Love & Passion Quote by Gloria Steinem

Steinem’s line lands like a joke that’s been sharpened into an indictment. It mimics the smug, backhanded “definition” you’d expect from a culture congratulating itself on progress while quietly policing the terms. The phrasing is deliberately clinical - “one who has” - as if liberation can be tallied on a checklist, two neat boxes to tick: sexual permissiveness and wage labor. That’s the trap. By presenting this as the whole of emancipation, Steinem exposes how easily feminism gets reduced to behaviors that are convenient for everyone else.

The sex-before-marriage clause skewers the way “freedom” is often framed as women loosening up for male pleasure, with liberation confused for sexual availability. The job-after clause hits the other side of the bargain: yes, you can enter the workforce, but now you’re expected to perform modernity while still carrying the old burdens at home. It’s a portrait of a society that wants the optics of equality without restructuring power - bosses, husbands, laws, childcare, pay.

Context matters: second-wave feminism fought on multiple fronts at once - reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, legal equality, domestic labor. Steinem’s quip compresses those conflicts into a two-part punchline, revealing the cultural compromise being offered to women: be “free” in ways that serve the economy and men, but don’t demand the deeper redistribution of authority, safety, and respect. The humor isn’t soft; it’s bait, and the sting follows.