Gloria Steinem Quotes

141 Sourced Quotes

In the last 25 years, we've convinced ourselves and a majority of the country that women can do what men can do. Now we have to convince the majority of the country — and ourselves — that men can do what women can do.... Let's face it: until men are fully equal inside the home, women will never be really equal outside it.

Gloria Steinem
God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.

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

Gloria Steinem
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day. After all, a movement is only people moving.

Gloria Steinem
The act of acting morally is behaving AS IF EVERYTHING WE DO MATTERS.

Gloria Steinem
Human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us — which is both the good news and the bad news.

Gloria Steinem
No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.

Gloria Steinem
Pornography is about dominance and often pain. Erotica is about mutuality and always pleasure.

Gloria Steinem
Old or new, this wisdom too often remains in our heads. Only experience can make it a visceral part of our daily lives by bridging the distance from head to heart.

Gloria Steinem
Romance is a means to the end of self-completion, but love is an end in itself.

Gloria Steinem
I'm still the same person who grew up mostly in a Midwestern, factory-working neighborhood where talk about "self-esteem" would have seemed like a luxury.

Gloria Steinem
Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we've always wanted.

Gloria Steinem
My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.

Gloria Steinem
We've allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyondfifty, sixty, or seventy--all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics--many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.

Gloria Steinem
Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.

Gloria Steinem
A different world can be created or re-created-but not until we stop enshrining the economic values of invisible labor, infinite and obsessive growth, and a slow environmental suicide.

Gloria Steinem
This is the wisdom: If we bless our bodies, they will bless us.

Gloria Steinem
Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective-women's bank, women's music, women's studies, women's caucus. That adjective did more than change a phrase. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics.

Gloria Steinem
Most art in the world does not have a capital 'A,' but is a way of turning everyday objects into personal expressions.

Gloria Steinem
Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

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

Gloria Steinem
If you let Barnum & Bailey interpret a plot by Stendahl, it might come out to be something like the 1972 Democratic convention.

Gloria Steinem
I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had "crazy mothers." We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends.

Gloria Steinem
Members of a powerful group are raised to believe (however illogically) that whatever affects it will also affect them. On theother hand, members of less powerful groups are raised to believe (however illogically) that each individual can escape the group's fate. Thus, cohesion is encouraged on the one hand, and disunity is fostered on the other.

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
Women fear endangering men's approval so much, we don't even wait for them to say no. Or else we protect them, even if it means saying no to ourselves.

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
The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.

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
Intelligence in the service of poor instinct is really dangerous.

Gloria Steinem