Gloria Steinem Quotes

I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

[T]he great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment.

… it is not sufficient to change laws, institutions and customs. It is essential that women acquire ‘a new skin’. This can occur only through a collective effort while women suffer and loathe the oppression of men; it does not follow that her ovaries condemn her to be on her knees for eternity.

The emancipation of women will only be possible if the traditional world of men also changes.

We always had a lot of admiration for feminists who were out there trying to change things for the better for women, who were trying to find equality in the workplace and at home.

And I think women have come a very, very long way, but they have a long way to go.

The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself; that is not what I meant by freedom, it is only social progress.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.

I owe nothing to Women's Lib.

It's a little bit late in the day for men to object that women are getting outside their proper sphere.

If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

… this mad, wicked folly of women’s rights

I remember when the feminist movement started. I was in Edmonton. There was no feminist movement in Edmonton.

Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.

The very same people who 40 years ago were saying that feminism was unnatural and unnecessary are now saying “Well, it used to be necessary, but it’s not any more.”

Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex.

We demand that, in the strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and new relations, that in this new world we also have our share of honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of the Children of Women. We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less. That is our ‘Woman’s Right’.

The women’s movement … does not need a political party, it is itself a driving force in political life and perhaps destined not only to transform party politics but to fill politics altogether with a different content.

The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

Sisters, I ain't clear what you be after. If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it?

It's not a man's world any more.