Gloria Steinem
I’ve only ever met one woman who actually was a prostitute of her own free will. She didn’t have a pimp. She could pick and choose her customers. That’s so rare. So we have to look at the reality and not romanticize it. We have to be clear that you have the right to sell your own body but nobody has the right to sell anybody else’s body. No one has that right.Collection: Reality
I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion. The truth of the mater is that hierarchy and violence can't be remedied by more hierarchy and violence. The end doesn't justify the means, the means we choose decide the end we get. The means are the end.Collection: Mean
Gratitude never radicalized anybody. I don't care if they recognize the past, I just want them to get angry about the present and keep going.Collection: Gratitude
It's obviously a great sign of growth and success that the media no longer try to embody the bigness and diversity of the women's movement in one person. Only a diverse group can symbolize a movement.Collection: Media
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.Collection: Opposites
[On the Internet and activism:] 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. In a way, the highest purpose of the Internet is to bring us together for empathy and action. After all, the reflector cells and empathy-producing chemicals in our brains only work when we're physically together with all five senses. You can't raise a baby online.Collection: Baby
This is what forty looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?Collection: Lying
All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.Collection: Mirrors
Women get hit with a double whammy. If they're attractive, they're presumed to have slept their way to the top. If they're unattractive, they are presumed to have chosen a profession because they could not get a man.Collection: Men
[On gender-rating by insurance companies:] They say the reason they get to charge more is we have children. I would say having children is a socially useful act. Being female is not a preexisting condition.Collection: Children
Whoever has power takes over the noun - and the norm - while the less powerful get an adjective.Collection: Powerful
women used to be elected only when their husbands died and they became widows. The men found this was too hard on them. That's why they've become feminists.Collection: Husband
During years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country, I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals. All for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman.Collection: Country
The kind of power I want is the power to persuade. But I do not want the power to tell other people what to do.Collection: People
Frequently people just vote for the party out of power because they're disappointed or angry at what is happening at the moment.Collection: Party
I'd just begun to be taken seriously as a freelance writer, but after the Playboy article, I mostly got requests to go underground in some other semi-sexual way. It was so bad that I returned an advance to turn the Playboy article into a paperback, even though I had to borrow the money.Collection: Taken
I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do, or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn't get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.Collection: Writing
I wasn't ever unable to function, but I did realize at some point that I had built a wall between myself and my childhood by saying, "I'm so glad that's over. Nothing can ever be as bad again," without understanding that my childhood was still very much with me.Collection: Wall
Little girls do not wake up in the morning and say "I dream of being a prostitute." It is a terrible, terrible life. Body invasion is more traumatic than even getting beaten up. In certain circumstances, obviously, it may be a way to survive.Collection: Girl
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. I wasn't as close to her then as I nowadays, in retrospect, wish I had been.Collection: Mother
Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it's amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects.Collection: Emotional
I always say to audiences of men: "Cooperation beats submission. Trust me."Collection: Men
If you consider that the gender roles are just political, then what you come to see is that the full circle of human qualities is divided up so that two-thirds are masculine and one-third is feminine. Women are missing more of their human qualities, so you'll find us on the fore-front of trying to change this.Collection: Circles
It's especially ridiculous to think you have to be successful when you're so young. You should be able to adventure and not worry so much about achievement.Collection: Adventure
Society definitely encourages and condones men's violence toward women. Not as much as it used to be when it was less visible, and there were still laws on the books that made it alright for men to beat their wives, as long as it was within certain limits, and women were chattel.Collection: Book
In almost any situation, if you have been the powerful one, which would tend to be men more than women but not always, it's very important to listen as much as you talk. If you have been the less powerful one, it's very important to talk as much as you listen.Collection: Powerful
You may very well fall in love with somebody who makes less money, who's younger than you, who weighs less than you.Collection: Falling In Love
The phenomenon of the woman who's asked what movie she wants to see, and she says, "I don't know. What do you want to see?" It's a tiny version of a big tendency. Women need to say, "This is what I want."Collection: Needs
Any group of people that has been subordinate absorbs the idea of our own subordination, and that it is natural, and comes to think that the only way to survive is to identify with the powerful. And I think that is not surprising, and it is what happens to a lot of right-wing women. I mean they think they better do what the powerful tell them do otherwise they'll be in even more trouble.Collection: Powerful
I haven't been in a job situation in which I was competing with other women. As a writer, you're more likely to be treated as an individual.Collection: Jobs
I wasn't even in a newspaper office where I was getting assignments in competition with other people. I remember earlier, though, that I knew a young woman who had been published in the New Yorker, and I was so jealous of her. It wasn't exactly a personal competition. I just envied that accomplishment.Collection: Jealous
Am I a capitalist? No. Why would I be a capitalist? I have no capital. Most people have no capital. But to punish the individual for the sins of the system makes no sense. We're responsible for changing it, yes. But we can't actually invent another universe, so we have to start where we are.Collection: People
I think we all have the power to name ourselves. I try to call people what it is they wish to be called. But we can take the sting out of epithets and bad words by using them.Collection: Thinking
I think it's important to see the parallels, and to understand that our masculine and feminine roles are relatively new in human history. Both gender and race are inventions that go deep because we have been raised with them, but they are still inventions.Collection: Thinking
I hate when people say, "Have fun at the press preview." Fun is talking to you.Collection: Fun
If we have reproductive freedom, that is the ability to decide for ourselves when and whether to have children and what happens to our bodies, sexism can be reversed. It's the understanding that it's not inevitable. I think that is crucial.Collection: Children
no one ever got radicalized by being gratefulCollection: Grateful
I definitely think men can be leaders. I see an analogy in the case of what helped me think about racism, which was to find parallels with sexism. In other words, I don't think I was such a great ally until I got mad on my own behalf.Collection: Men
Progress is not automatic, it depends on what we do every day. So any statement of ownership of our own bodies, however that occurs in our individual lives or our community or our collective lives, is crucial.Collection: Community
Violence against women is clearly not solved, not at all solved, and the reasons for it, which are controlling women's bodies in order to control reproduction, are definitely not solved.Collection: Order
Racism is not real, it's made up, it's cruel, it can be stopped.Collection: Real
Violence is not inevitable. I mean, the only inevitable form of violence is the kind that we understand, the only legitimate (if there can ever be legitimate violence) and that's self-defense.Collection: Mean
We need to take violence against women seriously. It is the biggest indicator of whether a country is violent inside itself, and whether it will be militarily violent against another country.Collection: Country
It's important that we recognize how extreme the Republicans are in almost every case and how against our self-interest it is to vote for them whether or not we are disappointed with the current crew. At least they believe in the Constitution. At least they have an idea of economic justice. The Republicans are devoted to creating more rich folks.Collection: Believe
Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers or mindless policy-makers in politics.Collection: Coffee
... if young women have a problem, it's only that they think there's no problem.Collection: Thinking
You're afraid to be close to women. Because it's not masculine to be close to women. The last time you were close to a woman, you were a child.Collection: Children
Show me something that is not transformed by the other half of the human race.Collection: Race
Men have to ask, 'How can I combine career and family?'Collection: Careers