Gloria Steinem

“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.”

“It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit.”

“There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female.”

“What we need to be able to do is count all human experience. So I would like to count the secretarial positions as good training places to take over the jobs of the bosses.”

“Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.”

“As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous.”

“Female inferiority is internalised by us. Women need a lot more confidence.”

“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.”

“I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.”

“Movements are like rivers. Dipping into them is never the same twice.”

“Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger - and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn't usually mean including women.”

“Having one's traditional role questioned is not a very comfortable experience, perhaps especially for women, who have been able to remain children, and to benefit from work they did not and could not do.”

“There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.”

“When I'm talking to groups that are all men, we talk about how the masculine role limits them. They often want to talk about how they missed having real fathers, real loving, present fathers, because of the way that they tried to fit the picture of masculinity.”

“The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us”

“You can see the absence of women in governing bodies from Congress to state legislators, on corporate boards, in tenured positions in academia, and as forepeople in factories.”

“I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars and young women were treated like - well - young women. {...}I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one.”

“If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.”

“The women's movement in England was totally against Margaret Thatcher.”

“I was the first woman to speak ever at the National Press Club, and they gave me a necktie.”