Top 100 Steinem Quotes
#1. I respect women like Gloria Steinem who paved the way. But when you say 'feminist' now, there is a message that if you are sexy and you acknowledge that part of your personality publicly, then it's somehow an affront to women. And I reject that.
Megyn Kelly
#2. Gloria Steinem said it best: "You can't do it all. No one can have two full-time jobs, have perfect children and cook three meals and be multi-orgasmic 'til dawn ... Superwoman is the adversary of the women's movement."5
Sheryl Sandberg
#3. I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.
Gloria Steinem
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.
Camille Paglia
#7. I loved Jerry, and I wanted to have his baby." She laughed. "This was before women started looking at their vaginas in hand mirrors and Gloria Steinem told us we could be more than just mothers.
Michael Thomas Ford
#8. But let me tell you something. Gloria Steinem never helped me out; Larry Flynt did.
Courtney Love
#9. My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem
then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.
Erica Jong
#10. Today's free women, as Gloria Steinem might say, are reshaping the world once again, creating space for themselves and, in turn, for the independent women who will come after them. This is the epoch of the single women, made possible by the single women who preceded it.
Rebecca Traister
#11. 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
#12. The feminist movement is often clouded with Gloria Steinem's perspective, but I feel like denying women their sexuality is just as chauvinistic.
Amber Heard
#13. The reason I was angry all the time was that Gloria Steinem and all those people, without reading my work, were saying all these horrible things against me.
Camille Paglia
#14. Gloria Steinem's marriage is proof positive of the emotional desperation of ageing feminists who for over 30 years worshiped the steely career woman and callously trashed stay-at-home moms.
Camille Paglia
#15. I'm thankful for the work that feminists like Gloria Steinem have done. I am a feminist, but the geography for women today is vastly different than it was in the '60s.
Amber Heard
#16. I got a lady who liked George because she said he knew how to tie his tie right," said the black girl. "Gloria Steinem showed him how to tie it. You should have seen how he tied it before that.
Hunter S. Thompson
#17. My problem is I can think whatever I think - girl power, solidarity, Gloria Steinem rah rah rah - but I still feel the way I feel.
Which is jealous. And pissy about little things.
E. Lockhart
#18. Soon, a national and international feminist movement was challenging the idea that what happened to men was political but what happened to women was cultural; that the first could be changed but the second could not. - Gloria Steinem
Jay Allison
#19. 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
#20. Marriage was always the happening end, not the beginning.
Gloria Steinem
#21. I don't think there's any country that has equal pay, not even Sweden or Iceland.
Gloria Steinem
#22. The young women seem to think that they can only go out with or marry a man who is superior to them. The problem there is that they are wanting to be defeated, as opposed to finding a partner.
Gloria Steinem
#23. We're communal animals. If we're by ourselves, we can feel wrong and crazy and out of step with society. We really need those talking circles.
Gloria Steinem
#24. Allowing women the power to decide when and whether to have children is the only way to solve the 7 billion human load on this planet that threatens to destroy it. Women's equality is also men's survival.
Gloria Steinem
#25. 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
#26. I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said 'maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.' It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.
Gloria Steinem
#27. 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
#28. I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.
Gloria Steinem
#29. Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.
Gloria Steinem
#30. 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 labour on which this system still depends.
Gloria Steinem
#31. 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
#32. The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason," she often explained. "It's to keep your ass sensitive.
Gloria Steinem
#33. IF EVERYONE HAS A full circle of human qualities to complete, then progress lies in the direction we haven't been.
Gloria Steinem
#34. It's not that women are less corruptible than men are, it's that women have had less chance to become corrupt.
Gloria Steinem
#36. You can hardly open a newspaper without seeing that a woman has been killed by a man for clearly gender-related reasons.
Gloria Steinem
#38. In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we've laughed.
Gloria Steinem
#39. There's going to be a demand for perfectionism on the part of Hillary Clinton, or any other pro-equality woman candidate, that would not be made of men. There are going to be attacks based on different standards of morality and different standards of dress and physical attractiveness.
Gloria Steinem
#40. If men started taking care of children, the job will become more valuable.
Gloria Steinem
#41. If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.
