Gloria Steinem Quotes

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

- Gloria Steinem

A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.

- Gloria Steinem

From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.

- Gloria Steinem

I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers.

- Gloria Steinem

'Ms.' always flouted the rules of the ad world that say, especially for products directed at women, that the ad must be connected to the editorial. You don't have food ads unless you have recipes. You don't get clothing ads unless you have lavish fashion coverage. We never did that; every other women's magazine does.

- Gloria Steinem

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

- Gloria Steinem

To say 'radical feminist' is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system is a root of race and class and other divisions.

- Gloria Steinem

Obviously there is no such thing as race, and in many ways, sex is a continuum, not a binary. So it doesn't make sense to label people in that way.

- Gloria Steinem

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

- Gloria Steinem

Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.

- Gloria Steinem

I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.

- Gloria Steinem

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

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

- Gloria Steinem

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.

- Gloria Steinem

Perfectionism attaches to what is valued in the culture.

- Gloria Steinem

The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.

- Gloria Steinem

We are still behaving as if a worker really doesn't have a family because the work pattern really was meant for men who really were the financial support but weren't looking after their families. We need to change this, and we can easily do that.

- Gloria Steinem

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.

- Gloria Steinem

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

We must begin to shift the emphasis of teen-age pregnancy to teen-age boys.

- Gloria Steinem

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

- Gloria Steinem

I'm so happy that we're finally hearing the stories and voices of women who make America. We do what we see, not what we're told, so an incomplete story of this country damages everyone.

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group.

- Gloria Steinem

Part of the reason that women go to college is to get out of the food service, clerical, pink-collar ghetto and into a more white-collar job. That does not necessarily mean they are being paid more than the blue-collar jobs men have.

- Gloria Steinem

Even before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking, 'Which candidate are Americans more ready for: a white woman or a black man?'

- Gloria Steinem

Pearl Jam doesn't just sing about issues they care about. These guys walk it like they talk it.

- Gloria Steinem

Because we are communal creatures, if you're with people who think you're smart, you're smart, and if they think you're dumb, you're dumb.

- Gloria Steinem

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

- Gloria Steinem

The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look instead of by our heads and our hearts.

- Gloria Steinem

Secretary of state is far superior to vice president, because it's involved in continuously solving problems and making policy and not being on standby.

- Gloria Steinem

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

A bad facelift is like a bad toupee.

- Gloria Steinem

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.

- Gloria Steinem

The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.

- Gloria Steinem

What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married.

- Gloria Steinem

Being misunderstood by people whose opinions you value is absolutely the most painful.

- Gloria Steinem

The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture.

- Gloria Steinem

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

You can see the absence of women in governing bodies from Congress to state legislators, on corporate boards, in tenured positions in academia, and as forepeople in factories.

- Gloria Steinem

I'm a freelance person, and I've always been able to support myself.

- Gloria Steinem

Actually, I believe there are more independents than either Republicans or Democrats, and yet those are the... that is the choice we have on the party ballot.

- Gloria Steinem

Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist.

- Gloria Steinem

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. There are many ways of supporting that, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all caregiving and making that amount tax deductible.

- Gloria Steinem

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

Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt.

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.

- Gloria Steinem

Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys.

- Gloria Steinem

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

- Gloria Steinem

If you ask men about their body image, they will tell you they look better than they do. And if you ask a woman, she'll tell you she looks worse.

- Gloria Steinem

The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.

- Gloria Steinem

I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.

- Gloria Steinem

The surest way to be alone is to get married.

- Gloria Steinem

I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives.

- Gloria Steinem

These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted, they think.

- Gloria Steinem

Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years - about twice as long as other bears - between having cubs. And after they're pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.

- 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

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

- Gloria Steinem

I'm not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression.

- Gloria Steinem

There's no shortage of great young activists.

- Gloria Steinem

If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?

- Gloria Steinem

How could you not love Norman Mailer? He was a total chauvinist, but also so vulnerable.

- Gloria Steinem

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.

- Gloria Steinem

Obviously, no LGBT person should be denied the ability to be who they are because their boss disagrees.

