If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Change
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Value, Money
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: Aptness, Writers, Appropriateness, Writing, Success, Authors & Writing
I do not like to write – I like to have written.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Writing
The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Authority, Body, Man, Mankind
Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice.
—Gloria Steinem
Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
—Gloria Steinem
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Career, Advice
It’s clear that most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Parenting, Fathers, Parents
America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Poverty, The Poor
The only thing I can’t stand is discomfort.
—Gloria Steinem
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: Authority, Control
Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Pornography
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
If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Welfare
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Women, Feminism
The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Family
We teach what we need to learn.
—Gloria Steinem
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Defense
It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
—Gloria Steinem
Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Past, The Past, Change
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Perspective
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
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’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
Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.
—Gloria Steinem
The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Ethics
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
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Power
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
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