Gloria Steinem (b.1934) is an American feminist activist and writer. She is one of the most influential women in the history of the modern feminist movement since the 1960s.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem spent her youth traveling with her parents in trailers and did not attend school consistently until age 12. Notwithstanding her poor school grades, she got into Smith College wholly on her entrance examinations. After college, she worked as a journalist.
In 1963, Steinem created a sensation with her two-part article, “A Bunny’s Tale,” about working covertly at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club in New York City. At the heart of her critique was her conviction that the sexual revolution would fail if men are the only ones allowed to characterize it.
In 1971, Steinem founded the National Women’s Political Caucus. In 1972, she created and edited the first issue of Ms. Magazine, devoted to women’s issues. The first print run of 300,000 copies got snapped up in eight days. Subsequently, she became one of the world’s best-known crusaders for gender equality.
Steinem has authored numerous books about the inequities and discriminations women face in the modern world, including Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983) and Revolution from Within (1992) and the memoir My Life on the Road (2016.) She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
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Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
—Gloria Steinem
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Money, Value
The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Ethics
Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Sex
It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
—Gloria Steinem
Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: The Past, Change, Past
The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Man
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Women, Men, Men & Women
Hope is a very unruly emotion.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Hope
Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.
—Gloria Steinem
A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.
—Gloria Steinem
Topics: Feminism, Women, Jobs
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