- Gloria Steinem

I remember someone once asked Jack Kennedy why he was paying such close attention to the renovation of the square across from the White House, and he said, 'It may be the only thing my presidency is remembered for.'

- Gloria Steinem

The electoral system is not where change starts - it usually starts in communities and from the bottom up - but it is where change can be stopped.

- Gloria Steinem

Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.

- Gloria Steinem

As for the American child's classic problem - too much mother, too little father - that would be cured by an equalization of parental responsibility.

- Gloria Steinem

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.

- Gloria Steinem

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

For twenty years, not a week went by when I wasn't on a plane.

- Gloria Steinem

The women's movement in England was totally against Margaret Thatcher.

- Gloria Steinem

The thing about aging is all your old lovers, pretty much if they were really friends, become your family. It's great. You have those terrible feelings of possessiveness and uncertainty go out the window. You have what you shared. You know you would help each other in times of trouble no matter what.

- Gloria Steinem

Men may feel just disempowered by intimacy, by being close to a woman, and also by feeling the tender feelings that they're ashamed of.

- Gloria Steinem

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

- Gloria Steinem

You can compel fear. You can even make someone feel they're in love if they're isolated and dependent for long enough. But laughter is free.

- Gloria Steinem

In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.

- Gloria Steinem

Do women compete for the favours of men? Yes. They've spent 5,000 years competing.

- Gloria Steinem

When I'm talking to groups that are all men, we talk about how the masculine role limits them. They often want to talk about how they missed having real fathers, real loving, present fathers, because of the way that they tried to fit the picture of masculinity.

- Gloria Steinem

It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.

- Gloria Steinem

Gerda Lerner was fierce, brilliant and unique. She lived history by her bravery, restored history by her scholarship, and democratized its study by her activism.

- Gloria Steinem

The Republican Party supported the Equal Rights Amendment before the Democratic Party did. But what happened was that a lot of very right-wing Democrats, after the civil rights bill of 1964, left the Democratic Party and gradually have taken over the Republican Party.

- Gloria Steinem

It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.

- Gloria Steinem

I'm lucky I don't make my living in front of the camera.

- Gloria Steinem

Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts.

- Gloria Steinem

Burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle.

- Gloria Steinem

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

Most women are one man away from welfare.

- Gloria Steinem

Women are liked better when they lose.

- Gloria Steinem

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

The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.

- Gloria Steinem

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

I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are discriminated against,' and I got so mad.

- Gloria Steinem

Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.

- Gloria Steinem

All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.

- Gloria Steinem

When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was - and that my real parents were going to come get me.

- Gloria Steinem

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

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

- Gloria Steinem

If I read the word 'problematize' one more time, I'm going to vomit.

- Gloria Steinem

Men are victims of their own impulses.

- Gloria Steinem

I keep thinking: 'Georgia O'Keeffe wouldn't have had Botox.'

- Gloria Steinem

A majority of Americans want redemption for racism - for our terrible, destructive racist past - and so see a vote for Obama as redemptive.

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

The Native American cultures on this continent, most of them, were matrilineal, and some women were the chiefs. Societies were about balance.

- Gloria Steinem

The AIDS crisis has brought us a consciousness of the immune system as the most important health-maintenance element, and a consciousness of how it is under attack.

- Gloria Steinem

One's enemies are always talking about 'post-feminism.' It is a word invented by people who would like to do away with feminism.

- Gloria Steinem

I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner.

- Gloria Steinem

Rich cultures, patriarchal cultures, value thin women, like ours; poor ones value fat women. But all patriarchal cultures value weak women. So for women to become physically strong is very profound.

- Gloria Steinem

Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part!

- Gloria Steinem

I supported Hillary Clinton. She would have made an excellent president. I didn't think she could get elected. I thought it was too soon.

- Gloria Steinem

A parking lot attendant who's a guy makes a lot more money than a child-care attendant who's a woman.

- Gloria Steinem

The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.

- Gloria Steinem

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.'

- Gloria Steinem

What we need to be able to do is count all human experience. So I would like to count the secretarial positions as good training places to take over the jobs of the bosses.

- Gloria Steinem

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

- Gloria Steinem

In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.