Gloria Steinem
#43. She acquired a lifetime aversion to the phrases bless your heart and poor dears.
Gloria Steinem
#44. Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers.
Gloria Steinem
#45. When the gender role starts to descend, boys get into the masculine box.
Gloria Steinem
#46. So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?
Gloria Steinem
#47. I don't know if fury can compete with necessity as the mother of invention, but I recommend it.
Gloria Steinem
#48. 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
#49. You didn't leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.
Gloria Steinem
#50. 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
#51. Pearl Jam doesn't just sing about issues they care about. These guys walk it like they talk it.
Gloria Steinem
#52. If men menstruated, they would brag about how much and for how long.
Gloria Steinem
#54. The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us
Gloria Steinem
#55. Intelligence without character is a dangerous thing.
Gloria Steinem
#56. We are literally linked in a circle, including with nature, as well as with other human beings. Old societies didn't have and still don't have "he" and "she." They don't have gendered pronouns. They don't have a word for nature, because we're not separate from nature.
Gloria Steinem
#57. Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.
Gloria Steinem
#58. Anyone who believes we're living in a postfeminist age will learn that violence against females - from female infanticide and child marriage to honor killings and sex trafficking - has now produced a world with fewer females than males, a first in recorded history.
Gloria Steinem
#59. Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole ... patriarch!
Gloria Steinem
#60. It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
Gloria Steinem
#61. 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?
Gloria Steinem
#62. Women, we tend to become whole people by venturing outside of the home, learning to aspire, to achieve, to deal with conflict - all these qualities that are wrongly called masculine.
Gloria Steinem
#63. Nothing will happen automatically. Change depends on what you and I do every day.
Gloria Steinem
#64. 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
#66. As I was to learn, avoiding conflict causes conflict to seek you out.
Gloria Steinem
#67. What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them?
Gloria Steinem
#68. How long before both women and men are allowed to see self-respecting rebellion as a lifelong possibility?
Gloria Steinem
#69. Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don't have to put on an act. If I'm not feminine enough for someone, I don't care, because femininity is different in everyone's mind.
Gloria Steinem
#70. 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
#71. Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.
Gloria Steinem
#72. 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.
Gloria Steinem
#73. Remember: "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost." This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn't count.
Gloria Steinem
#74. 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
#75. If what's inside your dreams wasn't already real inside you, you couldn't even dream it.
Gloria Steinem
#76. Movements are like rivers. Dipping into them is never the same twice.
Gloria Steinem
#77. Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem
#78. We're changing ourselves to fit the world instead of changing the world to fit women.
Gloria Steinem
#79. Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.
Gloria Steinem
#80. 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
#81. Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.
Gloria Steinem
#82. Men tend to gain wholeness by acquiring the qualities that are wrongly called feminine.
Gloria Steinem
#83. The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture.
Gloria Steinem
#84. In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women who argued for the old hierarchy and against universal adult suffrage - often on religious grounds.
Gloria Steinem
#85. She seemed both proud and scared that I was where she had once wished to be.
Gloria Steinem
#86. Racism and sexism are intertwined [ ... ] and cannot be uprooted separately.
Gloria Steinem
#87. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.
Gloria Steinem
#89. The phenomenon of the woman who's asked what movie she wants to see, and she says, "I don't know. What do you want to see?" It's a tiny version of a big tendency. Women need to say, "This is what I want."
Gloria Steinem
#90. 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
#91. Even graffiti above a tunnel can begin a journey that never ends.
Gloria Steinem
#92. Anything a powerful group has is perceived as good, no matter what it is, and anything a less powerful group has is not so good, no matter how intrinsically great it might be.
Gloria Steinem
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. The art of being helpful is behaving as if everything we do matters - because we never know which things might.
Gloria Steinem
#97. I think we acquire habits of mind when we're little, and I lived in the future because I was always imagining being a grown-up, when I could get out.
Gloria Steinem
#99. What is frustrating is being told that no matter how hard I've worked, it counts less than my appearance. Although if you're not considered conventionally attractive, that also becomes an issue: you know, you're a feminist because you couldn't get a man.
Gloria Steinem
#100. 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
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