30 Powerful Gloria Steinem Quotes To Increase Your Feminist Zeal

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Gloria Steinem might want to live in a world where her written works are no longer relevant, but much of what Steinem so radically wrote about feminism and inequality through the 60s and 70s remains just as pertinent now as it was then. Which is a testament both to her extreme insight and bravery, but also to the shoddily paved brick road we’re being led down under a guise of “gender equality.”

The woman is a genius and an inspiration, and her perspectives on feminism, equality and governance are unapologetic and bold–sometimes I think feminism needs not so much as a makeover or rebranding but a renaissance to this bolder way of thinking. So let these 30 Gloria Steinem quotes whip up your latent feminist zeal.

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn’t it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?
A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.
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.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
Most women are one man away from welfare.
No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.
Men should think twice before making widowhood women’s only path to power.
Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.
We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.
Women are always saying,”We can do anything that men can do.” But Men should be saying, “We can do anything that women can do.”
Women have two choices: Either she’s a feminist or a masochist.
This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.
Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.
There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.
Someone asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.
If you say, I’m for equal pay, that’s a reform. But if you say. I’m a feminist, that’s a transformation of society.
Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.
Most women’s magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.
For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.
For women… bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can’t possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman’s body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.
Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice.
Marriage works best for men than women. The two happiest groups are married men and unmarried women.
A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.
Hope is a very unruly emotion.
image – U.S. News & World Report