Gloria Steinem Quotes

When I was young, if a girl married poverty, she bcame a drudge; if she married wealth, she became a doll.

If woman's sole responsibility is of the domestic type, one class will be crushed by it, and the other throw it off as a badge of poverty. The poor man's motto, 'Woman's work is never done,' leads inevitably to its antithesis - ladies' work is never begun.

Among poor people, there's not any question about women being strong -- even stronger than men -- they work in the fields right along with the men. When your survival is at stake, you don't have these questions about yourself like middle-class women do.

I have known female whores who spoke very bitterly of their calling. "If they don't like my face, they can put a cushion over it. I know it's not that they're interested in." But to the boys this profession never seemed shameful. It was their daytime occupations for which they felt the need to apologize. In some instances, these were lower class or humdrum or, worst of all, unfeminine. At least whoring was never that.

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

If you had pockets, you were associated with a labor force. It meant you had things to carry yourself. Otherwise, your lady's maid or your manservant would have done it for you.

That's a huge fear for middle-class women. It's not so much a fear for poor women, because poor women have always assumed that they are going to have to support themselves. It's middle-class women who have this fantasy that somebody else is going to support them.

A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class that child comes from. Do I want my child to play with them?

I didn't say one negative word about poor people or about middle-class people or anything else. All I said was that the rich deserve our gratitude.

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

Marriage is for noblewomen with nothing else to do.

For all the chatter that Britain has moved beyond class, recent studies have found that it determines the life chances of British people more today than at any point since the Second World War... A child born into a rich family in Britain will almost certainly live and die rich, while a child born into a poor family will almost certainly live and die poor.

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

The taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths.

Marriages are so complicated that no one person is the culprit. But, I am really interested in class without really realizing that I am. It's more the manifestations of different classes that interest me.

Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim.

We have the beginnings of feminism starting to rear its head, where all of that got blown up. The whole point of going to college became not to find a husband - screw that! - feminism became, "You don't want anything about a man to be defining you, and you don't want your relationship to define, you! You don't want a relationship to be your happiness. You certainly don't want marriage to be the sole determining reason you live".

I've borne the shame of mother while you bought her off with a present and a treat here and there. God knows how hard I tried to civilize her so as not to have to blush with shame when I take her anywhere. I dressed her in the most stylish Paris models, but Delancey Street sticks out from every inch of her. Whenever she opens her mouth, I'm done for. You fellows had your chance to rise in the world because a man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

The rich want good wine, the poor, plenty of wine

Unless women have, from the moment of birth, socialization for, expectations of, and preparation for a viable significant alternative to motherhood . . . women will continue to want and reproduce too many children.

If men started taking care of children, the job will become more valuable.

When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.

If you're worth over $50m you should have to dress like that guy on the Monopoly box. The super-rich shouldn't get all the benefits of looking like a regular guy.