53 Gloria Steinem Quotable Quotes
Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the Women's Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s.
In 2005, Steinem worked alongside Robin Morgan and Jane Fonda to co-found the Women's Media Center.
The WMC works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership trainining, and the creation of original content.
Here is some of her own original content:
“A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”
“A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.”
“A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.”
“A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
“America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.”
“Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.”
“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.”
“From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.”
“God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions.”
“Once we begin to ask (questions), there's no turning back.”
“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.”
“Hope is a very unruly emotion.”
”I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.”
“I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?”
“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?”
“If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.”
“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.”
“In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.”
“It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.”
“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.”
“Law and justice are not always the same.”
“Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.”
“Logic is in the eye of the logician.”
“Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.”
“Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.”
“Most women are one man away from welfare.”
“Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.”
“Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice.”
“Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.”
“Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”
“The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.”
“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”
“The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.”
“The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.”
“The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.”
“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.”
“We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”
“We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.”
“We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.”
“What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married.”
“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
“Work is valued by the social value of the worker.”
“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.”