Gloria Steinem
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Marriage
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.Collection: Space
It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.Collection: Money
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.Collection: Women
I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.Collection: Marriage
God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.Collection: God
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.Collection: Marriage
Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Women
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Money
Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.Collection: Anger
The surest way to be alone is to get married.Collection: Alone
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.'Collection: Age
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.Collection: Future
Hope is a very unruly emotion.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Work
Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.Collection: Beauty
The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.Collection: Change
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.Collection: Amazing
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.Collection: Death
Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.Collection: Parenting
A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Family
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.Collection: Legal
Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Women
We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.Collection: Power
Nothing changes the gender equation more significantly than women's economic freedom.Collection: Freedom
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?Collection: Women
If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?Collection: Change
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.Collection: Romantic
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.Collection: Imagination
A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Food
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.Collection: Society
We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.Collection: Courage
Most women are one man away from welfare.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Family
Work is valued by the social value of the worker.
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.
The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture.
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.
If you ask men about their body image, they will tell you they look better than they do. And if you ask a woman, she'll tell you she looks worse.
When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was - and that my real parents were going to come get me.
I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.
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.
People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We're clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven't reached true democracy yet.
Actually, I believe there are more independents than either Republicans or Democrats, and yet those are the... that is the choice we have on the party ballot.