Gloria Steinem's Best Quotes on Being a Woman

Before Disney princesses were singing about equal pay, feminist journalist Gloria Steinem was marching and speaking out for women's rights. And at 80 — today's her birthday! — Gloria continues to be a driving force for the cause. In recent years, she's performed at Chime For Change, a global campaign for girls' and women's empowerment; made an appearance in the MAKERS documentary; and cofounded the Women's Media Center. The social and political activist has been an icon for women's rights, having been deeply involved in abortion issues, women's equality, and sex education. In honor of her birthday, take a look at some of Gloria's most powerful words on womanhood. Source: WireImage

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"A woman who aspires to something is called a b*tch."

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

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"There's such huge punishment in the culture for an angry woman."

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"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."

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"We are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud."

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

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"Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers."

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"We are becoming the men we wanted to marry."

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"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age."

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

"We are still identified by our looks instead of our hearts or heads. That's why it's so much better to break the rules. If the rules worked, we'd be able to see it. If women were able to sleep to the top, there would be many more women at the top." Source: Wikimedia Commons

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"Now we know that, say, women can do what men can do — most folks would agree with that. But we don't know that men can do what women can do."

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"I never wanted to be a politician or elected person myself, so I loved to work for other women who did — and hope that more girls will do that. The problem is the feeling that we're divided from politics, that our vote doesn't count or what we do doesn't count. In fact, everything we do counts."

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"It's still the case that women don't feel as safe in the streets as men do, or girls don't as much as boys do, so I think it's important to say our bodies belong to us, no one else, no one has a right to impose on us physically, nothing justifies it for no reason if we're not giving permission."

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"Women who were pretty, people said, 'Oh, they just succeeded because they were pretty.' Women who were not pretty, whatever that means, they said, 'She's succeeding because she couldn't get a man.' So we all basically had the same problem of being identified by our outsides instead of our hearts and minds, and that still goes on."

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"Women's equality is also men's survival."