Feminist and journalist, Gloria Steinem was a key figure in the women’s movement from 1969. She founded Ms. magazine, starting in 1972. Her good looks and quick, humorous responses made her the media’s favorite spokesperson for feminism, but she was often attacked by the radical elements in the women’s movement for being too middle-class-oriented. She was an outspoken advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment and helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus.

“The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.”
-Gloria Steinem

“Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.”
-Gloria Steinem

“Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren’t, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.”
-Gloria Steinem

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

“I don’t breed well in captivity.”
-Gloria Steinem

“Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”
-Gloria Steinem

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

“Someone asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.”
-Gloria Steinem

“Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.”
-Gloria Steinem

“We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”
-Gloria Steinem

“I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.”
-Gloria Steinem

“A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”
-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

“The only thing I can’t stand is discomfort.”
-Gloria Steinem

“Evil is obvious only in retrospect.”
-Gloria Steinem

“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”
-Gloria Steinem

“Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.”
-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

“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

“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’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 women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn’t it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?”
-Gloria Steinem

“It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.”
-Gloria Steinem

“If you say, I’m for equal pay, that’s a reform. But if you say. I’m a feminist, that’s a transformation of society.”
-Gloria Steinem

“We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”
-Gloria Steinem

“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”
-Gloria Steinem