Gloria Steinem Pow Quotations

I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives.

The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.

The question of whether one has one's own political power or goes to work for someone else is not only a feminist question.

It's easier to blame the person with less power.

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.

If you listen to the Catholic bishops you would think that Catholics are against contraception and legal abortion, but if you ask actual Catholics, you discover that more than 90% of Catholic women use contraception and Catholic women seem to need and choose legal abortion at about the same rate as everybody else. The problem is that the backlash occupies positions of power, not that it represents the majority of people.

... anything a powerful group has is perceived as good, no matter what it is, and anything a less powerful group has is not so good, no matter how intrinsically great it might be.

In almost any situation, if you have been the powerful one, which would tend to be men more than women but not always, it's very important to listen as much as you talk. If you have been the less powerful one, it's very important to talk as much as you listen.

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

Power in this country is often like hemophilia; it passes through women and then men get it.

Any group of people that has been subordinate absorbs the idea of our own subordination, and that it is natural, and comes to think that the only way to survive is to identify with the powerful. And I think that is not surprising, and it is what happens to a lot of right-wing women. I mean they think they better do what the powerful tell them do otherwise they'll be in even more trouble.

the less powerful group usually knows the powerful one much better than vice versa - blacks have had to understand whites in order to survive, women have had to know men - yet the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.

Whoever has power takes over the noun - and the norm - while the less powerful get an adjective.

... members of a powerful group are raised to believe (however illogically) that whatever affects it will also affect them. On theother hand, members of less powerful groups are raised to believe (however illogically) that each individual can escape the group's fate. Thus, cohesion is encouraged on the one hand, and disunity is fostered on the other.

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.

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'm not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression.

Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.