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Gloria Steinem
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“A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”
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“During years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country, I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals. All for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman.”
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“There are times when a woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”
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“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.”
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“The first problem for all of us, men and woman, is not to learn, but to unlearn. We are filled with the popular wisdom of several centuries just past, and we are terrified to give it up. Patriotism means obedience, age means wisdom, woman means submission, black means inferior: these are preconceptions imbedded so deeply in our thinking that we honestly may not know that they are there.”
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“It's clear that most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.”
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“I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.”
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“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.”
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“Intelligence in the service of poor instinct is really dangerous.”
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“... 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.”
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“I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.”
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“The human body is not obscene, sexuality is not obscene. But it [pornography] is not sex, it is violence. It encourages acceptance of the idea that violence is a legitimate part of sexuality.”
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“We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”
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“We've learned that women can and should do 'men's jobs,' for instance, and we've won the principle (if not the fact) of getting equal pay. But we haven't yet established the principle (much less the fact) that men can and should do 'women's jobs': that homemaking and child-rearing are as much a man's responsibility, too, and that those jobs in which women are concentrated outside the home would probably be better paid if more men became secretaries, file clerks, and nurses, too.”
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“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. ”
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“Pornography is the instruction; rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, battered children are the practice.”
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“The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.”
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“Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply 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.”
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“If the men in the room would only think how they would feel graduating with a 'spinster of arts' degree they would see how important this is.”
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“... we are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”
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“Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.”
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“Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.”
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“Writing ... keeps me from believing everything I read.”
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“Pornography is about dominance and often pain. Erotica is about mutuality and always pleasure.”
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“[Erotica] contains the idea of love, positive choice, and the yearning for a particular person.”
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“As a concept [androgyny] raise[s] anxiety levels by conjuring up a conformist, unisex vision, the very opposite of the individuality and uniqueness that feminism actually has in mind.”
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“... many of us have raised our daughters more like our sons, but too few have raised our sons more like our daughters.”
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“Writers are notorious for using any reason to keep from working: over-researching, retyping, going to meetings, waxing the floors — anything.”
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“... hope is a very unruly emotion.”
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“Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“... 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.”
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“Perhaps men should think twice before making widowhood our only path to power.”
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“If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?”
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“In short, pornography is not about sex. It's about an imbalance of male-female power that allows and even requires sex to be used as a form of aggression. ... But until we finally untangle sexuality and aggression, there will be more pornography and less erotica. There will be little murders in our beds — and very little love.”
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“Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.”
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“... writing is the only thing that ... when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead ...”
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“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.'”
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“Evil is obvious only in retrospect.”
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“Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.”
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“Whatever you want to do, just do it. Don't worry about making a fool of yourself. Making a fool of yourself is absolutely essential.”
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“If men started taking care of children, the job will become more valuable.”
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“Homemakers work longer and harder than any other class of worker in the United States for less pay, and are the most likely to be replaced by a younger worker.”
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“The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day. After all, a movement is only people moving.”
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“The alternative to being a feminist is being a masochist.”
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“... self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.”
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“It's never too late for a happy childhood.”
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“Self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated.”
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“... when pain has been intertwined with love and closeness, it's very difficult to believe that love and closeness can be experienced without pain.”
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“... imagining anything is the first step toward creating it. Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born.”
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“There is always one true inner voice. Trust it.”
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“... we teach what we need to learn and we write what we need to know.”
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“Nature doesn't move in a straight line, and as part of nature, neither do we.”
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“The political is personal.”
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“The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination.”
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“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.”
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“The act of acting morally is behaving AS IF EVERYTHING WE DO MATTERS.”
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“... 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.”
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“The need to treat ourselves as well as we treat others. It's women's version of the Golden Rule.”
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“The ends and means are a seamless web.”
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“Logic is in the eye of the logician.”
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“The art of life isn't controlling what happens, which is impossible; it's using what happens.”
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“[The United States] is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.”
