Gloria Steinem Quotes

Women have the feeling that since they didn't make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Patriarchy is so ingrained in our psyche, that most us propagate it in small ways even without realizing.

A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Patriarchy is a fundamental imbalance underlying society And it's one we rarely address because it's so universal. But as I get older, I see that peace is a product of balance.

White middle- and upper-class men have a longer journey to go than many people.

To be political means to speak out, to risk being called 'catty', or worse. I don't hear men worrying about whether they may be right or not. They enjoy the fight, whether it is with words or fists. Women still tend to shy away from controversy, to be uncomfortable with competition.

A man must know how to act in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

I love how when I say the world is still run by men, and sometimes I say the world is still run by white men, people gasp as if that's news. That's not news. That's obvious.

Antiracists must acknowledge that patriarchy has long been a weapon of racism and cannot sit comfortably in any politic of racial transformation.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.

Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.

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

Look at history; all the interesting women were deeply flawed.

I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.

Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.

The image of Ireland is projected as a male image in the acting world, similar to the way that the word of Ireland is male dominated.