Gloria Steinem Quotes

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.

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

We teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.

~ Gloria Steinem

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

~ Gloria Steinem

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.

~ Gloria Steinem

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.

~ Gloria Steinem

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.

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist.

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.

~ Gloria Steinem

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.

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives.

~ Gloria Steinem

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.

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.

~ Gloria Steinem

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?

~ Gloria Steinem

If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.

~ Gloria Steinem

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

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

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

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.

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.

~ Gloria Steinem

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

~ Gloria Steinem

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

~ Gloria Steinem

Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years - about twice as long as other bears - between having cubs. And after they're pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

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.

~ Gloria Steinem

Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.

~ Gloria Steinem

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

~ Gloria Steinem

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.

~ Gloria Steinem

It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.

~ Gloria Steinem

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.

~ Gloria Steinem