Gloria Steinem Quotes

141 Sourced Quotes

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

Gloria Steinem
The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination.

Gloria Steinem
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
Writing is the only thing that... when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead.

Gloria Steinem
A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

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

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

Gloria Steinem
The patterns that are normalized in the family — the whole idea that some people cook and some people eat, that some listen and others talk, and even that some people control others in very economic or even violent ways — that kind of hierarchy is what makes us vulnerable to believing in class hierarchy, to believing in racial hierarchy, and so on.

Gloria Steinem
However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.

Gloria Steinem
The men I've met who were the best allies of feminism are those who see their stake in it; who see that they themselves are being limited by a culture that deprives men of human qualities deemed feminine, which are actually just the qualities necessary to raise kids — empathy and attention to detail and patience. Men have those qualities too but they're not encouraged to develop them. And so they miss out on raising their kids, and they actually shorten their own lives. 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
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