Gloria Steinem (b.1934) is an American feminist activist and writer. She is one of the most influential women in the history of the modern feminist movement since the 1960s.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem spent her youth traveling with her parents in trailers and did not attend school consistently until age 12. Notwithstanding her poor school grades, she got into Smith College wholly on her entrance examinations. After college, she worked as a journalist.
In 1963, Steinem created a sensation with her two-part article, “A Bunny’s Tale,” about working covertly at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club in New York City. At the heart of her critique was her conviction that the sexual revolution would fail if men are the only ones allowed to characterize it.
In 1971, Steinem founded the National Women’s Political Caucus. In 1972, she created and edited the first issue of Ms. Magazine, devoted to women’s issues. The first print run of 300,000 copies got snapped up in eight days. Subsequently, she became one of the world’s best-known crusaders for gender equality.
Steinem has authored numerous books about the inequities and discriminations women face in the modern world, including Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983) and Revolution from Within (1992) and the memoir My Life on the Road (2016.) She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Gloria Steinem
America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Poverty, The Poor
The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Authority, Mankind, Body, Man
Hope is a very unruly emotion.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Hope
For women… bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can’t possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman’s body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Dress, Fashion
Someone once asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical 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.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Gambling
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Career, Advice
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
Topics: Planning
If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Change
Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Pornography
The moment we find the reason behind an emotion … the wall is breached, and the positive memories it has kept from us return too. That’s why it pays to ask those painful questions. The answers can set you free.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Questioning
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.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Courage
We teach what we need to learn.
—Gloria Steinem
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Value, Money
Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy
—Gloria Steinem
Self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it
—Gloria Steinem
The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Ethics
It’s clear that most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Fathers, Parenting, Parents
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
—Gloria Steinem
Men should think twice before making widow hood woman’s only path to power.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Power
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
Topics: Sex
If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Welfare
It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
—Gloria Steinem
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Perspective
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
Topics: Unhappiness, Family
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Future
By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: God, Potential
I do not like to write – I like to have written.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Writing
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Defense
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Women, Feminism
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
Topics: Women
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman American Feminist, Writer
Sheryl Sandberg American Executive, Author
Gertrude Stein American Writer
Jane Fonda American Actress
Robin Morgan American Activist
Betty Friedan American Feminist, Author
Erica Jong American Novelist, Poet
Letty Cottin Pogrebin American Writer
Walter Lippmann American Journalist
Rita Mae Brown American Writer, Feminist