Best Gloria Steinem Quotes

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice.

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.

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.

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.

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

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

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.

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.

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described --and will be, after our deaths --by each of the family members who believe they know us.

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.

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

The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.

Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.

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

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

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?

We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.

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.

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

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.

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

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.

By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.

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

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