Gloria Steinem Quotes

How insulting is it to suggest the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things?

I know labs where women refuse to make a coffee for others because they don't want to be seen doing seemingly female things. I think this is stupid. Why not make a coffee, bring a cake? I do it.

It's useful to know how much society's holding you back. My mother would talk about how she was told by the head of her art school that she was the best painter, but that she wouldn't get the biggest prize because she would waste her talent by having children. I think we have to get honest with girls about how they can expect the world to block them, and we have to prepare girls, and ourselves, to break through those blocks.

People feel removed from sexism. 'I'm not a sexist, but I'm not a feminist.' They think there's this fuzzy middle ground. There's no fuzzy middle ground. You either believe that women are people or you don't. It's that simple.

Women can always think as much as they like, an' they could get up on a platform an' talk till they bust, as long as they didn't want the world to be made no better, an' they wouldn't be thought unwomanly. It's soon as a woman wants any practical good done that she is considered a unwomanly creature.

There are some men who, in a spirit of arrogance, think they are superior to women. They do not seem to realize that they would not exist but for the mother who gave them birth. When they assert their superiority they demean her.

The notion that somehow women are wildly different infuriates me.

I would gladly admit women are superior to men if only they would stop trying to be the same as us.

When I was producing on my own, I was doing it in order to - in a very patriarchal entertainment industry, let alone planet - very much hell-bent on trying to prove to myself, if nothing else, that I could do it as a woman.

And then also I think it's harder for women because comedy is so opposite of being ladylike.

Nature says women are human beings, men have made religions to deny it. Nature says women are human beings, men cry out no!

People think anything done from a woman's perspective is only going to appeal to women.

They had always told me that I wrote like a man.

Misogyny not only for Joyce Banda but for women.

I'm not a misogynist, so you can dispense with that. I think I've done wonders for the feminist movement.

Men don't oppress women any more than women oppress men.

Women get the attention when we get into the men's arena, and that's sad.

Whenever a female takes a strong stand for herself, the majority of the time they have to really, really narrow it down to being feminine and wearing dresses and just being lipstick chic.

Growing up in Texas, you were either pretty or smart. Smart didn't get you very far, because there weren't too many job opportunities for women. I wondered why you couldn't be both.

If I want to dislike women, I should be allowed to. As it happens, I love them. Women to me are privately worshipped and publicly disdained.

I was in fact pretty much - by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV - encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men.

Feminism justified female 'victim power' by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world.

I was called a misogynist because I was reducing women to mothers. 'Reducing women to mothers' - now there is possibly the most anti-women statement I've heard.

Woman's at best a contradiction still.

I always laugh when people call me a misogynist. I... love women! Everything I do is to impress women. And if I hated women, why would half my fans be women?