Gloria Steinem
Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself. Fashion in the present means being individual and finding oneself.
The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.
One's enemies are always talking about 'post-feminism.' It is a word invented by people who would like to do away with feminism.
The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.
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.
You can see the absence of women in governing bodies from Congress to state legislators, on corporate boards, in tenured positions in academia, and as forepeople in factories.
In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.
There is nothing more fundamental than the idea that the government does not have a right to decide when and whether we have children.
The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.
The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look instead of by our heads and our hearts.
Movements are like rivers. Dipping into them is never the same twice.
Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.
In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women who argued for the old hierarchy and against universal adult suffrage - often on religious grounds.
A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.
Men are victims of their own impulses.
There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female.
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.
Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way.
The question of whether one has one's own political power or goes to work for someone else is not only a feminist question.
I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.
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.
Age brings a freedom. When you're young, you're much more subject to the idea of what feminine is or how you should look or how you should behave.
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 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 looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are discriminated against,' and I got so mad.
Obviously there is no such thing as race, and in many ways, sex is a continuum, not a binary. So it doesn't make sense to label people in that way.
Pearl Jam doesn't just sing about issues they care about. These guys walk it like they talk it.
Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.
Women's progress has been a collective effort.
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.
Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.
Obviously, no LGBT person should be denied the ability to be who they are because their boss disagrees.
If I read the word 'problematize' one more time, I'm going to vomit.
There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.
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.
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.
If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.
A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.
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.
You can compel fear. You can even make someone feel they're in love if they're isolated and dependent for long enough. But laughter is free.
Burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle.
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.
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.
I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner.
A bad facelift is like a bad toupee.
Female inferiority is internalised by us. Women need a lot more confidence.
What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married.
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.
In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.