Gloria Steinem

"Housewives are dependent creatures who are still children... parasites."

"In the early seventies, when I was in jail, one of the organizers of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis told me that they had approached a feminist organization-I do not remember which one-and the response was, "Well, Angela Davis is not associated with the women's movement, she's associated with the Black movement, as if one had to make a choice between the two, as if one was either a feminist or an antiracist. In all fairness, I should point out that white feminists were active around my case. Gloria Steinem, for example, was treasurer of my legal defense fund. There has been a great deal of dialogue about the influence of racism and class bias in the women's movement."

"Jung drew a circle and divided it into four parts, and said a man is three-quarters masculine and one quarter feminine. A woman is three-quarters feminine and one quarter masculine. And that’s a good start. The problem is that he says this is the way it should be, and that’s not the way it is. It is too rigid a form. Some men I have met are three-quarters feminine and one-quarter masculine, and the one-quarter masculine they are — jump back — very strong, fuerte, strong! But they have tremendous feminine development because it is who they are. It is from the souls, not an overlay from cultural family. Gloria Steinem is a great example of a woman who has far more masculine development then she has feminine development. Although now her feminine development appears as though it is coming now. She is 55 -60 years old and now it is coming. So whatever we have, as you know, the role in life is to develop it to its fullness. But also the challenges is to develop its balance, which is also its opposite."

"Even the kind of feminist women that I know, we’ve had great discussions here about reproductive rights. Our primary issue, as women and men who are our allies in the struggle, is not the right to have abortion, it is to have reproductive rights, of which abortion is one. I often have this discussion with my good comrade Gloria Steinem—I’ve not convinced her. I’ve said, “Do you really believe that women in the world who are just trying to get clean water and feed their children and to survive, are running around being upset that they can’t have an abortion?” This is a very small example of how First World women in our society, mostly white, can impose our sense of what is important for women in the world. As such, that is a form of violence. Because we are not respecting the lives of the millions of women in the world for whom feminist issue is ending war, having food, ending poverty, ending disease."

"Gloria Steinem inspired me."

"At first, the editors there said they didn’t want staff writers but that if I had an idea for a piece they’d look at it. So I went home and called up Ms. magazine, and I said, “I’d like to speak to Gloria Steinem.” She picked up, and I told her I’d like to interview her. She said, “Of course.” I was just somebody off the street, but that was the original solidarity of feminism."

"If we adopt Gloria Steinem's definition of a feminist — "Anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men" — most of us are probably feminists, too. This was a radical innovation two thousand years ago, when the first Christians proclaimed the equal value of all people."

"I don't know that my quarrel is with Western feminism as such, but with the mouthy American feminists of the early and mid-seventies. Particularly Gloria Steinem and the Ms. magazine group, who were doctrinaire and, we now know, often conducting intergender relationships and maneuvering for power when they had an overt but totally unacknowledged racist, colonialist attitude towards women of color. Particularly women of color who were not African American. And so the Kate Millets and the Gloria Steinems insisted on telling minority women, telling me, how I should conduct my life in order to be a feminist. It was all about talk, rhetoric, and self-examination-these were the times of consciousness-raising groups and examining yourself with mirrors"

"When was the last time you heard Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan talk about welfare rights?"

"She is so deluded that she genuinely believes she speaks for all women. She's a victim of her own success. I liked the early Steinem. There was once a survey conducted for Time about who would make a good candidate for the first female president, and I wrote in Gloria Steinem. But now? Gloria Steinem is dissing men and dissing fashion and she's out having her hair streaked at Kenneth's. She became a socialite with a coterie. A lot of middle-aged white ladies still love her, but the media have been negligent regarding her."

"The horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the U.S., led by Gloria Steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to Bill Clinton’s behavior because he was a Democrat. The Democratic president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didn’t matter what his personal behavior was. [...] The actual facts of the matter are that Bill Clinton was a serial abuser of working-class women–he had exploited that power differential even in Arkansas."