Top 122 Gloria Steinem Quotes

The problem for all women is we’re identified by how we look instead of by our heads and our hearts.

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted, they think.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Unless we include a job as part of every citizen’s right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else’s idea of what need is.

What we need to be able to do is count all human experience. So I would like to count the secretarial positions as good training places to take over the jobs of the bosses.

Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn’t know it’s about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

The first resistance to social change is to say it’s not necessary.

Even before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking, ‘Which candidate are Americans more ready for: a white woman or a black man?’

The same way that racism is a white person’s problem, violence against women is a men’s problem.

Republicans may learn they can’t appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time.

What has the women’s movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy for vice president? Never get married.

It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

What I’ve learned is that unless it’s an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you’re repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group.

I’m not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression.

A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.

If you are not a feminist in love, you fail to recognise someone who does not love you. Feminism makes love easier. Otherwise, there is the danger of feeling romantically drawn to someone who does not see you as an equal.

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

Because women of color were more likely to be in the paid labor force, they were more likely to recognize discrimination, so they were always leading the women’s movement.

A majority of Americans want redemption for racism – for our terrible, destructive racist past – and so see a vote for Obama as redemptive.

People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We’re clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven’t reached true democracy yet.

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, ‘Just wait.’

The Republican Party supported the Equal Rights Amendment before the Democratic Party did. But what happened was that a lot of very right-wing Democrats, after the civil rights bill of 1964, left the Democratic Party and gradually have taken over the Republican Party.

Perfectionism attaches to what is valued in the culture.

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

There’s nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

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.

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

As for the American child’s classic problem – too much mother, too little father – that would be cured by an equalization of parental responsibility.

I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers.

I supported Hillary Clinton. She would have made an excellent president. I didn’t think she could get elected. I thought it was too soon.

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman’s only path to power.

I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, ‘A measure by which white men are discriminated against,’ and I got so mad.

Female inferiority is internalised by us. Women need a lot more confidence.

Diane Keaton is good for women in and of herself. She’s smart and funny and real.

If you say, I’m for equal pay, that’s a reform. But if you say. I’m a feminist, that’s a transformation of society.

How could you not love Norman Mailer? He was a total chauvinist, but also so vulnerable.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female.

I keep thinking: ‘Georgia O’Keeffe wouldn’t have had Botox.’

Most women’s magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.

All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.

In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.

I want to help correct the inaccurate image of immigration in the media. There is an idea that women’s issues are over here and immigration is over there. Three quarters of undocumented workers are women and children.

If I read the word ‘problematize’ one more time, I’m going to vomit.

Being misunderstood by people whose opinions you value is absolutely the most painful.

I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn’t think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn’t see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.

To say ‘radical feminist’ is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system is a root of race and class and other divisions.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don’t want to talk.

What’s so valuable about HBO is they tell stories. We learn from stories.

If you’re going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.

I’d like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I’d have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.

Obviously there is no such thing as race, and in many ways, sex is a continuum, not a binary. So it doesn’t make sense to label people in that way.

If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children – that’s one thing. But if it’s used to say, ‘You’re not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,’ then it’s another story.

The women’s movement in England was totally against Margaret Thatcher.

It’s heartbreaking to watch people working against themselves.

Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys.

I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.

When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was – and that my real parents were going to come get me.

Liberation does not come from outside.

Nothing changes the gender equation more significantly than women’s economic freedom.

I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner.

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

One’s enemies are always talking about ‘post-feminism.’ It is a word invented by people who would like to do away with feminism.

The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.

In a general way, anything that affects men is taken more seriously than anything that affects only women.