Gloria Steinem quotes:

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.

I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers.

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

Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years - about twice as long as other bears - between having cubs. And after they're pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. There are many ways of supporting that, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all caregiving and making that amount tax deductible.

The error that we tend to make is that we think that women's magazines are what editors want and what their readers want - and thus are social indicators - when, in fact, they are what advertisers want. They're just advertising indicators.

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.

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?

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

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

The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.

The electoral system is not where change starts - it usually starts in communities and from the bottom up - but it is where change can be stopped.

What we need to be able to do is count all human experience. So I would like to count the secretarial positions as good training places to take over the jobs of the bosses.

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

To say 'radical feminist' is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system is a root of race and class and other divisions.

Work is valued by the social value of the worker.

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

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

Secretary of state is far superior to vice president, because it's involved in continuously solving problems and making policy and not being on standby.

Part of the reason that women go to college is to get out of the food service, clerical, pink-collar ghetto and into a more white-collar job. That does not necessarily mean they are being paid more than the blue-collar jobs men have.

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.

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.'

These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted, they think.

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

Women's progress has been a collective effort.

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.

Ms.' always flouted the rules of the ad world that say, especially for products directed at women, that the ad must be connected to the editorial. You don't have food ads unless you have recipes. You don't get clothing ads unless you have lavish fashion coverage. We never did that; every other women's magazine does.

The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.

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

The thing about aging is all your old lovers, pretty much if they were really friends, become your family. It's great. You have those terrible feelings of possessiveness and uncertainty go out the window. You have what you shared. You know you would help each other in times of trouble no matter what.

When I'm talking to groups that are all men, we talk about how the masculine role limits them. They often want to talk about how they missed having real fathers, real loving, present fathers, because of the way that they tried to fit the picture of masculinity.

What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group.

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.

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.

If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story.

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.

As for the American child's classic problem - too much mother, too little father - that would be cured by an equalization of parental responsibility.

Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts.

I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives.

We are still behaving as if a worker really doesn't have a family because the work pattern really was meant for men who really were the financial support but weren't looking after their families. We need to change this, and we can easily do that.

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

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

Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself. Fashion in the present means being individual and finding oneself.

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

The question of whether one has one's own political power or goes to work for someone else is not only a feminist question.

The Native American cultures on this continent, most of them, were matrilineal, and some women were the chiefs. Societies were about balance.

I hope to live to 100. There is so much to do.

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.

Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.

All women, and men of color - we were owned like tables and chairs. We spent a hundred years getting a legal identity as human beings. That's a big thing.

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

I'm not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression.

Gerda Lerner was fierce, brilliant and unique. She lived history by her bravery, restored history by her scholarship, and democratized its study by her activism.

Women tend to need the healthcare system more because we bear children. Insurance companies - not all of them, but many of them - 'gender-rate.' Women may pay 40% more for their health insurance than men do.

Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt.

In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.

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

The women's movement in England was totally against Margaret Thatcher.

What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married.

Rich cultures, patriarchal cultures, value thin women, like ours; poor ones value fat women. But all patriarchal cultures value weak women. So for women to become physically strong is very profound.

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.

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

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

There's been the same kind of demonizing of the word 'feminism' as words like 'liberal,' 'affirmative action,' and so on.

Men may feel just disempowered by intimacy, by being close to a woman, and also by feeling the tender feelings that they're ashamed of.

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

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

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

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

In Sweden, both parents take care of the children.

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.

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

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.

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

We're never going to have democratic countries or peaceful countries until we have democratic or peaceful families.

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

I'm so happy that we're finally hearing the stories and voices of women who make America. We do what we see, not what we're told, so an incomplete story of this country damages everyone.

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

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

The AIDS crisis has brought us a consciousness of the immune system as the most important health-maintenance element, and a consciousness of how it is under attack.

I keep thinking: 'Georgia O'Keeffe wouldn't have had Botox.'

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

Law and justice are not always the same.

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

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

Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother - so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally.

Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.

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.

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

Whatever each individual woman is facing - only she knows her biggest challenge.

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

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.

The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am terminally sentimental about graduations. They are more individual than weddings, more conscious than christenings, or bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs. They are almost as much a step into the unknown as funerals-though I assure you, there is life after graduation.

Battered women is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets.

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

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.

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

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.

Even when educators survey grade school texts and create new bibliographies to help teachers include Asians, Eskimos, and other Americans, females in and out of those groups may be down-played or forgotten.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.

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.

I spend a lot of time on college campuses, and I don't quite understand where the idea comes from that young women are not moving forward. In fact, statistically, if you look at the public opinion polls, young women are much more supportive of feminism and feminist issues than older women are.

I can't mate in captivity.

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.

The road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic "Odyssey," of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it's really about a man on the road. There's an assumption that the road is too dangerous for women.

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

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.

There is no such thing as a crime of passion, only a crime of possession.