Quotes by Gloria Steinem

Most women are one man away from welfare.

I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we dont express it, we loose faith in ourselves.

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.

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 . . . She will need her sisterhood.

Well never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

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?)

In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, heres an idea for theorists and logicians: 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 isnt it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.)

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

At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of womens libbers, bra burners, and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters...that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a postfeminist age...

Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasnt for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out.

Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

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

As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, Hate generalizes, love specifies. Thats what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies.

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be unfeminine so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward am activist place where she herself could never go.

But why didnt you leave? Why didnt you take my sister and go to New York? she would say it didnt matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, If Id left, you never would have been born. I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.

Women of all groups were measurably more likely than their male counterparts to vote for equality, health, and education, and against violence as a way of solving conflict. It wasnt about biology, but experience.

Feminism...is not women as victims but women refusing to be victims.