Gloria Steinem Quotes

141 Sourced Quotes

Why are women raped far away (say, Bosnia) called victims, while those raped nearby (say, a local campus) are playing victim politics?

Gloria Steinem
Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

Gloria Steinem
If you think about Martin Luther King and others in the leadership of the Civil Rights movement, they were all college-educated, middle class people. Nobody tries to diminish the Civil Rights movement by saying they were middle class.
It's true that the National Organization for Women in its early years was white middle class. But once it was joined by younger women from civil rights groups like SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) it changed profoundly. In any case, my life's ambition is to make white women as smart as black women. Because the group of women who still vote against their own self-interest are white married women.

Gloria Steinem
This is what forty looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?

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
The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute.

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
The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

Gloria Steinem
The Arab Spring did a great deal for women because the person who spread the word in the first place was a woman. Women participated in it; they were fully out there in the street. Nawal El Saadawi is a founding figure of Egyptian and Middle Eastern feminism who wrote a book opposing female genital mutilation (of which she is a victim). She's been banned. She's been in prison. She's now in her eighties and during the Arab Spring she was like the wise woman of Liberation Square, sitting in the middle of it as young women and young men came to her for instruction, for blessings, and so on.
But it's very often the case with revolutionary moments that women are present but then they're drummed out of it afterwards.

Gloria Steinem
Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

Gloria Steinem
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
The most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself — or will use military violence against another country — is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy: it's violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.

Gloria Steinem
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
Men were valued by what they did, women by how they looked and then by what their husbands did, and all of life was arranged (or so we thought) from the outside in.

Gloria Steinem
Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical answer that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.

Gloria Steinem
Women get hit with a double whammy. If they're attractive, they're presumed to have slept their way to the top. If they're unattractive, they are presumed to have chosen a profession because they could not get a man.

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

Gloria Steinem
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
Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.

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 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
Feminism isn't called the longest revolution for nothing.

Gloria Steinem
To me, the model of success is not linear. Success is completing the full circle of yourself.

Gloria Steinem