110+ Gloria Steinem Quotes On Marriage, Equality And Age

Gloria Steinem is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. in 1972, and has since been a political activist for causes such as LGBT rights, reproductive rights, and other movements. Steinem has also written extensively on issues of equality and has received numerous awards and honors for her work. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Gloria Steinem on marriage, love, equality.

Top 10 Gloria Steinem Quotes

1. Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
2. God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.
3. 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.
4. We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.
5. Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.
6. 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.
7. A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.
8. Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
9. Each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms.
10. The purpose of feminism is to free the uniqueness of the individual and to understand that inside each of us is a unique human being who is a combination of heredity and environment.

Gloria Steinem Image Quotes

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

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. — Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Short Quotes

• Superwoman is the adversary of the women's movement.
• A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
• There is no such thing as Superwoman. You cant have everything if you do everything.
• A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
• In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.
• Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
• Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer.
• The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
• Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.
• Hope is a very unruly emotion.

Gloria Steinem Quotes About Marriage

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

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

Women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage — 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

Being married is like having somebody permanently in your corner. It feels limitless, not limited. — Gloria Steinem

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). — Gloria Steinem

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

Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence. It also allows one to risk that marriage. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

Looking at traditional marriages, it seems the surest way for a woman to be alone is to get married. — Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Quotes About Love

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

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little. — Gloria Steinem

[Erotica] contains the idea of love, positive choice, and the yearning for a particular person. — Gloria Steinem

If you love your work, I'm not sure you have hobbies. I try to say no to things that other people could do and only say yes to things that only I could do. — Gloria Steinem

You may very well fall in love with somebody who makes less money, who's younger than you, who weighs less than you. — Gloria Steinem

I never expected to be even busier at 81, and doing more of what I love, than when I was 30. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

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

Sexuality has always been for humans a form of communication, a way we express love and caring and bonding, not only a way we have children if we choose to. — Gloria Steinem

I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had "crazy mothers." We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends. — Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Quotes About Equality

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

The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

There are many ways of supporting gender equality, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all care-giving, and making that amount tax deductible. — Gloria Steinem

Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. — Gloria Steinem

I don't think there's any country that has equal pay, not even Sweden or Iceland. — Gloria Steinem

There's a wonderful cartoon of Reagan in a Western hat and he's saying, "A pregnant woman in every home, a gun in every holster. Make America a man again." That sums up his attitudes: pro-military, anti-equality, pro-rich, anti-poor. — Gloria Steinem

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. — Gloria Steinem

Allowing women the power to decide when and whether to have children is the only way to solve the 7 billion human load on this planet that threatens to destroy it. Women's equality is also men's survival. — Gloria Steinem

There's going to be a demand for perfectionism on the part of Hillary Clinton, or any other pro-equality woman candidate, that would not be made of men. There are going to be attacks based on different standards of morality and different standards of dress and physical attractiveness. — Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Quotes About Age

At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m “passing the torch.” I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much-and I’m using it to light the torches of others. — Gloria Steinem

But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child -- a true self who is waiting. — Gloria Steinem

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

Girls are taught to view their bodies as unending projects to work on, whereas boys from a young age, are taught to view their bodies as tools to master their environment — Gloria Steinem

Don't listen to me. Listen to yourself ... People often ask me at this age, 'Who am I passing the torch to?' First of all, I'm not giving up my torch, thank you! I'm using my torch to light other people's torches. ... If we each have a torch, there's a lot more light. — Gloria Steinem

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.' — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part! — Gloria Steinem

I hope readers will consider, especially in this age of the World Wide Web, that as miraculous as it is, we still need to be in the same room with all five senses if we are to empathize with each other. — Gloria Steinem

We must begin to shift the emphasis of teen-age pregnancy to teen-age boys. — Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Quotes About Feminist

Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home. — Gloria Steinem

Women have two choices: Either she's a feminist or a masochist. — Gloria Steinem

Controlling women as the means of reproduction is made even more necessary by any race or caste or class system. It just comes together, it's just like life. And therefore it's not even practical to be a feminist without being anti-racist or against classism. It just doesn't work. — Gloria Steinem

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

Women are always saying,"We can do anything that men cando." But Men should be saying,"We can do anything that women can do. — Gloria Steinem

