Gloria Steinem quote: "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."

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.
GLORIA STEINEM

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for ...
GLORIA STEINEM

In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.
GLORIA STEINEM

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

What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president?...
GLORIA STEINEM

I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining ...
GLORIA STEINEM

Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.
GLORIA STEINEM

Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from ...
GLORIA STEINEM

If you ask men about their body image, they will tell you they look better than they do. And if you ...
GLORIA STEINEM

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.
GLORIA STEINEM

The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should ...
GLORIA STEINEM

There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.
GLORIA STEINEM

Nothing changes the gender equation more significantly than women's economic freedom.
GLORIA STEINEM

God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there'...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

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

Part of the reason that women go to college is to get out of the food service, clerical, pink-collar...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

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

What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy ...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

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

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.
GLORIA STEINEM

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after a...
GLORIA STEINEM

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible ...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some g...
GLORIA STEINEM

For women... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a co...
GLORIA STEINEM

The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human ...
GLORIA STEINEM

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be d...
GLORIA STEINEM

Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical reply...
GLORIA STEINEM

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us kn...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.
GLORIA STEINEM

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

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

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his wo...
GLORIA STEINEM

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the stat...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

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

Someone asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that ...
GLORIA STEINEM

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
GLORIA STEINEM

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.
GLORIA STEINEM

Each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms.
GLORIA STEINEM

We are becoming the men we wanted to marry
GLORIA STEINEM

Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about in...
GLORIA STEINEM

I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are...
GLORIA STEINEM

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as eit...
GLORIA STEINEM

You can see the absence of women in governing bodies from Congress to state legislators, on corporat...
GLORIA STEINEM

Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with tha...
GLORIA STEINEM

'Ms.' always flouted the rules of the ad world that say, especially for products directed at...
GLORIA STEINEM

There's no shortage of great young activists.
GLORIA STEINEM

Gerda Lerner was fierce, brilliant and unique. She lived history by her bravery, restored history by...
GLORIA STEINEM

Burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle.
GLORIA STEINEM

The error that we tend to make is that we think that women's magazines are what editors want and...
GLORIA STEINEM

The most hurtful thing is not what comes from our adversaries, it's what comes from our friends.
GLORIA STEINEM

I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But th...
GLORIA STEINEM

Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.
GLORIA STEINEM

I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because m...
GLORIA STEINEM

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after ...
GLORIA STEINEM

A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone c...
GLORIA STEINEM

I remember someone once asked Jack Kennedy why he was paying such close attention to the renovation ...
GLORIA STEINEM

All women, and men of color - we were owned like tables and chairs. We spent a hundred years getting...
GLORIA STEINEM

Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.
GLORIA STEINEM

From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in whic...
GLORIA STEINEM

The Native American cultures on this continent, most of them, were matrilineal, and some women were ...
GLORIA STEINEM

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.
GLORIA STEINEM

We are still behaving as if a worker really doesn't have a family because the work pattern reall...
GLORIA STEINEM

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the stat...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey He...
GLORIA STEINEM

A parking lot attendant who's a guy makes a lot more money than a child-care attendant who's...
GLORIA STEINEM

Obviously there is no such thing as race, and in many ways, sex is a continuum, not a binary. So it ...
GLORIA STEINEM

The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that ...
GLORIA STEINEM

Being misunderstood by people whose opinions you value is absolutely the most painful.
GLORIA STEINEM

Men have a much better time of it than women: for one thing they marry later, for another thing they...
GLORIA STEINEM

Marriage: A ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the ge...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.
GLORIA STEINEM

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

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the stat...
GLORIA STEINEM

If men menstruated, they would brag about how much and for how long.
GLORIA STEINEM

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

I can't mate in captivity.
GLORIA STEINEM

Women are more than smart enough to see that McCain's policies are a disaster... He is anti- eve...
GLORIA STEINEM

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.
GLORIA STEINEM

Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years...
GLORIA STEINEM

I'm so happy that we're finally hearing the stories and voices of women who make America. We...
GLORIA STEINEM

Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
GLORIA STEINEM

You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding ...
GLORIA STEINEM

To say 'radical feminist' is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system...
GLORIA STEINEM

If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to...
GLORIA STEINEM

Movements are like rivers. Dipping into them is never the same twice.
GLORIA STEINEM

Diane Keaton is good for women in and of herself. She's smart and funny and real.
GLORIA STEINEM

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, mon...
GLORIA STEINEM

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'
GLORIA STEINEM

Logic is in the eye of the logician.
GLORIA STEINEM

. . . as for logic, it's in the eye of the logician.
GLORIA STEINEM

I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage...
GLORIA STEINEM

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious.
GLORIA STEINEM

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and o...
GLORIA STEINEM

Do women compete for the favours of men? Yes. They've spent 5,000 years competing.
GLORIA STEINEM

