Gloria Steinem

"There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation."

"A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves."

"A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after."

"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."

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

"Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal."

"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."

"In a general way, anything that affects men is taken more seriously than anything that affects only women."

"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."

"Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist."

"Most women are one man away from welfare."

"Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other."

"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."

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

"The surest way to be alone is to get married."

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

"What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group."

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