Feminism Gloria Steinem Quotes & Sayings

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age. — Gloria Steinem

Feminism is about friends and sisters and community. — Gloria Steinem

I also noticed that humor was even more of a survival tactic here than in most women's groups. As one asked: What did Columbus call primitive? Answer: Equal women. — Gloria Steinem

The accusation that feminism is bad for the family leads to understanding that it's bad for the patriarchal variety, but good for democratic families that are the basis of democracy. — Gloria Steinem

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

You should write about take no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules p.79 — Gloria Steinem

Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves. — Gloria Steinem

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men. — Gloria Steinem

II worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong. — Vita Sackville-West

As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, "Hate generalizes, love specifies". Thats what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies. — Gloria Steinem

Feminism starts out being very simple, and it ends up being a world view that questions hierarchy altogether. — Gloria Steinem

The nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters). — Gloria Steinem

Feminism is memory. — Gloria Steinem

Everyone has a home but me. — 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

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. — Gloria Steinem

Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste
and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key. — Gloria Steinem

When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel. — Gloria Steinem

Inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle. — 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

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. — Gloria Steinem

Feminism isn't called the longest revolution for nothing. — Gloria Steinem

The idea that women are 'our own worst enemies' forces us to admit that we don't have the power to be, even if we wanted too. — Gloria Steinem

In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up. — Gloria Steinem

There's no such thing as post-feminism. It's like saying post-democracy, excuse me, what does that mean? We're nowhere near equality, so the very idea of post-feminism is ridiculous. The same people who 30-40 years ago said the women's movement is not necessary, 'it's going against nature, my wife is not interested' [are] the same people now saying 'well it used to be necessary but not anymore.' The very invention of the word post-feminism is the current form of resistance. — Gloria Steinem

My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you. — Gloria Steinem

There's been the same kind of demonizing of the word 'feminism' as words like 'liberal,' 'affirmative action,' and so on. — 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

Feminism began to dawn on my brain belatedly in life. — Gloria Steinem

When men realize that feminism is a universal good that affects them in very intimate ways then I think they really become allies and leaders. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars and young women were treated like - well - young women. {...}
I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one. — 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

As a concept [androgyny] raise[s] anxiety levels by conjuring up a conformist, unisex vision, the very opposite of the individuality and uniqueness that feminism actually has in mind. — Gloria Steinem

Feminism is not antisexuality. On the contrary. It says that sexuality shouldn't be confused with violence and dominance and that it should be a matter of free choice. It shouldn't be forced on you by economics, including dependence on a husband, or by pressure. — Gloria Steinem

The political is personal. — Gloria Steinem

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual. — Gloria Steinem

If you are not a feminist in love, you fail to recognise someone who does not love you. Feminism makes love easier. Otherwise, there is the danger of feeling romantically drawn to someone who does not see you as an equal. — 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

Materialism has defeated feminism as well. In a sign of the times, Gloria Steinem was on the picket line when the first American DeBeers store opened on Fifth Avenue in June 2005, protesting the evictions of Bushmen in Botswana to make room for diamond miners and the charges that the company dealt in "blood diamonds" used to finance civil wars in Africa.
Her presence meant nothing to young Hollywood beauties who are pleased to shill for the diamond industry in magazine layouts and personal appearances.
As Steinem stood outside, Lindsay Lohan was inside the party, gushing over the possibility that she could get to wear one of the big rocks.
Asked by reporters about the Bushmen controversy, she shrugged it off: "I don't get involved in any drama. — Maureen Dowd

Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself. — Gloria Steinem

Comics are reflective of what's going on in larger culture. Wonder Woman came to be in her position when women were first entering the workplace in numbers during the war. Then Wonder Woman had another rise in the '70s when Gloria Steinem latched on to her as an icon for the [feminist] movement. I think we're seeing another wave of feminism today, a fourth wave characterized by intersectionality and the internet. And I think it falls right in line that we would see another wave of superheroines coming to the fore. — Kelly Sue DeConnick

I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off. — Gloria Steinem

As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism. — 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

One's enemies are always talking about 'post-feminism.' It is a word invented by people who would like to do away with feminism. — 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

At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women's "libbers", bra burners, and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters ... that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a "postfeminist" age ... — Gloria Steinem

But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead. — 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

Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't. — Gloria Steinem

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke ... She will need her sisterhood. — Gloria Steinem

Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power. — Gloria Steinem

Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims. — Gloria Steinem

Karla Jay's intimate account of life in the early years of feminism and gay liberation is as irresistible as a novel, but as credible, humorous, and unexpected as real life. — Gloria Steinem

In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them. — Gloria Steinem

The purpose of feminism is to free the uniqueness of the individual and to understand that inside each of us is a unique human being who is a combination of heredity and environment. — Gloria Steinem