Steinem Quotes & Sayings

Perfectionism attaches to what is valued in the culture. — Gloria Steinem

If you're raised in a house where it's okay for one group to eat and another to cook, or for one group to get more education money than the other or to be more free than the other, or where one parent gives in to the will of the other or may be verbally or even physically abused by the other. This gives you an idea of human worth. — Gloria Steinem

A lot of the people who are supposed to be enforcing the crime, enforcing the law, are also criminals. They've suppressed something in their childhood and they don't want to think they themselves were sexually abused as children or they are abusing their own children and they're sitting on a bench and they either can't admit it, won't admit it, depending on how deeply buried it is. — Gloria Steinem

There's really a shortage of good freelance writers ... There are a lot of talented people who are very erratic, so either they don't turn it in or they turn it in and it's rotten; it's amazing. Somebody who's even maybe not all that terrific but who is dependable, who will turn in a publishable piece more or less on time, can really do very well. — Gloria Steinem

She didn't put her finger to the wind; she became the wind. — Gloria Steinem

Roots cannot exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. — Gloria Steinem

Violence is not inevitable. I mean, the only inevitable form of violence is the kind that we understand, the only legitimate (if there can ever be legitimate violence) and that's self-defense. — 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

For women ... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique. — Gloria Steinem

Any insistence on equal pay is crucial and any redefinition of work to include caregiving work so that it also has an economic value, at least at replacement level, that's crucial. So change does come from the bottom up, and it will come from girls and women and men who understand that for us all to be human beings instead of being grouped by gender is good for them, too. — Gloria Steinem

How can I combine career and family? — Gloria Steinem

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. — 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

What I think we need to do is infuse everyday and every action with the kind of values we hope will be in the future, with kindness, with nurturing, with dreams, ambition, using your talents, not resorting to violence, other forms of conflict resolution, with humor, with poetry, with music. — Gloria Steinem

I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan. — Gloria Steinem

When pain has been intertwined with love and closeness, it's very difficult to believe that love and closeness can be experienced without pain. — Gloria Steinem

Movements are like rivers. Dipping into them is never the same twice. — Gloria Steinem

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

The ends and means are a seamless web. — Gloria Steinem

Instead, we talked about the reasons to support political leaders who support us, never mind party labels. It was the kind of campaigning only a movement could do. — Gloria Steinem

I ... understand that age is kind of awesome. I am fortunate enough to know women like Gloria Steinem - who I think is one of the most stunning women on the planet - [who] doesn't touch her face. Diane Keaton, Annette Bening - all of these fabulous, fearless women who are flawless - they embrace it! — Jennifer Aniston

It's heartbreaking to watch people working against themselves. — 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

This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. — Gloria Steinem

Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular. — Gloria Steinem

If you listen to the Catholic bishops you would think that Catholics are against contraception and legal abortion, but if you ask actual Catholics, you discover that more than 90% of Catholic women use contraception and Catholic women seem to need and choose legal abortion at about the same rate as everybody else. The problem is that the backlash occupies positions of power, not that it represents the majority of people. — Gloria Steinem

Perhaps because women are seen as good listeners, I find that a traveling woman - perhaps especially a traveling feminist - becomes a kind of celestial bartender. — Gloria Steinem

The error that we tend to make is that we think that women's magazines are what editors want and what their readers want - and thus are social indicators - when, in fact, they are what advertisers want. They're just advertising indicators. — Gloria Steinem

Democracy is mob rule with income taxes. — Gloria Steinem

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism. — Gloria Steinem

I'm not sure we can understand another country if we don't understand our own. — Gloria Steinem

But controversy is a teacher. — Gloria Steinem

Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted. — 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

Housewives are dependent creatures who are still children ... parasites. — Gloria Steinem

If you have two groups of people and you say one is inferior to the other, which is a lie, then the only way to maintain the lie is through violence or the threat of violence. — Gloria Steinem

We choose to be writers because we don't want to talk. — 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

The more polarized the gender roles, the more violent the society. The less polarized the gender roles, the more peaceful the society. — Gloria Steinem

You know the hospital shows on television?" this woman asks. "When someone's heart stops and has to be restarted with electric paddles? That's what you and Margaret did for us. Please tell her daughter our hearts have been going ever since. — 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

Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. — 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