In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them. — Gloria Steinem

If you look at the public opinion polls even, support for all the issues, people who self-identify as feminists are as least as many as those who self-identify as Republicans. — Gloria Steinem

I'm more often confronted by women who come from religious traditions and don't feel that they have a place in the feminist movement. I've felt pressure when reporters asked me, "Do you believe in God?" I do say, "No. I believe in people." — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

What is frustrating is being told that no matter how hard I've worked, it counts less than my appearance. Although if you're not considered conventionally attractive, that also becomes an issue: you know, you're a feminist because you couldn't get a man. — Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Quotes About Inspiring

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. — Gloria Steinem

Rich People plan for three generations Poor people plan for Saturday night — Gloria Steinem

We teach what we need to learn. — Gloria Steinem

If what's inside your dreams wasn't already real inside you, you couldn't even dream it. — Gloria Steinem

A movement happens when people are inspired by somebody, but they do it themselves. You don't wait for someone else. You do it yourself. — Gloria Steinem

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

Gloria Steinem Quotes About Children

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

You can't do it all. No one can have two full-time jobs, have perfect children and cook three meals and be multi-orgasmic 'til dawn ... Superwoman is the adversary of the women's movement. — Gloria Steinem

I'm completely happy not having children. I mean, everybody does not have to live in the same way. And as somebody said, "Everybody with a womb doesn't have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer." — Gloria Steinem

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

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

Sadomasochiasm - which we know very well doesn't exist in societies that don't have child abuse - is regarded some sort of natural sexual expression. — Gloria Steinem

As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot. — Gloria Steinem

Children are short people. Some you like, some you don't. — Gloria Steinem

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

Gloria Steinem Quotes About People

The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving. — Gloria Steinem

I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned. Their health care decisions should be theirs and theirs alone to make. — Gloria Steinem

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

I think we all have the power to name ourselves. I try to call people what it is they wish to be called. But we can take the sting out of epithets and bad words by using them. — Gloria Steinem

The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine. People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together. — Gloria Steinem

I think I've wasted some of my time, but used most of it well, and have realized that my life is not separate from other people's lives or from the universe. I think our moments of happiness really come from a feeling of unity. — Gloria Steinem

People are quite clear in viewing nuns as the servants and the teachers and the supporters of the poor. You contrast that with the fact that the Vatican did virtually nothing about long-known pedophiles, and it's just too much. — Gloria Steinem

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

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. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Quotes About Work

For a man to say, "I have to leave work now because I need to do something with my kids," it's sometimes viewed as a career killer. He doesn't have the right drive. So when they depart from their gender roles, they face some of the same restrictions. — Gloria Steinem

Work is valued by the social value of the worker. — Gloria Steinem

Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style. — 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

[on sexual politics] 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. — Gloria Steinem

No matter how hard I worked, whatever I accomplished was attributed to my looks. If you're working your ass off, then you don't want to be told that you only got whatever because of the way you look. It takes the heart out of you. — Gloria Steinem

Thank you for all your good and beautiful work. — Gloria Steinem

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

The definition of woman's work is shitwork. — Gloria Steinem

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

Gloria Steinem Quotes About Feminism

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth. — Gloria Steinem

Feminism isn't called the longest revolution for nothing. — Gloria Steinem

As a concept [androgyny] raise[s] anxiety levels by conjuring up a conformist, unisex vision, the very opposite of the individuality and uniqueness that feminism actually has in mind. — 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

Feminism starts out being very simple, and it ends up being a world view that questions hierarchy altogether. — Gloria Steinem

It's hard to measure success when we're dealing with between 500 and 5,000 years of patriarchy depending on which continent we sit, so I would say feminism has been successful and we have a huge distance to go, huge. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

The political is personal. — Gloria Steinem

Karla Jay's intimate account of life in the early years of feminism and gay liberation is as irresistible as a novel, but as credible, humorous, and unexpected as real life. — Gloria Steinem

Feminism is about friends and sisters and community. — Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Quotes About Person

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. — Gloria Steinem

I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion. — Gloria Steinem

From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified. — Gloria Steinem

I'm a freelance person, and I've always been able to support myself. — Gloria Steinem

You know there is a person inside every baby, right? And anybody who has ever met a baby knows there is already a person in there. — Gloria Steinem

