A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.
Gloria Steinem

A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.
Gloria Steinem

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Gloria Steinem

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.
Gloria Steinem

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

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.
Gloria Steinem

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

Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.
Gloria Steinem

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
Gloria Steinem

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.
Gloria Steinem


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.
Gloria Steinem

From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.
Gloria Steinem

God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.
Gloria Steinem

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.
Gloria Steinem

Hope is a very unruly emotion.
Gloria Steinem

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
Gloria Steinem

I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.
Gloria Steinem

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.
Gloria Steinem

I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.
Gloria Steinem

If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?
Gloria Steinem