Gloria Steinem Quotes - Page 2

One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is "I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart.
Gloria Steinem
I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars and young women were treated like - well - young women. {...}I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one.
Gloria Steinem
An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus Tshirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment “Thou shall not kill.”But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies.Thus the Bible is making clear, that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life.
Gloria Steinem
Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism.In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled "Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs", and explains that it started "only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests.
Gloria Steinem
Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger - and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn't usually mean including women.
Gloria Steinem
When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.
Gloria Steinem
Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.
Gloria Steinem
My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.
Gloria Steinem
As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism.
Gloria Steinem
Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.
Gloria Steinem
The idea that women are 'our own worst enemies' forces us to admit that we don't have the power to be, even if we wanted too.
Gloria Steinem
I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.
Gloria Steinem
There are really not many jobs that actually acquire a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.
Gloria Steinem
Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.
Gloria Steinem
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 wasn't about biology, but experience.
Gloria Steinem
But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.
Gloria Steinem
As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, "Hate generalizes, love specifies". Thats what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies.
Gloria Steinem
A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.
Gloria Steinem
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
Gloria Steinem
The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us
Gloria Steinem
Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasn't for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out.
Gloria Steinem
Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.
Gloria Steinem
At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women's "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...
Gloria Steinem
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.
Gloria Steinem
In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's 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 isn't 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.)
Gloria Steinem
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?)
Gloria Steinem
We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.
Gloria Steinem
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
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 . . . She will need her sisterhood.
Gloria Steinem
A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.
Gloria Steinem
I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.
Gloria Steinem
Most women are one man away from welfare.
Gloria Steinem
Without leaps of the imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning
Gloria Steinem
Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice.
Gloria Steinem
As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous.
Gloria Steinem
Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
Gloria Steinem
Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.
Gloria Steinem
Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River.
Gloria Steinem
Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves.
Gloria Steinem
If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.
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
In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place - where males gives birth.Though this comparison was new to to me, it struck home like a rock down a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. 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. No wonder the male priesthood tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body.
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
Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem
Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.
Gloria Steinem
Rich People plan for three generationsPoor people plan for Saturday night
Gloria Steinem
Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.
Gloria Steinem