Top 100 Steinem's Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Steinem's

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. The model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then,

Gloria Steinem

#5. For women, all women, whatever our sexuality, it's crucial to our health that we are able to separate sexuality from reproduction. I mean whether or not we can control when we give birth is the biggest element in our health, our education, our economic welfare, our life expectancy, everything.

Gloria Steinem

#6. Women have two choices: Either she's a feminist or a masochist.

Gloria Steinem

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. Controlling women as the means of reproduction is made even more necessary by any race or caste or class system. It just comes together, it's just like life. And therefore it's not even practical to be a feminist without being anti-racist or against classism. It just doesn't work.

Gloria Steinem

#10. It would be a disaster to have Sarah Palin or Carly Fiorina in the White House, so it's not just a woman, but a woman who stands for the majority needs of women. It's not just getting a job for one woman, it's making life better for all women.

Gloria Steinem

#11. A journey - whether it's to the corner grocery or through life - is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, the road is not like that at all. It's the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road - combined with our search for meaning - that make travel so addictive.

Gloria Steinem

#12. The road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic "Odyssey," of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it's really about a man on the road. There's an assumption that the road is too dangerous for women.

Gloria Steinem

#13. The same way that racism is a white person's problem, violence against women is a men's problem.

Gloria Steinem

#14. 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

#15. You may very well fall in love with somebody who makes less money, who's younger than you, who weighs less than you.

Gloria Steinem

#16. Because women of color were more likely to be in the paid labor force, they were more likely to recognize discrimination, so they were always leading the women's movement.

Gloria Steinem

#17. There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

Gloria Steinem

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. You're a unique person. You should do what you're suited to do. We all should. It's the only way to be happy. That pressure is all outside. It's external.

Gloria Steinem

#21. 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

#22. 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

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

Gloria Steinem

#24. The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights

Gloria Steinem

#25. Nothing changes the gender equation more significantly than women's economic freedom.

Gloria Steinem

#26. I'm clearly not frightened of flying because I fly all the time, but every once in a while I do, as we all do, think, What if this plane goes down? And I think, Well, if I'm holding the hand of the person sitting next to me, then I'm holding everyone's hand.

Gloria Steinem

#27. I wouldn't want to generalize, but we still do live in a society that's sexist and racist and addicted to class and has the ridiculous idea that if you have money you're smarter, which Donald Trump by himself should be able to disprove.

Gloria Steinem

#28. Women are more than smart enough to see that McCain's policies are a disaster ... He is anti- every reproductive issue we've ever fought for.

Gloria Steinem

#29. The need to treat ourselves as well as we treat others. It's women's version of the Golden Rule.

Gloria Steinem

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. The most impersonal seeming audiences eventually just say such intimate, smart, wise, amazing, totally surprising, funny things. It's empowering, in the sense of feeling like you're a part of something really important.

Gloria Steinem

#33. If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say. I'm a feminist, that's a transformation of society.

Gloria Steinem

#34. 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

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

Gloria Steinem

#36. It's as if attentive
people create a magnetic force field for stor-
ies the tellers themselves didn't know they
had within them.

Gloria Steinem

#37. 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

#38. It's easier to blame the person with less power.

Gloria Steinem

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife's household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate - a failure of the imagination.

Gloria Steinem

#42. We will live to see the day that St. Patrick's Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.

Gloria Steinem

#43. What's so valuable about HBO is they tell stories. We learn from stories.

Gloria Steinem

#44. It's one of the great things about campaigns that experience trumps everything,

Gloria Steinem

#45. It's obviously a great sign of growth and success that the media no longer try to embody the bigness and diversity of the women's movement in one person. Only a diverse group can symbolize a movement.

Gloria Steinem

#46. The most common characteristic of women's history is to be lost and discovered, lost again and rediscovered, lost once more and re-rediscovered - a process of tragic waste and terrible silences that will continue until women's stories are a full and equal part of the human story.

Gloria Steinem

#47. There's a big gap between public opinion polls and the vote in Washington, in Congress.

Gloria Steinem

#48. Don't worry about your background, whether it's odd or ordinary, use it, build on it.

Gloria Steinem

#49. MY LAST HOPE IS to open up the road - literally. So far it's been overwhelmingly masculine turf. Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it.

Gloria Steinem

#50. If you add up all the forms of genocide, from female infanticide and genital mutilation to so-called honor crimes, sex trafficking, and domestic abuse, everything, we lose about 6 million humans every year just because they were born female. That's a holocaust every year.

Gloria Steinem

#51. It's possible to be pro-sex and anti-pornography.

Gloria Steinem

#52. If what's inside your dreams wasn't already real inside you, you couldn't even dream it.

Gloria Steinem

#53. 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

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

Gloria Steinem

#55. All women, and men of color - we were owned like tables and chairs. We spent a hundred years getting a legal identity as human beings. That's a big thing.

Gloria Steinem

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. The question of whether one has one's own political power or goes to work for someone else is not only a feminist question.

Gloria Steinem

#59. Maybe U.S. policy makers should talk to taxi drivers.

Gloria Steinem

#60. 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

#61. A portable friend to all readers-especia lly but not only women-who need to learn that the Golden Rule works only if it's reversible: We must learn to treat ourselves as well as we wish to treat others.

Gloria Steinem

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. If young women have a problem, it's only that they think there's no problem.

Gloria Steinem

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. The definition of woman's work is shitwork.

Gloria Steinem

#72. 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

#73. It's not that women are less corruptible than men are, it's that women have had less chance to become corrupt.

Gloria Steinem

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. I don't think there's any country that has equal pay, not even Sweden or Iceland.

Gloria Steinem

#77. I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father's ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.

Gloria Steinem

#78. I want to help correct the inaccurate image of immigration in the media. There is an idea that women's issues are over here and immigration is over there. Three quarters of undocumented workers are women and children.

Gloria Steinem

#79. They would say well there's always been wars, men have always beaten women. But it isn't true in all cultures. It doesn't have to be true. And the first step is imaging.

Gloria Steinem

#80. There's no shortage of great young activists.

Gloria Steinem

#81. 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

#82. Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.

Gloria Steinem

#83. 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

#84. Having one's traditional role questioned is not a very comfortable experience, perhaps especially for women, who have been able to remain children, and to benefit from work they did not and could not do.

Gloria Steinem

#85. Carolyn Heilbrun's

Gloria Steinem

#86. It's a fundamental human right to decide to have children or not to have children.

Gloria Steinem

#87. 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

#88. For a man to say, "I have to leave work now because I need to do something with my kids," it's sometimes viewed as a career killer. He doesn't have the right drive. So when they depart from their gender roles, they face some of the same restrictions.

Gloria Steinem

#89. The whole idea is not to figure out what you should do that will matter, but to make each thing you do reflect the values you want, because we don't know what's going to matter in the future

Gloria Steinem

#90. Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it's amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects.

Gloria Steinem

#91. Men, through no fault of theirs, get born into cultures that tell them that if a woman can do it, it's not worth doing, or if they're not superior to women in one way or another, they're not really masculine.

Gloria Steinem

#92. Labeling makes the invisible visible, but it's limiting. Categories are the enemy of connecting. Link, don't rank.

Gloria Steinem

#93. 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

#94. The most hurtful thing is not what comes from our adversaries, it's what comes from our friends.

Gloria Steinem

#95. The old languages - at least the ones I know - don't have gender. They don't have gendered pronouns. There's no "he" and "she." A human being is a human being.

Gloria Steinem