- Gloria Steinem

Diane Keaton is good for women in and of herself. She's smart and funny and real.

- Gloria Steinem

The mark, to me, of a constructive argument is one that looks at a specific problem and says, 'What shall we do about this?' And a nonconstructive one is one that tries to label people.

- Gloria Steinem

Female inferiority is internalised by us. Women need a lot more confidence.

- Gloria Steinem

People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We're clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven't reached true democracy yet.

- Gloria Steinem

As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot.

- Gloria Steinem

Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way.

- Gloria Steinem

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

- Gloria Steinem

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

- Gloria Steinem

In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women who argued for the old hierarchy and against universal adult suffrage - often on religious grounds.

- Gloria Steinem

When I had a fellowship at the Smithsonian, I asked for a couch in the office because I liked to lie down and take a break.

- Gloria Steinem

I was the first woman to speak ever at the National Press Club, and they gave me a necktie.

- Gloria Steinem

What is frustrating is being told that no matter how hard I've worked, it counts less than my appearance. Although if you're not considered conventionally attractive, that also becomes an issue: you know, you're a feminist because you couldn't get a man.

- Gloria Steinem

There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.

- Gloria Steinem

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

There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female.

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

Liberation does not come from outside.

- Gloria Steinem

The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.

- Gloria Steinem

If you are not a feminist in love, you fail to recognise someone who does not love you. Feminism makes love easier. Otherwise, there is the danger of feeling romantically drawn to someone who does not see you as an equal.

- Gloria Steinem

The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

- Gloria Steinem

There's been the same kind of demonizing of the word 'feminism' as words like 'liberal,' 'affirmative action,' and so on.

- Gloria Steinem

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

- Gloria Steinem

Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself. Fashion in the present means being individual and finding oneself.

- Gloria Steinem

Movements are like rivers. Dipping into them is never the same twice.

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.

- Gloria Steinem

You know there is a person inside every baby, right? And anybody who has ever met a baby knows there is already a person in there.

- Gloria Steinem

Women tend to need the healthcare system more because we bear children. Insurance companies - not all of them, but many of them - 'gender-rate.' Women may pay 40% more for their health insurance than men do.

- Gloria Steinem

Work is valued by the social value of the worker.

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

We're never going to have democratic countries or peaceful countries until we have democratic or peaceful families.

- Gloria Steinem

In Sweden, both parents take care of the children.

- 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

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

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

- Gloria Steinem

Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother - so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally.

- Gloria Steinem

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time.

- Gloria Steinem

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

- Gloria Steinem

After feminism, I suddenly realised: not everyone has to live the same way. Imagine that!

- Gloria Steinem

Feminism began to dawn on my brain belatedly in life.

- Gloria Steinem

If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story.

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

- Gloria Steinem

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

- Gloria Steinem

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.

- Gloria Steinem

Age brings a freedom. When you're young, you're much more subject to the idea of what feminine is or how you should look or how you should behave.

- Gloria Steinem

The Constitution did not mention women when it was first written, and it still doesn't.

- Gloria Steinem

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

- Gloria Steinem

In a general way, anything that affects men is taken more seriously than anything that affects only women.

- Gloria Steinem

I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.

- Gloria Steinem

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.

- Gloria Steinem

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

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

It's heartbreaking to watch people working against themselves.

- Gloria Steinem

Anything can be used for or against the welfare of women - or the welfare of anyone - depending on who controls it.

- Gloria Steinem

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

- Gloria Steinem

Women's progress has been a collective effort.

- Gloria Steinem

If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.

- Gloria Steinem

Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.

- Gloria Steinem

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

- Gloria Steinem

Law and justice are not always the same.

- Gloria Steinem

There is nothing more fundamental than the idea that the government does not have a right to decide when and whether we have children.

- Gloria Steinem

A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.

- Gloria Steinem

Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.

- Gloria Steinem

I am not patient.

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

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

- Gloria Steinem

Whatever each individual woman is facing - only she knows her biggest challenge.

- Gloria Steinem

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.

- Gloria Steinem

We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.

- Gloria Steinem

Children are short people. Some you like, some you don't.

- Gloria Steinem