When I'm talking to groups that are all men, we talk about how the masculine role limits them. They often want to talk about how they missed having real fathers, real loving, present fathers, because of the way that they tried to fit the picture of masculinity.
— Gloria Steinem
I remember someone once asked Jack Kennedy why he was paying such close attention to the renovation of the square across from the White House, and he said, 'It may be the only thing my presidency is remembered for.'
The women's movement in England was totally against Margaret Thatcher.
Burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle.
The mark, to me, of a constructive argument is one that looks at a specific problem and says, 'What shall we do about this?' And a nonconstructive one is one that tries to label people.
Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts.
Anything can be used for or against the welfare of women - or the welfare of anyone - depending on who controls it.
The electoral system is not where change starts - it usually starts in communities and from the bottom up - but it is where change can be stopped.
What's so valuable about HBO is they tell stories. We learn from stories.
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.
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.
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.
Being misunderstood by people whose opinions you value is absolutely the most painful.
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.
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.
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.
A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.
In a general way, anything that affects men is taken more seriously than anything that affects only women.
I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.
I supported Hillary Clinton. She would have made an excellent president. I didn't think she could get elected. I thought it was too soon.
If I read the word 'problematize' one more time, I'm going to vomit.
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.
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.
Whatever each individual woman is facing - only she knows her biggest challenge.
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.
What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group.
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.
Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.
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.
The most hurtful thing is not what comes from our adversaries, it's what comes from our friends.
If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.
Work is valued by the social value of the worker.
I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.
When I had a fellowship at the Smithsonian, I asked for a couch in the office because I liked to lie down and take a break.
For twenty years, not a week went by when I wasn't on a plane.
The Republican Party supported the Equal Rights Amendment before the Democratic Party did. But what happened was that a lot of very right-wing Democrats, after the civil rights bill of 1964, left the Democratic Party and gradually have taken over the Republican Party.
These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted, they think.
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.
If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story.
In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.
If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way.
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.
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.
Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.
