Quotes from Gloria Steinem

If you're going to have a male dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.

Just because we all have wombs doesn't mean we have to be mothers, just like we all have vocal cords doesn't mean we're all opera singers.

In a general way, anything that affects men is taken more seriously than anything that affects only women.

Her husband stops by on his way to the cashier and suggests I see the huge statue of Crazy Horse that's being dynamited out of the Black Hills. "Crazy Horse riding his pony," he says, "is going to make all those Indian-killing presidents on Mount Rushmore look like nothing.

Marriage has worked better for men than for women. The two happiest groups are married men and unmarried women.

Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted.

In retrospect, the second cause for delay makes less feminist sense: the long popularity of assertiveness training. Though most women needed to be more assertive (or even more aggressive, though that word was considered too controversial), many assertiveness courses taught women how to play the existing game, not how to change the rules.

Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is.

Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.

They knew that in the 1970s the Indian Health Service of the U.S. government admitted that thousands of Native women had been sterilized without their informed consent. Some called it a long-term strategy for taking over Indian lands, and others said it was the same racism that had sterilized black women in the South.

Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way.

Women have two choices: Either she's a feminist or a masochist.