Marriage Quote by Gloria Steinem

The sting in Steinem's line is how calmly it exposes a rigged game. She doesn’t need to argue that marriage and career are hard to juggle; she points out who is expected to do the juggling at all. The phrasing "I have yet to hear" is crucial: it frames sexism as an everyday absence, a silence so routine it passes for nature. No villain is named, because the villain is the default setting.

Steinem’s intent is diagnostic, not merely accusatory. By focusing on "ask for advice", she targets the cultural machinery that turns structural inequality into personal self-help. Women are coached, warned, and managed: how to "have it all", how to time children, how to be ambitious without seeming "selfish". Men, in the conventional script she’s skewering, are assumed to have careers by right and marriages by accommodation. If conflict arises, it’s treated as a woman’s scheduling problem, not a societal design flaw.

The subtext is sharper: even the language of "combining" reveals who is seen as the merger and who is seen as the main enterprise. Marriage is imagined as a woman’s second job; a man’s marriage is imagined as part of his support system. The context is second-wave feminism’s battle against the supposedly private sphere that kept women’s labor invisible and their ambitions negotiable. Steinem compresses a whole political program into a single, cutting observation: equality isn’t just about access to work, it’s about rewriting the assumptions that make one gender responsible for holding life together.