Gloria Steinem - Men Quotes

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

Gloria Steinem
Perhaps men should think twice before making widowhood our only path to power.

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
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
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
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
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
Power in this country is often like hemophilia; it passes through women and then men get it.

Gloria Steinem
If men started taking care of children, the job will become more valuable.

Gloria Steinem
The less powerful group usually knows the powerful one much better than vice versa — blacks have had to understand whites in order to survive, women have had to know men — yet the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.

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
Regarding the idea that the women's movement is white and middle class — a fair share of the country is white and middle class. And certainly, there are racist white women. Certainly, there are sexist black men. All those things are true. But the other thing that's never said is that black women are much more likely to support feminist issues than white women. It makes sense because they're much more likely to be on the paid labor force than white women. And if you've experienced discrimination for one reason, you're probably more likely to recognize it for another reason.

Gloria Steinem
I can sometimes deal with men as equals and therefore can afford to like them.

Gloria Steinem
Women used to be elected only when their husbands died and they became widows. The men found this was too hard on them. That's why they've become feminists.

Gloria Steinem
More women are becoming the men they wanted to marry, but too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry. That leaves most women with two jobs, one outside the home and one in it...

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
Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

Gloria Steinem
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

Gloria Steinem
Whatever a 'superior' group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an 'inferior' group has will be used to justify its plight. Black men were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'stronger' than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'weaker.'

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