Wealth & Money Quote by Gloria Steinem

Steinem drops a provocation that sounds like a tongue-twister until it clicks: power gets coded as “feminine” only after it’s been drained of status, and that downgrading is inseparable from who holds the money. The line is built to short-circuit a familiar debate. Instead of arguing about whether women have “enough” power, she asks why certain kinds of power are treated as soft, secondary, or suspect in the first place - and why the hard authority of wealth still reads as masculine even when women accumulate it.

The intent is corrective and strategic. “Feminization of power” points to the way caretaking, education, community work, even political compromise get framed as less serious once associated with women. Steinem’s subtext: you can put women in charge of institutions all day, but if the culture treats their domains as pink-collar power - moral, symbolic, underfunded - you’ve just diversified the face of disempowerment. The real lever is “the masculinity of wealth”: the set of norms that cast accumulation, control, risk-taking, and ownership as male-coded virtues, then reward them with outsized influence.

Context matters: Steinem came up in the second-wave era, when women were entering formal politics and the workforce while capital and corporate leadership remained overwhelmingly male. The quote anticipates a now-familiar critique of representation without redistribution. It works because it refuses the comforting idea that equality is a matter of access alone; it’s a question of what society pays for, reveres, and allows to command.