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“I don't know if fury can compete with necessity as the mother of invention, but I recommend it.”
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“Too much of our lives corresponds to the 'lost-wallet' theory of life. You lose something, spend a long time finding it, and then feel grateful to be back where you started.”
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“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.”
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“Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.”
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“I always trust the microcosm over the macrocosm.”
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“This is what forty looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?”
- Moving Beyond Words
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“... why is the word 'qualified' applied only to those who have to be more so?”
“Why are women raped far away (say, Bosnia) called victims, while those raped nearby (say, a local campus) are playing victim politics?”
“I can't mate in captivity.”
“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 ...”
“Inner space is the real frontier.”
“Voting isn't the most we can do. But it is the least.”
“For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness.”
“... learning must travel the distance from head to heart.”
“The most common characteristic of women's history is to be lost and discovered, lost again and rediscovered, lost once more and re-rediscovered — a process of tragic waste and terrible silences that will continue until women's stories are a full and equal part of the human story.”
“All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.”
“Feminism isn't called the longest revolution for nothing.”
“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.”
“... I'm at the age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.”
“Until we end the masculinization of wealth, we will not end the feminization of poverty.”
“Nothing will happen automatically. Change depends on what you and I do every day.”
“Power in this country is often like hemophilia; it passes through women and then men get it.”
“Imagining change is the first step toward creating it.”
“What we have been raised to think of as inevitable — division and hierarchy, monotheism and nation states — actually accounts for less than 10 percent of human history.”
“A good friendship is a conversation that never ends.”
“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.”
“What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them?”
“I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.”
“We will live to see the day that St. Patrick's Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.”
“There's no such thing as post-feminism. It's like saying post-democracy, excuse me, what does that mean? We're nowhere near equality, so the very idea of post-feminism is ridiculous. The same people who 30-40 years ago said the women's movement is not necessary, 'it's going against nature, my wife is not interested' [are] the same people now saying 'well it used to be necessary but not anymore.' The very invention of the word post-feminism is the current form of resistance.”
“The dogma is that that dogma is a mistake.”
“There's more variation among human groups than between human groups.”
“Labeling makes the invisible visible, but it's limiting. Categories are the enemy of connecting. Link, don't rank. ”
“... it's possible to be pro-sex and anti-pornography.”
“The U.S. has more guns per capita and supplies more guns to the world than any other country. What would be a fistfight without guns turns into dead bodies with them. Families with guns in the house are more likely to shoot themselves accidentally than to shoot any intruder. Women abused by their partners have a five-fold increased risk of being killed when their partner owns a gun. Every three hours, at least one child is wounded or killed by gunfire.”
“... humor is the only free emotion. I mean, you can compel fear, as we know. You can compel love, actually ... But you can't compel laughter. It happens when two things come together and make a third unexpectedly.”
“... 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.”
“... there is bias and sexism everywhere, just like there are problems of racism and homophobia stemming from the whole notion that we're arranged in a hierarchy, that we're ranked rather than linked.”
“... change starts at the bottom. I think we're disempowered by the idea that it starts at the top, when really change is like a tree. It does start at the bottom.”
“... if I had one wish for the feminist movement worldwide, for the democratic movement worldwide, for the humanist movement worldwide, it would be a kind of revolutionary AA, a network consisting of small groups that one could easily find, small enough so that everyone can speak and everyone can listen. We need these kinds of revolutionary cells. It's the soul of the Chinese revolution. It's the soul of the Civil Rights movement. It's the soul of the feminist movement. We need these groups of diverse people with shared purpose, who meet regularly, support each other, and create another reality because right now we're swimming in someone else's reality much of the time.”
“... you never know which thing you do is going to turn out to be important. I'm sure we've all done very small things that had very great impact and very big things that didn't make any difference. So, create the means that best reflect the ends we want. Try to make each moment authentic, and you'll get to an authentic end.”
