It's going to take a while because for the last 500 years patriarchal societies have been devoted to controlling reproduction and that means controlling women. So we got into this masculine/feminine, dominant/passive paradigm, and it's going to take a while to get out.

Gloria Steinem

Categorized in : Years Mean Lasts

The purpose of feminism is to free the uniqueness of the individual and to understand that inside each of us is a unique human being who is a combination of heredity and environment.

Gloria Steinem

heredity-and-environment unique inspirational

If we're by ourselves we come to feel crazy and alone. We need to make alternate families of small groups of women who support each other, talk to each other regularly, can speak their truths and their experiences and find they're not alone in them, that other women have them, too ... It makes such a huge difference.

Gloria Steinem

strong-women differences crazy

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

Gloria Steinem

mother-daughter honesty courage

There's one logical generational difference and that is that young women will have more chances to support a female president than older women. Older women feel it's their last chance, so that's just a factual, obvious difference. But other than that it depends on experience, on individual experience.

Gloria Steinem

support differences president

At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m “passing the torch.” I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much-and I’m using it to light the torches of others.

Gloria Steinem

light age people

Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.

Gloria Steinem

motivational inspirational relationship

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

Gloria Steinem

life-is happens art

Progress is not automatic, it depends on what we do every day. So any statement of ownership of our own bodies, however that occurs in our individual lives or our community or our collective lives, is crucial.

Gloria Steinem

progress community body

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Gloria Steinem

funny-love hilarious heartbreak

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Gloria Steinem

motivational inspirational life

No one can give us power. If we aren’t part of the process of taking it, we won’t be strong enough to use it.

Gloria Steinem

strong use giving

If [George] Zimmerman had been arrested for domestic violence, Trayvon Martin might still be alive.

Gloria Steinem

domestic-violence alive might

Inner space is the real frontier.

Gloria Steinem

frontiers space real

The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.

Gloria Steinem

moving-on feminist people

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

Gloria Steinem

feminism pie jobs

If you're raised in a house where it's okay for one group to eat and another to cook, or for one group to get more education money than the other or to be more free than the other, or where one parent gives in to the will of the other or may be verbally or even physically abused by the other. This gives you an idea of human worth.

Gloria Steinem

parent giving ideas

Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.

Gloria Steinem

empathy body mind

I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

Gloria Steinem

unique self believe

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.

Gloria Steinem

army war dirty

We'll only really know we've succeeded when a mediocre woman does as well as a mediocre man. You shouldn't have to be extraordinary. That's the point!

Gloria Steinem

mediocre doe men