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.

There’s more to Bunnyhood than stuffing bosoms.

Even when educators survey grade school texts and create new bibliographies to help teachers include Asians, Eskimos, and other Americans, females in and out of those groups may be downplayed or forgotten.

Anyone who has ever experienced dehumanized life on welfare or any other confidence-shaking dependency knows that a paid job may be preferable to the dole, even when the handout is coming from a family member.

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

[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.

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.

Obviously, untangling sex from aggression and violence or the threat of it is going to take a very long time. And the process is going to be greatly resisted as a challenge to the very heart of male dominance and male centrality.

I’m still the same person who grew up mostly in a Midwestern, factory-working neighborhood where talk about “self-esteem” would have seemed like a luxury.

1 began to understand that self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.

Perhaps well-to-do women and unemployed ghetto teenagers have something in common. Neither group has been allowed to develop the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourselves.

[0]ur children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we’ve always wanted.

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.

[Wjomen are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers or mindless policy-makers in politics.

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

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.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols—all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child’s authentic self to a parent’s needs.

It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standard that implies).

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

[Mjen were valued by what they did, women by how they looked and then by what their husbands did, and all of life was arranged (or so we thought)' from the outside in.

[T]he nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters).

Romance is a means to the end of selfcompletion, but love is an end in itself.

As wise women and men in every culture tell us: The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.

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

Battered wowien is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets.

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

We need to unlearn some of our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves.

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

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.

Down the stairs and up Fifth Avenue. Hippety- hop, I’m a Bunny!

Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence. It also allows one to risk that marriage.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious.

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

If men menstruated, they would brag about how much and for how long.

The main achievement of the Women’s Movement was the right to go Dutch.