Gloria Steinem Quotes

I'm not superwoman. It's impossible to do everything 100 percent all of the time. And suggesting that women should be able to do it only puts more pressure on them.

There's a different expectation, not just on mothers but on women. We're expected to do it all, to have it all, and look good through the process and have a smile on our face, and that's not always the case.

The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

Women are the real superheroes because they're not just working. They have a life and everything.

The way I look at - speaking as a woman - I understand what it means to be a daughter, and to be a wife, and to be a mother, and also to be a career woman. The multiple roles that women can play in a society if given the opportunity is really a tremendous asset.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

People ask me if I think Anne Boleyn was a feminist... but she wasn't striking out on behalf of women, and she wasn't particularly keen on them.

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.

That's one of the unintended consequences of the women's liberation movement - that, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be feminine, they would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children.

Women who can, do. Those who can't become feminists.

The world cannot evolve if girls refuse to become women.

I certainly don't think of my life as a fairy tale. I think of myself as a modern, contemporary woman who has had to deal with all kinds of problems that many women today have to deal with.

I'm a strong believer in the fact that women are born to multi-task. God has made us like that.

Society is still adapting to women being CEOs and professionals rather than homemakers. Because of this, the unfortunate outcome is that we feel we have to be successful at both - in the office and in the home. Striking that balance is different for everyone.

I think, as a woman, you've got to make so many sacrifices.

There are so many professional women who have to be this boss, but when they get home, it's like, 'Can someone take care of me? Can I not be so powerful?'

I was frustrated in general with the way women are always portrayed. And it's always through a man's eyes.

I cannot refrain from saying that women must come to recognize there is some function of womanhood other than being a child-bearing machine.

Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.

Women are being told "you are future leaders." Meanwhile, we are more than our jobs. One reason Sex and the City was such an enormous hit is that it expressed something that feminism won't admit: we don't know what we want. We don't know if we want children or not.

I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.

I believe that all women of working ages and physical capacity, regardless of income, should be expected to earn their livings either in or out of the home. Until this attitude prevails I believe the position of women will be uncertain and undignified, in spite of poetic rhapsodies to the contrary.