“... anything being perceived as being superior takes the noun. And everything that isn't, that's judged to be inferior, requires an adjective. So there are black novelists and novelists. There are women physicians and physicians. Male nurses and nurses.”
“To me, the model of success is not linear. Success is completing the full circle of yourself.”
“There is no such thing as a crime of passion, only a crime of possession.”
“Feminism is not antisexuality. On the contrary. It says that sexuality shouldn't be confused with violence and dominance and that it should be a matter of free choice. It shouldn't be forced on you by economics, including dependence on a husband, or by pressure.”
“If you can learn to like how you look, and not the way you think you look, it can set you free. ”
“... the Golden Rule works for men as written, but for women it should go the other way around. We need to do unto ourselves as we do unto others.”
“Most of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers, because they were not able to become the unique people they were born to be.”
“Looking at traditional marriages, it seems the surest way for a woman to be alone is to get married.”
“I'm going to make a button, 'The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.'”
“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.”
“Women get more radical with age.”
“During years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country. I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals. All for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman.”
“It used to be said that this country was a child-centered one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Children have been our lowest priority, both in economic and emotional spending.”
“Whoever has power takes over the noun — and the norm — while the less powerful get an adjective.”
“We seem to think that women here are better off than they are in any other country, and that's not true. We are the only modern democracy in the whole world with no national system of child care, no natioanl system of healthcare, no system of family-friendly workplace policies. Women are a lesser percentage of elected officials [here] than in India.”
“[On gender-rating by insurance companies:] They say the reason they get to charge more is we have children. I would say having children is a socially useful act. Being female is not a preexisting condition.”
“[On feminism:] I think of the future in two ways — survival plus moving forward. Under survival, I would put all the efforts to save the female half of the world from violence directed at us specifically because we are female; what Diana Russell has called femicide. Under survival is everything from domestic violence, sex trafficking, rape and serial killing to aborting female fetuses, female genital mutilation, child marriage and denying female children protein, health care and education. Under moving forward, I would put all the efforts to humanize the 'masculine' and 'feminine' gender roles that are the beginning of a false human hierarchy and normalize race, class and other systems of domination to come — even 'Man's' dominion over nature. 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 care-giving, and making that amount tax deductible. Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts. That's already happened in Ireland and Liberia, and is beginning in North and South Korea. And of course, allowing women the power to decide when and whether to have children is the only way to solve the 7 billion human load on this planet that threatens to destroy it. Women's equality is also men's survival.”
“[On the Internet and activism:] 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. In a way, the highest purpose of the Internet is to bring us together for empathy and action. After all, the reflector cells and empathy-producing chemicals in our brains only work when we're physically together with all five senses. You can't raise a baby online.”
“You can't do it all. No one can have two full-time jobs, have perfect children and cook three meals and be multi-orgasmic 'til dawn ... Superwoman is the adversary of the women's movement.”
“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.”
“[On whether the Women's Movement needs another Gloria Steinem:] I don't think there should have been a first one.”
“Most women in this country are only one man away from welfare.”
“One act of violence takes four generations to heal.”
“Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.”
“It's not that women are less corruptible than men are, it's that women have had less chance to become corrupt.”
“The political is personal.”
“It's a big gift to be recognizable as part of something that matters to people, but that's not the same as being responsible for something.”
“The best kind of leader: one who creates independence, not dependence.”
“Taking to the road — by which I mean letting the road take you — changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories — in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.”
“... one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.”
“... human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us — which is both the good news and the bad news.”
“... 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.”
“When human beings are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.”
“When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.”
“Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule.”
“Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.”
“Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one's self.”
“[On graduations:] They are individual and communal, an end and a beginning, more permanent than weddings, more inclusive than religions, and possibly the most moving ceremonies on earth.”
“A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.”
“The greatest indicator of the world's stability, wealth, and safety is the status of women.”
“Empathy is the most revolutionary emotion.”
“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, U.S.writer, journalist, activist, founder/editor of Ms.
(1934)