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose powe...
GLORIA STEINEM

When I had a fellowship at the Smithsonian, I asked for a couch in the office because I liked to lie...
GLORIA STEINEM

A bad facelift is like a bad toupee.
GLORIA STEINEM

If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say. I'm a feminist, that'...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

I'm a freelance person, and I've always been able to support myself.
GLORIA STEINEM

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

There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations ...
GLORIA STEINEM

I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact...
GLORIA STEINEM

I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be...
GLORIA STEINEM

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his wo...
GLORIA STEINEM

I want to help correct the inaccurate image of immigration in the media. There is an idea that women...
GLORIA STEINEM

Actually, I believe there are more independents than either Republicans or Democrats, and yet those ...
GLORIA STEINEM

Women tend to need the healthcare system more because we bear children. Insurance companies - not al...
GLORIA STEINEM

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education ...
GLORIA STEINEM

The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, ou...
GLORIA STEINEM

If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.
GLORIA STEINEM

You should write about take no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules" p.79
GLORIA STEINEM

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. L...
GLORIA STEINEM

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for wome...
GLORIA STEINEM

This is what fifty looks like. We’ve been lying so long, who would know?
GLORIA STEINEM

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

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

It's heartbreaking to watch people working against themselves.
GLORIA STEINEM

Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it
GLORIA STEINEM

The electoral system is not where change starts - it usually starts in communities and from the bott...
GLORIA STEINEM

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.
GLORIA STEINEM

Women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage
GLORIA STEINEM

I can't mate in captivity
GLORIA STEINEM

At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men y...
GLORIA STEINEM

One thing is sure. Women and girls will have their first vision of a female network anchor who is an...
GLORIA STEINEM

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.
GLORIA STEINEM

For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn't yet ready for editorials in the Daily News.
GLORIA STEINEM

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

If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?
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...
GLORIA STEINEM

I did not see any way that I could possibly give birth to someone else and also give birth to myself...
GLORIA STEINEM

She has become the Julia Child of sex.
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 ruli...
GLORIA STEINEM

Most women are one man away from welfare.
GLORIA STEINEM

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

make dinner, not war.
GLORIA STEINEM

That is almost impossible to do -- to prove that a pregnancy would literally cause you to lose your ...
GLORIA STEINEM

I am not now, and never have been, a girl friend of Henry Kissinger
GLORIA STEINEM

What has the women's movement learned from [Geraldine Ferraro's] candidacy for vice president? Never...
GLORIA STEINEM

Law and justice are not always the same.
GLORIA STEINEM

Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy
GLORIA STEINEM

The art of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.
GLORIA STEINEM

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.
GLORIA STEINEM

The definition of woman's work is shitwork
GLORIA STEINEM

The surest way to be alone is to get married
GLORIA STEINEM

Hope is a very unruly emotion
GLORIA STEINEM

Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power
GLORIA STEINEM

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn an...
GLORIA STEINEM

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be d...
GLORIA STEINEM

It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for somethi...
GLORIA STEINEM

It's important not to stigmatize the word Republican, because the great tragedy is an extremist grou...
GLORIA STEINEM

Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply t...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.
GLORIA STEINEM

So, whatever you want to do, just do it....Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.
GLORIA STEINEM

Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it
GLORIA STEINEM

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

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

There's a big gap between public opinion polls and the vote in Washington, in Congress.
GLORIA STEINEM

Having one's traditional role questioned is not a very comfortable experience, perhaps especiall...
GLORIA STEINEM

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.
GLORIA STEINEM

so whatever you want to do, just do it...Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.
GLORIA STEINEM

I remember Spider Woman from the first page of Leslie’s novel Ceremony. She is the Thought Woman w...
GLORIA STEINEM

The Republican Party supported the Equal Rights Amendment before the Democratic Party did. But what ...
GLORIA STEINEM

I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the wo...
GLORIA STEINEM

No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to...
GLORIA STEINEM

Perfectionism attaches to what is valued in the culture.
GLORIA STEINEM

Pearl Jam doesn't just sing about issues they care about. These guys walk it like they talk it.
GLORIA STEINEM

Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.
GLORIA STEINEM

Our grief is not a cry for war.
"That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what...
GLORIA STEINEM

In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that p...
GLORIA STEINEM

Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with stat...
GLORIA STEINEM

If I read the word 'problematize' one more time, I'm going to vomit.
GLORIA STEINEM

We need to unlearn our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves. It'...
GLORIA STEINEM

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the ...
GLORIA STEINEM

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors...
GLORIA STEINEM

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

Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys.
GLORIA STEINEM

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on...
GLORIA STEINEM

Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and come...
GLORIA STEINEM

Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself. Fashion in the present means being individu...
GLORIA STEINEM

Rich People plan for three generations
Poor people plan for Saturday night
GLORIA STEINEM

Laughter is a rescue. p.204
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.

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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

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