Gloria Steinem Quotations | Page 5

Power in this country is often like hemophilia; it passes through women and then men get it.

If men started taking care of children, the job will become more valuable.

Writers are notorious for using any reason to keep from working: over-researching, retyping, going to meetings, waxing the floors - anything.

There is no such thing as a crime of passion, only a crime of possession.

Religion is often politics made sacred.

Feminism is not antisexuality. On the contrary. It says that sexuality shouldn't be confused with violence and dominance and that it should be a matter of free choice. It shouldn't be forced on you by economics, including dependence on a husband, or by pressure.

It was the first female-style revolution: no violence and we all went shopping.

... if young women have a problem, it's only that they think there's no problem.

... we've allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyondfifty, sixty, or seventy--all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics--many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.

... if you're a woman, all they can think about your relationship with a politician is that you're either sleeping with him or advising him about clothes.

If you really want to be lonely, get married.

We need to return and go forward to the understanding that there is God in all living things, not more in men than women, and not more in humans than in nature. To believe otherwise is only an excuse for dominating women and nature.

Now we know that women can do what men can do..., but we don't know that men can do what women can do.

There's no emotion more revolutionary than empathy.

I would say that each of us has only one thing to gain from the feminist movement: Our whole humanity. Because gender has wrongly told us that some things are masculine and some things are feminine... which is bullshit.

You're afraid to be close to women. Because it's not masculine to be close to women. The last time you were close to a woman, you were a child.

Most of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers, because they were not able to become the unique people they were born to be.

... the Golden Rule works for men as written, but for women it should go the other way around. We need to do unto ourselves as we do unto others.

An education is not a thing one gets, but a lifelong process.

You're a unique person. You should do what you're suited to do. We all should. It's the only way to be happy. That pressure is all outside. It's external.

Nature doesn't move in a straight line, and as part of nature, neither do we.

The point is less what we choose than that we have the power to make a choice.

People waste more time waiting for someone to take charge of their lives than they do in any other pursuit.

There is a naive belief that injustice only had to be pointed out in order to be cured.

It feels as if childhood sexual abuse or domestic abuse of women in the home has increased but actually if you ask women of 60 or 70 years old, the incidence is about the same. We just didn't know it.

Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole...patriarch!

How ever 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, religion or all four.

It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standards that implies).

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.

If you consider that the gender roles are just political, then what you come to see is that the full circle of human qualities is divided up so that two-thirds are masculine and one-third is feminine. Women are missing more of their human qualities, so you'll find us on the fore-front of trying to change this.

Knowing About Victoria Woodhull inspires women to be daring, outrageous and creative.

I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)

I believe that change comes from the bottom, not the top.

How can I combine career and family?

Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.

Writers - we're a little crazy about how much we care about it. We spend a lot of time fussing. At least, I do.

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

It's never to late for a happy childhood.

For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn't yet ready for editorials in the Daily News.

No, I'll take responsibility for my own life, I am going to make a decision. And you know, to this day, I would raise flags on all public buildings to celebrate the chance I had to make that decision.

This is the wisdom: If we bless our bodies, they will bless us.

The ends and means are a seamless web.

The old languages - at least the ones I know - don't have gender. They don't have gendered pronouns. There's no "he" and "she." A human being is a human being.

This idea of doing it all is the enemy of equality, not the path to do it. It's impossible to do two full-time jobs, and an impossible definition of success is just another way of making women feel like failures... Any definition of success has to include social policies that honor families and men who raise babies as much as women do.

Transformation happens in small groups. Each person can speak and all listen.

A different world can be created or re-created-but not until we stop enshrining the economic values of invisible labor, infinite and obsessive growth, and a slow environmental suicide.

It would help not to treat age as if it were any less of a pleasure than it was when we were six and saying, 'I'm six and a half.' You know, we could be saying, 'I'm fifty and a half' and say it with joy. Each age is different and has different discoveries and pleasures.

