Daily Inspiration Quote by Gloria Steinem

Progress can be a one-way street: we applaud girls “acting like boys” because masculinity still reads as currency, while treating boys “acting like girls” as a downgrade. Steinem’s line lands because it exposes that asymmetry without sermonizing. The first clause sounds like a victory lap - daughters encouraged toward ambition, toughness, public authority. Then she pivots to the real indictment: our culture’s feminism often stops where male privilege begins to feel personally threatened, inside the home, inside boyhood.

The subtext is blunt: we haven’t dismantled sexism so much as offered girls conditional access to the masculine-coded traits we already reward. Raising sons “more like our daughters” isn’t a call to swap genders; it’s a demand to revalue the traits we’ve historically trained into girls - emotional literacy, caregiving competence, gentleness, relational intelligence - as human skills rather than feminine accessories. That “few have the courage” is doing a lot of work. It names the social penalty parents fear: the boy who’s tender becomes suspicious, the father who models care risks being read as weak, the family that de-emphasizes dominance invites judgment.

Context matters. Steinem, a key architect of second-wave feminism, is writing into a long fight where women’s liberation was frequently framed as women entering men’s world - workplaces, politics, power. Her quote pushes the movement to its unfinished edge: liberation that doesn’t just integrate women into existing hierarchies, but reshapes what we teach boys to want, to feel, and to respect. It’s not merely about fairness to sons. It’s about defusing the engine of inequality: the belief that “feminine” is lesser.