The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Ethics
For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I’m doing it, I don’t feel that I should be doing something else instead; (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and (3) it’s frightening.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Success, Appropriateness, Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing, Aptness
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
Topics: Food, Eating
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
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Power
Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: The Past, Past, Change
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: Fashion, Dress
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: Family, Unhappiness
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Defense
The only thing I can’t stand is discomfort.
—Gloria Steinem
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Future
I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment adn heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Being True to Yourself
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
Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
—Gloria Steinem
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 do not like to write – I like to have written.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Writing
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Men, Women, Men & Women
Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.
—Gloria Steinem
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Women, Feminism
Evil is obvious only in retrospect.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Evil
We teach what we need to learn.
—Gloria Steinem
Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy
—Gloria Steinem
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Advice, Career
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
Topics: Sex
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
Topics: Worry
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
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.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Control, Authority
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Money, Value
Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren’t, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Justice
If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Welfare
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 Author
- 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
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