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Quote by Gloria Steinem

Work

My Life on the Road

This book offers a personal account of the author's journey through various destinations, capturing the essence of life on the road and the insights gained from such extensive travel. more

Author

Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem is an American journalist and social activist, renowned for her leadership in the women's rights movement. Born on March 25, 1934, she was one of the founding editors of Ms. magazine and played a pivotal role in the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Steinem's work has covered a wide range of issues from gender equality to environmental justice. more

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“We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. ‘I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn’t tell him to stop . . .’ My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, ‘No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?’ And I didn’t have any answer for that.”

“A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her prosocial sense, you are damaging it--and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.”