gloria Steinem
The women's movement and gay and lesbian movements always come together, and our adversaries are always the same because the male supremacist, patriarchal, ultra-right-wing, religious fundamentalists, whatever you want to call it is devoted to saying that sex is only moral and okay when it is directed towards having children and occurs in patriarchal marriage, so the children are owned. — Gloria Steinem
Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas. — Gloria Steinem
It was a game, and life was the playing field. — Gloria Steinem
Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy. — Gloria Steinem
Don't think about making women fit the world
think about making the world fit women. — Gloria Steinem
It's time to leave. There is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road, because I can come home. I come home, because I am free to leave. — 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
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). — Gloria Steinem
Your problem is that you should like yourself better." Of course, he was right - but how could she like herself when she felt she had no self ? — Gloria Steinem
No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence. — Gloria Steinem
We learn most where we know the least. — Gloria Steinem
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. — Gloria Steinem
Marriage was always the happening end, not the beginning. — Gloria Steinem
The gender prism is just descending upon us. For instance, when we're girls of nine or 10 we may be climbing trees and saying, "I know what I want. I know what I think." And then suddenly at 11 or 12, the gender role takes hold, and adults tell us, "How clever of you to know what time it is." It happens to boys, too and even sooner - between five and eight. Before that, boys cry and express uncertainty. — Gloria Steinem
Then, as if in answer to a riddle posed years before, you will realize that this growth came from seeds you planted or watered or carried from place to place - and you'll be rewarded in the way that we as communal beings need most: you'll know you made a difference. — Gloria Steinem
The thing about aging is all your old lovers, pretty much if they were really friends, become your family. It's great. You have those terrible feelings of possessiveness and uncertainty go out the window. You have what you shared. You know you would help each other in times of trouble no matter what. — 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
If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you. — Gloria Steinem
A rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying. — Gloria Steinem
The point of the journey is not just healing. It's also recovering the truest, most spontaneous, joyful, and creative core of ourselves. — Gloria Steinem
priests dressed in skirts try to trump women's birth-giving power by baptizing with imitation birth fluid, calling us reborn, and going women one better by promising everlasting life. Indeed, — Gloria Steinem
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. — Gloria Steinem
The premise of most media is that only conflict is newsworthy. And that's just not true. I think for a lot of men, too - certainly for most women - there's enough real conflict without manufacturing it. The media formula is always to have a pro and con, to say there are two sides to any issue, when in fact there may be ten sides. — Gloria Steinem
I didn't hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it - and what it would be used to justify?) — Gloria Steinem
The more polarized the gender roles, the more violent the society. The less polarized the gender roles, the more peaceful the society. — Gloria Steinem
It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman - and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze - as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter - one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process - sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock - demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution. — Gloria Steinem
If hard things ultimately have a purpose, then they aren't so hard anymore. Therefore, I listed what I had learned: 1. It's easy to forget that people can think you think what you don't think. 2. Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't. 3. A writer's greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer's greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both. — Gloria Steinem
We are becoming the men we wanted to marry — Gloria Steinem
Liberation does not come from outside. — Gloria Steinem
If you consider that the gender roles are just political, then what you come to see is that the full circle of human qualities is divided up so that two-thirds are masculine and one-third is feminine. Women are missing more of their human qualities, so you'll find us on the fore-front of trying to change this. — Gloria Steinem
We choose to be writers because we don't want to talk. — Gloria Steinem
Judy Collins sings about in "The Blizzard," or read Alice Walker's essay "My Father's Country Is the Poor." Each — Gloria Steinem
Women tend to need the healthcare system more because we bear children. Insurance companies - not all of them, but many of them - 'gender-rate.' Women may pay 40% more for their health insurance than men do. — Gloria Steinem
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. — Gloria Steinem
In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance. — Gloria Steinem
I think laughter is crucial. Some of the original cultures, like the Dalit and the Native American, don't separate laughter and seriousness. — Gloria Steinem
Intelligence in the service of poor instinct is really dangerous. — Gloria Steinem
I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward am activist place where she herself could never go. — Gloria Steinem
As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun. — Gloria Steinem
As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot. — Gloria Steinem
The only thing I can't stand is discomfort. — Gloria Steinem
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. — Gloria Steinem
The new women in politics seem to be saying that we already know how to lose, thank you very much. Now we want to learn how to win. — Gloria Steinem
Some women and men seem to need each other. — Gloria Steinem
Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism.
In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled "Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs", and explains that it started "only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests. — Gloria Steinem
Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it. — Gloria Steinem
Mother's Day really was in its origin an antiwar day, an antiwar statement. Julia Ward Howe was sickened by what had happened during the Civil War, the loss of life, the carnage, and she created Mother's Day as a call for women all over the world to come together and create ways of protesting war, of making a kind of alternate government that could finally do away with war as an acceptable way of solving conflict. — Gloria Steinem
Anything being perceived as being superior takes the noun. And everything that isn't, that's judged to be inferior, requires an adjective. So there are black novelists and novelists. There are women physicians and physicians. Male nurses and nurses. — Gloria Steinem
Our brains are organized by narrative and image. After — Gloria Steinem
The political is personal. — Gloria Steinem
I want to say to you that there is life and dreams and surprises after 30-and 40, and 50, and 60, and 77! Believe me, life is one long surprise. — Gloria Steinem
It's hard to measure success when we're dealing with between 500 and 5,000 years of patriarchy depending on which continent we sit, so I would say feminism has been successful and we have a huge distance to go, huge. — Gloria Steinem
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn but to unlearn. — Gloria Steinem
For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead: (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, nce in a while, pride; and (3) it's frightening. — Gloria Steinem
It doesn't matter where we begin the personal/political circle, but it matters desperately that we complete it. — Gloria Steinem