Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Gloria Steinem
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
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 future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.
We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.
Logic is in the eye of the logician.
A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.
The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.
Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.
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 have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
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.
There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.
I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers.
A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.
Most women are one man away from welfare.
Law and justice are not always the same.
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.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Being misunderstood by people whose opinions you value is absolutely the most painful.
Liberation does not come from outside.
Burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle.
The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.
Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother - so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally.
Perfectionism attaches to what is valued in the culture.
Age brings a freedom. When you're young, you're much more subject to the idea of what feminine is or how you should look or how you should behave.
A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.
Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.
America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.
Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.
Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.
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.
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?
It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
Rich cultures, patriarchal cultures, value thin women, like ours; poor ones value fat women. But all patriarchal cultures value weak women. So for women to become physically strong is very profound.
We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Work is valued by the social value of the worker.
The mark, to me, of a constructive argument is one that looks at a specific problem and says, 'What shall we do about this?' And a nonconstructive one is one that tries to label people.
The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture.
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.
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.
Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.
Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.
