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
I do not like to write – I like to have written.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Writing
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
Evil is obvious only in retrospect.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Evil
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
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
The only thing I can’t stand is discomfort.
—Gloria Steinem
We teach what we need to learn.
—Gloria Steinem
The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Mankind, Authority, Body, Man
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
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
Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Past, Change, The Past
Men should think twice before making widow hood woman’s only path to power.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Power
Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice.
—Gloria Steinem
By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Potential, God
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
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Learning
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
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Money, Value
Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
—Gloria Steinem
America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: The Poor, Poverty
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
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Men, Women, Men & Women
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Future
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
—Gloria Steinem
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Aging
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: Writing, Aptness, Authors & Writing, Success, Writers, Appropriateness
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Women, Feminism
Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.
—Gloria Steinem
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
Self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it
—Gloria Steinem
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 the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Change
It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
—Gloria Steinem
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 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
Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Pornography
If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Welfare
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Perspective
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Defense
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