Gloria Steinem Quotes
“50 Years of Speaking Out” – On Oct. 21, 2009, Smith College celebrated the life, words and work of alumna Gloria Steinem 56, in commemoration of her 75th birthday. For more than 50 years, Steinem has been at the forefront of the movement for women’s equality.
Gloria Marie Steinem (born March 25, 1934) is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. Below are some quotes:
I’m not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power.
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?
The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?
“Women need abortions more than breast screening”
I have met 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.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour in which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.
Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren’t, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.
Most women’s magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.
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.
We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.
We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don’t know that men can do what women can do. That’s absolutely crucial. We can’t go on doing two jobs.
Gloria Steinem attending the Ms. Foundation for Women’s 23rd annual Gloria Awards, named for her, on May 19, 2011. photo/ Ms. Foundation for Women via wikimedia
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.
I don’t breed well in captivity.
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don’t get young men standing up and saying, ‘How can I combine career and family?’
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
[About Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy:] What has the women’s movement learned from her candidacy for vice president? Never get married.
Most women are one man away from welfare.
A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
Someone asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
photo/ screenshot
Steinem appeared on Bill Maher’s show last to promote her new book, My Life on the Road, and shared her feelings about female activists.
“I find the young women very activist and they’re way more feminist,” Steinem said. “We were, like, 12 crazy ladies in the beginning, and now it’s the majority. I do think that gratitude never radicalized anybody. I did not say thank you for the vote. I got mad on the basis of what was happening to me, and I think that that’s true of young women too. So they’re mad as hell because they’re graduating in debt, and they’re gonna earn a million dollars less over their lifetime to pay it back, they’re mad about what’s happening to them.”
Then Maher pressed her on Sanders versus Clinton, saying that young women “really don’t like Hillary.” Steinem responded that overall, women and African-American voters strongly support Clinton, and that, unlike men, “women get more radical as we get older.”
“Men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age, and women tend to get more radical because they lose power as they age,” Steinem said. “It’s not fair to measure most women by the standard of most men, because they’re gonna get more activist as they grow older, and when you’re young, you’re thinking, Where are the boys, the boys are with Bernie.”
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