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
We teach what we need to learn.
—Gloria Steinem
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Women, Feminism
If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Change
Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Past, Change, The Past
It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
—Gloria Steinem
Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy.
—Gloria Steinem
Evil is obvious only in retrospect.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Evil
Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.
—Gloria Steinem
The only thing I can’t stand is discomfort.
—Gloria Steinem
Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice.
—Gloria Steinem
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: Writers, Aptness, Success, Appropriateness, Authors & Writing, Writing
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
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
Hope is a very unruly emotion.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Hope
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Perspective
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Power
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
Men should think twice before making widow hood woman’s only path to power.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Power
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Aging
The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Ethics
America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: The Poor, Poverty
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
Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
—Gloria Steinem
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: Eating, Food
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Learning
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
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Defense
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
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
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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