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Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem Books

Journalist

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“We need to unlearn our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves. It's worth taking time to demistify it. [...] All the things an adolescent can be [...] are reduced to a three digit number. [...] We too can decide how to value our education instead of letting them value us.”

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Book:Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem
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“In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.)”

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Author:Gloria Steinem
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“There is a small wooden viewing tower, and pamphlets from the State of Ohio, but they focus on facts—for instance, the Serpent Mound is as long as four football fields—not on meaning. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen, a Native poet, mythologist, and scholar, explains that Serpent Woman was one of the names of the quintessential original spirit “that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind…she is both Mother and Father to all people and all creatures. She is the only creator of thought, and thought precedes creation.” In Western mythology, she might be compared to Medusa, the serpent-haired Greek goddess whose name means Knowing Woman or Protectress. She once was all-powerful—until patriarchy came along in the form of a mythic young man who chopped off her head. He was told to do this by Athena, who sprang full-blown from the mind of her father, Zeus—a goddess thought up by patriarchy and therefore motherless. There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.”

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Book:My Life on the Road
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“We discover the bumps are milpa, small mounds of earth on which complementary crops were planted. Unlike linear plowing, which encourages water runoff and soil erosion, the circular pattern traps rainfall. Each mound is planted with a cluster of the Three Sisters that were the staples of Indian agriculture: corn, beans, and squash. The corn provided a stalk for the beans to climb, while also shading the vulnerable beans. The ground cover from the squash stabilized the soil, and the bean roots kept the soil fertile by providing nitrogen. As a final touch, marigolds and other natural pesticides were planted around each mound to keep harmful insects away. Altogether it was a system so perfect that in some Central American countries too poor to adopt linear plowing with machinery, artificial pesticides, and monocrops of agribusiness, the same milpa have been producing just fine for four thousand years. 19 Not only that, but milpa can be planted in forests without clear-cutting the trees; at most, by removing a few branches to let sunlight through on a mound. This method was a major reason why three-fifths of all food staples in the world were developed in the Americas.”

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Book:My Life on the Road
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“I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward am activist place where she herself could never go.”

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Book:My Life on the Road
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“Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.”

Feminism
Book:My Life on the Road
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“An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus Tshirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment “Thou shall not kill.” But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies. Thus the Bible is making clear, that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life.”

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Book:My Life on the Road
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“God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back. Instead of trying to fit women into existing middle-class professions or working-class theories, these radical feminist groups assumed that women’s experience could be the root of theory. Whether at speak-outs or consciousness-raising groups, “talking circles” or public hearings, the essential idea was: Tell your personal truth, listen to other women’s stories, see what themes are shared, and discover that the personal is political.”

FeminismWomen S RightsEssaysWomen S LiberationRadical Feminism
Book:Doing Sixty & Seventy
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“I’m not sure feminism should require an adjective. Believing in the full social, political, and economic quality of women, which is what the dictionary says “feminism” means, is enough to make a revolution in itself. But if I had to choose only one adjective, I still would opt for radical feminist. I know our adversaries keep equating that word with violent or man-hating, crazy or extremist—though being a plain vanilla feminist doesn’t keep one safe from such epithets either. Neither does saying, “I’m not a feminist, but.…” Nonetheless, radical seems an honest indication of the fundamental change we have in mind: the false division of human nature into “feminine” and “masculine” is the root of all other divisions into subject and object, active and passive, and—the beginning of hierarchy.”

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Book:Doing Sixty & Seventy
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“I used to indulge in magical thinking when problems seemed insurmountable. Often, this focused on men, for they seemed to be the only ones with power to intercede with the gods. Now it has been so long since I fantasized a magical rescue that I can barely remember the intensity of that longing. Instead, I feel my own strength, take pleasure in the company of friends, male and female, who are mortals. I no longer believe in gods, except those in each of us.”

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Book:Doing Sixty & Seventy
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“We understand that being able to help dependent children find what they need can be a gift in itself. Why shouldn’t we feel the same about the other end of life? Why shouldn’t the equally natural needs of age be an opportunity for others to give? Why indeed? Now I wonder if women’s fear of dependency doesn’t stem from being too much depended upon. Perhaps if we equalize the giving of care—with men, with society—this will bring a new freedom to receive.”

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Book:Doing Sixty & Seventy
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“Now I look at artificial boundaries—lines that can stop no current of air or drought or polluted river—and mourn the violence lavished on defending them. Long ago, in times suspiciously set aside as “prehistory,” we were mostly nomadic peoples who claimed nothing but crisscrossing migratory paths. Cultures were the richest where different peoples and paths were most intermingled. We’re still a nomadic species; indeed, we move and travel on this earth more than ever before. Yet we insist on the destructive fiction of nationalism, one that becomes even more dangerous when it joins with religions that try to create nationalistic gods.”

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Book:Doing Sixty & Seventy
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“As a group who can never afford the expensive fiction of having a nation—and whose bodies suffer from nationalism by being used as its means of reproduction—women of all races and cultures may be the most motivated to ask: How can we create a future beyond nationalism? After all, it has been around for less than five percent of humanity’s history. We know we have had more migratory and communal ways of sharing this Spaceship Earth. There could be again.”

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Book:Doing Sixty & Seventy
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“I realized that most women in their teens and twenties hadn’t yet experienced one or more of the great radicalizing events of a woman’s life: marrying and discovering it isn’t yet an equal (or even nonviolent) institution; getting into the paid labor force and experiencing its limits, from the corporate “glass ceiling” to the “sticky floor” of the pink-collar ghetto; having children and finding out who takes care of them and who doesn’t; and, finally, aging, still the most impoverishing and disempowering event for women of every race and so the most radicalizing.”

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Book:Doing Sixty & Seventy
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“Men tend to rebel when young and become more conservative with age, but women tend to be more conservative when young and become rebellious as we grow older. I’d noticed this pattern in the suffragist/ abolitionist era, when women over fifty, sixty, even seventy were a disproportionate number of the activists and leaders—think of Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ida B. Wells—but I’d assumed it was due to the restrictions placed on younger women by uncontrolled childbirth and their status as household chattel: hard facts that limited all but a few single or widowed white women, and all but even fewer free women of color.”

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Book:Doing Sixty & Seventy
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“Laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality...laughter is an orgasm of the mind.”

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Book:My Life on the Road
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“Our grief is not a cry for war. "That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren't here. They'll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren't in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.”

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Book:My Life on the Road
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