The same way that racism is a white person's problem, violence against women is a men's problem. — Gloria Steinem

I'm clearly not frightened of flying because I fly all the time, but every once in a while I do, as we all do, think, What if this plane goes down? And I think, Well, if I'm holding the hand of the person sitting next to me, then I'm holding everyone's hand. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it's amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects. — Gloria Steinem

Obviously, no LGBT person should be denied the ability to be who they are because their boss disagrees. — Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. — Gloria Steinem

I have me brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words. — Gloria Steinem

What I think we need to do is infuse everyday and every action with the kind of values we hope will be in the future, with kindness, with nurturing, with dreams, ambition, using your talents, not resorting to violence, other forms of conflict resolution, with humor, with poetry, with music. — Gloria Steinem

The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

Democracy is mob rule with income taxes. — Gloria Steinem

Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious. — Gloria Steinem

If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot? — Gloria Steinem

If you add up all the forms of genocide, from female infanticide and genital mutilation to so-called honor crimes, sex trafficking, and domestic abuse, everything, we lose about 6 million humans every year just because they were born female. That's a holocaust every year. — Gloria Steinem

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

Law and justice are not always the same. — Gloria Steinem

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. — Gloria Steinem

Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike. — Gloria Steinem

We need to stop raising boys to think that they need to prove their masculinity by being controlling or by not showing emotion or by not being little girls. — Gloria Steinem

I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said 'maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.' It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life. — Gloria Steinem

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

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

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before. — Gloria Steinem

I want to say to you that there is life and dreams and surprises after 30-and 40, and 50, and 60, and 77! Believe me, life is one long surprise. — Gloria Steinem

Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power. — Gloria Steinem

It turns out that we literally don't empathize unless we're physically present - that the oxytocin, the famous "tend and befriend" hormone is not produced unless we're present with all five senses. — Gloria Steinem

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

Probably those three things affect the most people: reproductive freedom, freedom from violence, and democratic families. But there may well be someone sitting at this table who has a great idea to do something else that wouldn't come under those umbrellas and that would really be great, and make all kinds of change. — Gloria Steinem

Most women are one man away from welfare. — Gloria Steinem

We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs. — Gloria Steinem

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." — Gloria Steinem

What we experience in our childhoods that comes to seem normal, or even inevitable, is that if you are placed in a hierarchy, you probably are immediately anxious about going further down and you're striving to go further up, so your energies get placed into becoming "more than," or at least not becoming "less than," instead of becoming "part of." — Gloria Steinem

Evil is obvious only in retrospect. — Gloria Steinem

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world. — Gloria Steinem

We have to stop arresting prostitutes and not arresting traffickers and pimps. It's absurd. We're arresting the victim or the survivor and not the oppressor. — Gloria Steinem

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach. — Gloria Steinem

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

Logic is in the eye of the logician. — Gloria Steinem

Empathy is the most radical of human emotions. — Gloria Steinem

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

No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life. — Gloria Steinem

The ends and means are a seamless web. — Gloria Steinem

I guess 35 years ago, I thought we had more of a democracy than we actually do. Majority support doesn't help unless the majority is active and votes - but the opposition minority votes a much greater proportion, so we often lose by a narrow margin. — Gloria Steinem

I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again. — Gloria Steinem

The surest way to be alone is to get married. — Gloria Steinem

Severe opposition is a measure of success (because) one inevitable result of winning a majority change in consciousness is a backlash from those forces whose power depended on the old one. — 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

Women fear endangering men's approval so much, we don't even wait for them to say no. Or else we protect them, even if it means saying no to ourselves. — Gloria Steinem

The only thing I can't stand is discomfort. — Gloria Steinem

Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality. — Gloria Steinem

The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination. — Gloria Steinem

What would happen if even one generation were raised with respect and without violence? — Gloria Steinem

Life Lessons by Gloria Steinem

1. Gloria Steinem taught us to be courageous and to never give up in the face of adversity. She showed us that it is possible to make a difference and to fight for what we believe in, no matter the odds.
2. She also taught us the importance of standing up for the rights of all people, regardless of gender, race, or any other factor.
3. Finally, Gloria Steinem showed us that it is possible to make a real impact on the world through activism, and that we should never be afraid to speak out for what we believe in.