Gloria Steinem Quotes

If you're considered a beauty, it's hard to be accepted doing anything but standing around.

Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

I'm sure mothers are important across every culture, but particularly in Korean society, the role of the mother is of great importance.

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

I grew up in a conservative household. That was the life of the time in Egypt: a conservative, middle-class household.

Even today, in our progressive times, in most movies that come out, the men have to have biceps and the women have to be thin or something.

There's nothing wrong with looking at a woman's kneecaps.

In Georgia, apparently, men are men and women are women - at least in their folk dance.

Land belongs to the men folk.

The archetype of male hero is so boring. And the pretty, boobed woman is so... boring.

I think the desire to be with someone beautiful...I just had such a different experience growing up. To be in a position where you're lauded for things that you don't own - and don't think of yourself as - it's so bizarre.

To exist as an advertisement of her husband's income, or her father's generosity, has become a second nature to many a woman who must have undergone, one would say, some long and subtle process of degradation before she sunk [sic] so low, or grovelled so serenely.

Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.

A woman has all too much substance in a man's eyes at the best of times. That is why men like women to be slim. Her lack of flesh negates her. The less of her there is, the less notice he need take of her. The more like a male she appears to be, the safer he feels.

If you're raised in a household where questions are encouraged, you're the minority. It's sad. One of the things that has resonated the most for me is that, in the '50s, if your sex life was unfulfilling, it was your fault, as a woman. It was never the man's fault. Millions of women thought they were working with faulty equipment. If they couldn't have orgasms from having sex with their husbands, then they were broken. That's insane, and everybody believed it.

We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and wants to belong exclusively in the home.

Mom also hinted a couple of times that it was good I was going to college, since with one failed marriage behind me, I 'd have trouble landing a good husband and would need something to fall back on. "A package that's been opened once doesn't have the same appeal".

The Confucian concept and Chinese ideograms for 'woman' and for 'slave' are the same.

Why should a woman cook? So her husband can say 'My wife makes a delicious cake' to some hooker?

I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.

Men like me because I dont wear a brassiere. Women like me because I dont look like a girl who would steal a husband. At least not for long.

Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man.