Daily Inspiration Quote by Gloria Steinem

Steinem flips the usual hierarchy of heroism by putting childbirth in the same sentence as conquest and combat, then quietly rearranging the ranking. Conquest is the classic masculine epic: flags, borders, history books. Self-defense is the morally cleaner cousin, a violence we excuse because it’s necessary. By measuring childbirth against these, she’s not asking for sentimental applause; she’s staging a cultural audit of what we’ve been trained to call “brave.”

The line works because it borrows the vocabulary of war to indict the culture that reserves admiration for spectacle and domination. “Conquest” is pointedly chosen: it’s not just battle, it’s expansion, possession, empire. Steinem treats that as the baseline for public honor, then undercuts it by suggesting the real feat is generative rather than acquisitive. The provocation isn’t that childbirth is hard (everyone knows that); it’s that society has historically treated women’s risk, pain, and endurance as private, inevitable, almost naturalized labor - not as courage worthy of narrative or reward.

Calling childbirth “as courageous as either one” also dodges a trap. She isn’t romanticizing motherhood as destiny; she’s arguing that courage isn’t owned by soldiers. It can be bodily, domestic, unpaid, and still heroic. In the context of second-wave feminism’s fight to make women’s experiences politically legible - from workplace inequity to reproductive autonomy - the quote reads like a demand: if we’re going to hand out medals, start by expanding the definition of valor.