Quotes by Gloria Steinem

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

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

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

“If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day a movement is only people moving.”

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

“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.”

“Hope is a very unruly emotion.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Most women are one man away from welfare.”

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

“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.”

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

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