Secretary of state is far superior to vice president, because it's involved in continuously solving problems and making policy and not being on standby. — Gloria Steinem

The U.S. has more guns per capita and supplies more guns to the world than any other country. What would be a fistfight without guns turns into dead bodies with them. Families with guns in the house are more likely to shoot themselves accidentally than to shoot any intruder. Women abused by their partners have a five-fold increased risk of being killed when their partner owns a gun. Every three hours, at least one child is wounded or killed by gunfire. — Gloria Steinem

Laughter is the only free emotion-the only one that can't be compelled.p.181 — 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

All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror. — Gloria Steinem

People are quite clear in viewing nuns as the servants and the teachers and the supporters of the poor. You contrast that with the fact that the Vatican did virtually nothing about long-known pedophiles, and it's just too much. — Gloria Steinem

Our grief is not a cry for war. — Gloria Steinem

By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God. — Gloria Steinem

I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart. — 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

Humor is the only free emotion. I mean, you can compel fear, as we know. You can compel love, actually ... But you can't compel laughter. It happens when two things come together and make a third unexpectedly. — Gloria Steinem

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other. — Gloria Steinem

In other cases of unadmitted bias, I had used the time-honored movement tactic of reversing the race or sex or ethnicity or sexuality involved, then seeing if the response would be the same. — Gloria Steinem

Safety. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, When the slave leaves bondage, his first act is to name himself. — Gloria Steinem

A person who has experienced something is almost always far more expert on it than are the experts. — Gloria Steinem

I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life. — Gloria Steinem

We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money. — 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

If men could menstruate ... clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much.... Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. Of course, some men would still pay for the prestige of such commercial brands as Paul Newman Tampons, Muhammed Ali's Rope-a-Dope Pads, John Wayne Maxi Pads, and Joe Namath Jock Shields - "For Those Light Bachelor Days." Gloria Steinem — Sawyer King

I always thought that "humanist" was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word. — Gloria Steinem

No matter how hard I worked, whatever I accomplished was attributed to my looks. If you're working your ass off, then you don't want to be told that you only got whatever because of the way you look. It takes the heart out of you. — Gloria Steinem

The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin. — 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

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 did not see any way that I could possibly give birth to someone else and also give birth to myself. Far from feeling guilty, it was the first time that I had taken responsibility for my own life. — Gloria Steinem

I was the only "girl writer," probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, "Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity. — Gloria Steinem

There's one logical generational difference and that is that young women will have more chances to support a female president than older women. Older women feel it's their last chance, so that's just a factual, obvious difference. But other than that it depends on experience, on individual experience. — Gloria Steinem

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

He took comfort in not knowing about the future. — Gloria Steinem

Listening to these stories reminded me of the words of the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah: For seasons and seasons and seasons, all our movement has been going against our self, a journey into our killer's desire. — Gloria Steinem

Reading in the car was so much my personal journey that when my mother urged me to put down my book and look out the window, I would protest, But I just looked an hour ago! — Gloria Steinem

Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself ... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home. — Gloria Steinem

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

If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story. — Gloria Steinem

Now we know that women can do what men can do ... , but we don't know that men can do what women can 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

RBG's old friend Gloria Steinem, who marvels at seeing the justice's image all over campuses, is happy to see RBG belie Steinem's own long-standing observation: "Women lose power with age, and men gain it." Historically, one way women have lost power is by being nudged out the door to make room for someone else. — Irin Carmon

And I was angry because the media took racism seriously - or pretended to - but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend. — 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

Soon we discovered the intensity of interest in the simple idea that each person's shared humanity and individual uniqueness far outweighed any label by group of birth, whether sex, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religious heritage, or anything else. — 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

I think we all have the power to name ourselves. I try to call people what it is they wish to be called. But we can take the sting out of epithets and bad words by using them. — Gloria Steinem

The travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote that our nomadic past lives on in our need for distraction, our mania for the new. — Gloria Steinem

The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine. People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together. — Gloria Steinem

More women are becoming the men they wanted to marry, but too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry. That leaves most women with two jobs, one outside the home and one in it ... — Gloria Steinem

It was a constitutional convention for the female half of the country. After all, we had been excluded from the first one. — Gloria Steinem

Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy. — Gloria Steinem

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world. — Gloria Steinem

Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence - and just as adventurous. — Gloria Steinem

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.' — Gloria Steinem