Gloria Steinem - Outrageous acts and everyday rebellions (1983)

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Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.

Gloria Steinem
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?

Gloria Steinem
Women fear endangering men's approval so much, we don't even wait for them to say no. Or else we protect them, even if it means saying no to ourselves.

Gloria Steinem
Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect.

Gloria Steinem
As the little boy said when asked if he wanted to be a lawyer like his mother, "Oh no, that's women's work." Logic has nothing to do with oppression.

Gloria Steinem
The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizens' skin.

Gloria Steinem
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

Gloria Steinem
Pornography is about dominance and often pain. Erotica is about mutuality and always pleasure.

Gloria Steinem
[Erotica] contains the idea of love, positive choice, and the yearning for a particular person.

Gloria Steinem
The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.

Gloria Steinem
I've finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.

Gloria Steinem
A rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying.

Gloria Steinem
Now, we've made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

Gloria Steinem
For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead: (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, nce in a while, pride; and (3) it's frightening.

Gloria Steinem
Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style.

Gloria Steinem
I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had "crazy mothers." We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends.

Gloria Steinem
If you let Barnum & Bailey interpret a plot by Stendahl, it might come out to be something like the 1972 Democratic convention.

Gloria Steinem
Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

Gloria Steinem
Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective-women's bank, women's music, women's studies, women's caucus. That adjective did more than change a phrase. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics.

Gloria Steinem
Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.

Gloria Steinem
My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.

Gloria Steinem
Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

Gloria Steinem
Perhaps men should think twice before making widowhood our only path to power.

Gloria Steinem
Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

Gloria Steinem
Writers are notorious for using any reason to keep from working: over-researching, retyping, going to meetings, waxing the floors — anything.

Gloria Steinem
Most women in this country are only one man away from welfare.

Gloria Steinem
Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.

Gloria Steinem
However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.

Gloria Steinem
As a concept, it [androgyny] also raised anxiety levels by conjuring up a conformist, unisex vision, the very opposite of the individuality and uniqueness that feminism actually has in mind.

Gloria Steinem
Whatever a 'superior' group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an 'inferior' group has will be used to justify its plight. Black men were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'stronger' than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'weaker.'

Gloria Steinem