From Jone Johnson Lewis,
Your Guide to Women's History.
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Feminist and journalist, Gloria Steinem was a key figure in the women's movement from 1969. She founded Ms. magazine, starting in 1972. Her good looks and quick, humorous responses made her the media's favorite spokesperson for feminism, but she was often attacked by the radical elements in the women's movement for being too middle-class-oriented. She was an outspoken advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment and helped found the National Women's Political Caucus.

Selected Gloria Steinem Quotations

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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 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?

• 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.

• 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.