Selected Gloria Steinem Quotations
• 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.
• The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
• We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.
• We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
• Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
• 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?"
• A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.
• 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.
• 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.
• Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
• Most women are one man away from welfare.
• [About Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy:] What has the women's movement learned from her candidacy for vice president? Never get married.
• 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?
• 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.
• 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.
• If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?
• The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.
• 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.