It's especially ridiculous to think you have to be successful when you're so young. You should be able to adventure and not worry so much about achievement.

If we're by ourselves we come to feel crazy and alone. We need to make alternate families of small groups of women who support each other, talk to each other regularly, can speak their truths and their experiences and find they're not alone in them, that other women have them, too ... It makes such a huge difference.

Superwoman is the adversary of the women's movement.

Women with body image or eating disorders are not a special category; [they’re] just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.

Democracy is mob rule with income taxes.

Men, through no fault of theirs, get born into cultures that tell them that if a woman can do it, it's not worth doing, or if they're not superior to women in one way or another, they're not really masculine.

Some women and men seem to need each other.

Gratitude never radicalized anybody. I don't care if they recognize the past, I just want them to get angry about the present and keep going.

Marriage works best for men than women. The two happiest groups are married men and unmarried women.

We teach what we need to learn.

we are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

We do what we see and what we're told. If we haven't been raised in a family or in a community where women are treated as full human beings and men don't have to be superior anymore, we continue to think that it's not only natural but inevitable.

Everyone is unique and each experience is different.

I wouldn't want to generalize, but we still do live in a society that's sexist and racist and addicted to class and has the ridiculous idea that if you have money you're smarter, which Donald Trump by himself should be able to disprove.

The gender prism is just descending upon us. For instance, when we're girls of nine or 10 we may be climbing trees and saying, "I know what I want. I know what I think." And then suddenly at 11 or 12, the gender role takes hold, and adults tell us, "How clever of you to know what time it is." It happens to boys, too and even sooner - between five and eight. Before that, boys cry and express uncertainty.

Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.

The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.

When the gender role starts to descend, boys get into the masculine box.

It doesn't matter where we begin the personal/political circle, but it matters desperately that we complete it.

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.

She is a water bug on the surface of life.

It's going to take a while because for the last 500 years patriarchal societies have been devoted to controlling reproduction and that means controlling women. So we got into this masculine/feminine, dominant/passive paradigm, and it's going to take a while to get out.

Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.

Even when educators survey grade school texts and create new bibliographies to help teachers include Asians, Eskimos, and other Americans, females in and out of those groups may be down-played or forgotten.

The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute.

There are two types of people in the world, those who say 'there are two types of people in the world' and those who don't.

Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.

Of course, we can change. We're very adaptable. But it takes a while.

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

Each others' lives are our best textbooks.

A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.

I think one of the great innovations of sexual harassment law was that it did not use the word "consent." It used the word "welcome."

when pain has been intertwined with love and closeness, it's very difficult to believe that love and closeness can be experienced without pain.

The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.

Obviously, untangling sex from aggression and violence or the threat of it is going to take a very long time. And the process is going to be greatly resisted as a challenge to the very heart of male dominance and male centrality.

Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.

A rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying.

Our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

Prejudice marks a mental landmine.

Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we've always wanted.

In almost any situation, if you have been the powerful one, which would tend to be men more than women but not always, it's very important to listen as much as you talk. If you have been the less powerful one, it's very important to talk as much as you listen.

Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.

Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers or mindless policy-makers in politics.

If you let Barnum & Bailey interpret a plot by Stendahl, it might come out to be something like the 1972 Democratic convention.

The phenomenon of the woman who's asked what movie she wants to see, and she says, "I don't know. What do you want to see?" It's a tiny version of a big tendency. Women need to say, "This is what I want."

Now, we've made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

Logic has nothing to do with oppression.

The nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters).

Given the expectations of society at large, men are generally correct in their assumption that it is important for a woman to have a man. What they do not understand is how pathetically little difference it makes what man.

Men were valued by what they did, women by how they looked and then by what their husbands did, and all of life was arranged (or so we thought) from the outside in.

Perhaps well-to-do women and unemployed ghetto teenagers have something in common. Neither group has been allowed to develop the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourselves.