Quotes from Gloria Steinem

Since Native students often prosper in cooperative rather than competitive classrooms—as do a lot of female students, regardless of where they come from—I've been asked to talk about the feminist movement and efforts to change classrooms into learning circles.

Wherever selling other people's bodies is legal, demand soon outstrips the number of people who want to be prostituted, and trafficking results.

What if heterosexual male teachers were prejudged as sexual abusers of children, in the way that gay males often have been (which would make more statistical sense, since heterosexual males are the majority of abusers of both girls and boys)?

Gender is the remaining caste system that still cuts deep enough, and spreads wide enough, to be confused with the laws of nature.

Sometimes you're hungry for one thing and not another.

there is no better moment in life than finding the right word.

She found value in conflict, no matter what. "The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason," she often explained. "It's to keep your ass sensitive.

Humbled by this response and looking for advice on my own future now that I'm past seventy, I ask her how she has remained herself all these years. She looks at me as if at a slow pupil. "You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.

There are rock-bottom subjects for men as well as women. If there is one that men want to talk about most, it's how much they missed having nurturing fathers, or any man in their lives who cared.

Women still average much less in earnings over a lifetime than men do and have to pay back the same college debt.

Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still

Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, "Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.

can replace being in the same space. That's exactly why we need to keep creating the temporary worlds of meetings, small and large, on campuses and everywhere else. In them, we discover we're not alone, we learn from one another, and so we keep going toward shared goals.

When she visited me in New York during her sixties and seventies, she always told taxi drivers that she was eighty years old ("so they will tell me how young I look"), and convinced theater ticket sellers that she had difficulty in hearing long before she really did ("so they'll give us seats in the front row").

The simple right to reproductive freedom—to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction—is basic to restoring women's power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature.

Last week in an airport, a place I so often am, I noticed that the clerk who was helping me didn't ask me if I wanted a wheelchair, as I guess age guidelines required her to do. She just smiled and said she could see I didn't need one. On my return, another airline clerk looked only at her computer and so ordered a wheelchair, complete with attendant, that might have been needed somewhere else. To one, I was an individual human being. To the other, I was a group.

Our brains are organized by narrative and image. After

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

At every stop, Catholic officials condemned her for supporting family planning and legal abortion. I noticed they hadn't attacked Senator Ted Kennedy, also a pro-choice Catholic, in the same way—as if tacitly admitting that it was strong, rebellious women who were the problem.

More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.

And over time, the question I have to ask myself is this: What would I have felt had I known I was talking to a woman, not a man? Such is the divisive power of a binary called gender.

As the New York primary approached, I certainly wasn't against either candidate, but I still had to decide who to vote for. So I sat down with a yellow pad and made a list of pros and cons for each.

That's why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow consciousness to change.

a quote from The Little Prince: "True love is visible not to the eyes, but to the heart, for eyes may be deceived.