Gloria Steinem

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

“Nothing changes the gender equation more significantly than women's economic freedom.”

“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.”

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

“The thing about aging is all your old lovers, pretty much if they were really friends, become your family. It's great. You have those terrible feelings of possessiveness and uncertainty go out the window. You have what you shared. You know you would help each other in times of trouble no matter what.”

“Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.”

“The surest way to be alone is to get married.”

“Women tend to need the healthcare system more because we bear children. Insurance companies - not all of them, but many of them - 'gender-rate.' Women may pay 40% more for their health insurance than men do.”

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

“Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.”

“The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.”

“All women, and men of color - we were owned like tables and chairs. We spent a hundred years getting a legal identity as human beings. That's a big thing.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“We are still behaving as if a worker really doesn't have a family because the work pattern really was meant for men who really were the financial support but weren't looking after their families. We need to change this, and we can easily do that.”

“As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot.”

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

“If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?”

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”