YouSaid · the spoken record

Gloria Steinem

lines on the record: 38
first: 2026-06-17
most recent: 2026-06-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I see women directing traffic in New York and doing it very well and ordering everybody around and blowing their whistle and then saying to me as I cross the street give them hell honey.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that women. Have started young women really have started a major part of a black liberation movement now Are very clear about it and talk about it A sisterhood. It's for men and women, but they talk about themselves A sis”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the little things inspire me, you know, the 10 year old girl who's playing football and she's littler the boys than the boys, but she's”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what pisses me off in a very fundamental way is that reproductive freedom is not a basic human right, like freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and so on, because we each get to, I mean, the power of the government needs to stop at our skins, male or female. You know, there's a boundary here”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. Being centered, it's not one thing or the other. I think it's a balance between qualities that's the important thing. And each of us is unique.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I have a creed exactly. I mean, I have a series of creeds, I guess, you know, The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, the first thing that came into my head when you said it is that Wilma Mankiller, who was the chief of the Cherokee Nation and a dear friend and an amazing woman, she and I were, before she died, writing a book, trying to write a book about original cultures around the world and what very simple, practical things we can learn And each thing was a chapter, for instance, in a culture in Ghana, when someone does something antisocial and destructive, that person is indeed punished with isolation. But when that person is brought back into the group, there is a long ritual amount of time in which everyone who knows that person tells them every good thing they ever did. We could do that. But we do the opposite with prisoners. The opposite. They can't vote, they can't work.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think anthropologically speaking, it is seeing difference in your family, seeing a dominant and a passive role, seeing cheap labor, seeing unpaid labor, and then turning other people into it outside the family. If you can own a woman as the means of production, you can own a slave as a laborer. It's not about, you know, I know that the academic word is intersection, which is a very good word. But I think intertwined is an even more graphic way of saying that racism and sexism can only be uprooted at the same time.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Controlling reproduction to try to control reproduction. If we didn't have wombs, we'd be fine, if you know what I mean. And it's doubly important when there's a lot of racism, because if you're going to perpetuate racial separation, you have to control reproduction even more so.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They gave me the most wonderful present, which is a wooden bench, not like the metal kind, but a beautiful wooden bench in Central Park. And on the back is a plaque. And it says to Gloria Steinemann, her 80th birthday, and something about the women's movement. And then it says, and to her hero, Sojourner Truth. Who Unless all of us are free, none of us is free. So we just, I love that because I'm not there by myself. I don't want to be on a statue by myself. I want people to know what I've learned, which is that change starts from the bottom, not the top. Like a tree. And we have to stay connected to each other. So I'm happy that I'm there connected across distance with Sojourner.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll just answer because I can't imagine that. Okay, so the closest I can come to it is that a bunch of my women friends, wonderful human beings on my 80th birthday, we all went elephant riding. Yes, I know. Botswana. Yeah, right.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who lived intimately on this land where we are before Europeans showed up were one of 500 or so native nations whose paradigm of life, very sophisticated, very sophisticated cultures, whose paradigm of life was the circle, not a pyramid. So people were linked. We were not ranked like this. And if we start ranking each other in the family, we think it's natural. We think it's culture. We think there's no other way. And there is another way. The old languages, most of the ones I know, don't even have gendered pronouns. They don't have he and she. They don't have a concept of race. They don't have a word for nature. We're not separate from these.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's that we confuse it with culture. We think it's inevitable somehow. We assume that the masculine controls the feminine. Of course, there is no masculine and feminine. There's human. But we set up”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They never would have blood me. He's been wonderful about it. Child marriage and domestic violence in the United States, which is huge. But we talk about foreign terrorism, but not about domestic terrorism.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the world. Yes, it is the first that we're aware of. And it's because of the preference for sons. Now there's a sun surplus and a daughter deficit. Much of India and China It's because of female genital mutilation, which Jimmy Carter, you know, he sat on television on David Letterman and talked about female genital mutilation. I thought, thank you.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge Religion is politics in the sky, mostly I mean, God looks like the ruling class a suspicious amount of time. Even Jesus is blonde and blue-eyed in the middle of the Middle East. God is a guy, God is spirituality is in everything, in all living things. You know, I had to go to have a minor medical something in a hospital just for a few hours, but they make you fill out a little form. Including religion. So first I was going to put none, but then I thought it's a little negative. So I put pagan. Yeah. So the nurse said to me, What does pagan mean? I said, It just means you believe there's godliness in all living things. I converted around the spot. I mean, I think we're natural. Pagans. And when we see now the political uses of religion, religion is politics we're not supposed to talk about. And we have to talk about it.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think so because of the living and the moment communicating with other people. Part of it, which I think is a spiritual experience.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, she, because I would, of course, be saying to her because she had told me that she fell in love with someone else in the newspaper office, and she wanted to go to New York. And I was saying, but why didn't you marry this other guy, go to New York with your girlfriend? And then she would say, but then you never would have been born. And I so wanted to say to her, but then you would have been born. But I couldn't say it because it couldn't happen. If there had been a chance of it happening still.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think a lot of women, hopefully that will pass because women will be able to live out their own lives. But it's still true, I think, for a lot of us. And it made me understand that my mother had no journey of her own. My father had no home of his own And we both need, we all need both.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That also took me a while. I think we spend a lot of time saying I'm not going to be anything like my mother. Before we realize that it's not an individual fault, it's a collective fate. And so I too went through that period of time, but I do realize looking back that, I mean, my mother was a pioneer journalist before I was born. I didn't even know that until much later. She gave up everything not because my father forced her to, but that was the way the world ran. She had what was then called a nervous breakdown, but I mean, she was really institutionalized for a couple years. And then just to survive, you know, became her goal. And she was wonderful, smart, loving person. But I began to realize that actually I was living out her unlived life.