Quotes from Gloria Steinem

Reading in the car was so much my personal journey that when my mother urged me to put down my book and look out the window, I would protest, "But I just looked an hour ago!

Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife's household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate—a failure of the imagination.

would I have known that mystery leaves a space for us when certainty does not? And would I have dared to challenge rules later in life if my father had obeyed them?

The best thing about self-defense is knowing there is a self worth defending.

I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us - which is both the good and the bad news

Many are looking for the right person. Too few are trying to be the right person.

I had been silent and silenced about an abortion I'd had years before. Like many women, I'd been made to feel at fault, not realizing there were political reasons why female humans were not supposed to make decisions about our own bodies.

What our bodies can do is way more important than how they look. Sports help young women realize that our bodies are instruments, not ornaments.

But for women especially, 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 those visual references, however, each individual woman's body can be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine", so we suppress it-until it overflows.

Among their first questions was said to be: Where are the women?

We are the women our parents warned us about - and we are proud!

I'm not black on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and a woman on Thursday, Friday and Saturday

Everyone has a home but me.

You're always the person you were when you were born. You just keep finding new ways to express it.

There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things.

Secrets have power only as long as they are secret.

MY LAST HOPE IS to open up the road—literally. So far it's been overwhelmingly masculine turf. Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it.

Perhaps we'll only be fully at ease with ourselves when we can appreciate scars as symbols of experience, often experiences that other women share, and see our bodies as unique chapters in a shared story.

Inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.

This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.

Gender is the remaining caste system that still cuts deep enough, and spreads wide enough, to be confused with the laws of nature. To uncover the difference between what is and what could be, we may need the "Aha!" that comes from exchanging subject for object, the flash of recognition that starts with a smile, the moment of changed viewpoint that turns the world upside down.

White people should have sued for being culturally deprived in a white ghetto. When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.

Most of all, I love graduations. They are individual and communal, an end and a beginning, more permanent than weddings, more inclusive than religions, and possibly the most moving ceremonies on earth.