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is about spontaneity. I mean, and it takes you out of yourself. You find yourself in a completely different world, you know, in a road house and it's snowing and there's a somehow a guy there who's a Tango teacher and you find yourself, I mean tangoing to the, I mean.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I got rid of the myth that we're supposed to grow up and settle down. Those two things go together. And also, since I, in my childhood, had lived in a house trailer with my parents most of each year as we voyaged from Michigan to Florida or California. My father was kind of. I, of course, wanted to be like other kids. I wanted to go to school like other kids, right? So I thought I was rebelling against a traveling way of life. But really what was happening was I was finding my own And also something my father never did. Just making a home So, my discovery is really that we all need both, I think.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Testifying and telling their stories, and the women's movement, women sitting in circles. You know, we are communal people. But it took me a while to realize that what I had learned in India had any application in the rest of my life.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a circle, and every Movement that we care about, you know, I mean, the civil rights movement came out of churches in the South”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I learned that in India by good luck, by accident, was walking through Indian villages with the Gandhian group trying to get a message of we care about you to an area where there had been riots. So we were just traveling by foot and being fed by the villagers and so on. And every night we would sit around a kerosene lamp and the villagers would tell terrible stories of what was happening. By the end of a few hours the very fact that they could talk to each other that they weren't alone and experiencing this would begin to transform the group. And the Gandhians were saying to me, it's just very simple rules. If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you want to know how people live, you have to go where they live. You know, everyone has a story. You have to listen to each other's stories.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you are in a place where you're more powerful than the people around you, being sure to listen as much as you talk. And if you're less powerful, be sure to talk as much as you listen.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's an on the road state of mind And I can only compare it to, you know, when you see birds riding a current. It's like that, or a surfer riding the waves.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what the road does is force you to live in the present in that way. There's just an infinite amount of learning and it's in the moment. It forces you to live in the moment.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like so much in life. It happened accidentally. Yes. Because I couldn't get published what I wanted to say about the women's movement when it was new and exploding. And so I ended up going out with a friend on the road to speak. And that led to years of on-the-road organizing. And I discovered, as I never otherwise would have, I think, that what happens in a room when you are present cannot happen on the printed page or on the screen. It's really true that the hormones that allow us to empathize with each other are only produced when we're together in all five senses. It isn't to devalue the page or the screen, but it's just different. And I guess I discovered my form of meditation. I mean, I've taken two meditation courses. I believe in it, but I don't do it.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, right, I couldn't believe it. And then she said, Isn't that woman with you? Isn't that Alice Walker? I really like her poetry. I mean, you know, it just teaches you so much about stereotypes. But then she also said, now look out the window, and you see that purple motorcycle out there in the parking lot. So that's mine. Now she had her own motorcycle. She used to ride on the back of her husband's. It had Miz on the license plate. And she said, You should see my grandkids when Grandma drives up in her purple motorcycle. It was just wonderful. And so my conclusion is that we all have a purple motorcycle inside.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open minded. And one of the motorcycle wives, she came over and she said, I just want to tell you, I really enjoy Ms. Magazine.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was going to a powwow. We were all meeting there, and once we were at the airport in Rapid City, we saw all these motorcycles. We couldn't understand why. And they had been on the plane to guys in chains and studded jackets and everything. So we realized it was some kind of motorcycle rally. And a waitress told us that. And we were afraid of the motorcyclists, I have to say, as a group of women, because everything that we'd seen in the press and in movies was about motorcyclists as, you know, treating women as possessions, being dangerous in various ways. So I was sitting in the little dining room of the motel where we were, and full of motorcyclists, and I was trying to be cool and also...”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think those moments when, for no reason, really, you suddenly feel at one with everything. You feel... Boundaryless And also, if I just meet somebody in the supermarket around the street and they tell me how a social justice something, the women's movement, something has changed their lives and you get a sense of a story that's a different story because of something we contributed to. That's infinitely, infinitely rewarding.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting you say 60 because that was, well, 50 for me was hard because it was the end of the central years of life, the gendered years of life in a way, you know, from 13 to 50, but 60 was great because it was beyond the kind of feminine prison you could be your own self. Right. And 70 was somewhat like that too, but eighty is about mortality. You know, I mean, I have to understand that even though I'm going to live to 100, in my opinion, that's only 19 years. But there's just so much I want to do. And also I love it here. You know, what makes it hard to imagine Leaving is not the hard parts, it's the parts you love.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well, you have to know. I'm so grateful you just said I'm 81 years old because I'm trying to convince myself. I tell people on the street that I'm 81”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it isn't as if it's blind optimism. It's important to be skeptical because otherwise we don't use our energies very well. But if you don't have hope, you're defeated before you start. I mean, hope is a form of planning. So it's important that we have that because we have to be conscious of the possibility of change in order to pursue it.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that one of the most fundamental differences between people is whether they see the world as basically friendly or basically unfriendly. And I think that probably comes from the way we're brought up. Were we lucky enough to be loved and valued when we were children and to see a friendly world, which I was. And I'm grateful for that. And so actually.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we get to be icons to each other because we see each other in the media and in some ways what we see in the media seems more real than we are.”
2026-06-17 · Oprah's Super Soul · Gloria Steinem: Letting the Road Take You · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source