Gloria Steinem

One of the things I understood from early on was that art was a symbol of systemic inequity.

I don\'t like debates anyway. I have never debated anyone, I think they\'re a very masculine form - like an intellectual prizefight. They let you know who the better debater is but they don\'t really tell you about the issue. It\'s all heat, but no light.

What we experience in our childhoods that comes to seem normal, or even inevitable, is that if you are placed in a hierarchy, you probably are immediately anxious about going further down and you\'re striving to go further up, so your energies get placed into becoming \'more than,\' or at least not becoming \'less than,\' instead of becoming \'part of.\'

I think it\'s important to see the parallels, and to understand that our masculine and feminine roles are relatively new in human history. Both gender and race are inventions that go deep because we have been raised with them, but they are still inventions.

Women are only half responsible for children. Men raise children as much as women do. Until men are as nurturing as women are, and until women are as active outside the home as men are, we won\'t have democratic families, and therefore we won\'t have democracy, and we will continue this hierarchical notion of life.

One of our biggest problems in terms of effectiveness is that we have hopes, but our opposition has interests. We measure everything against our hopes, including politicians that we are voting for or choosing amongst. We don\'t measure up to our hopes ourselves. How can we expect anybody else to?

We\'ve demonstrated in modern countries or industrialized countries that women can do what men can do, but we have not demonstrated that men can do what women can do therefore children are still mostly raised, hugely mostly raised by women and women in industrialized modern countries end up having two jobs one outside the home and one inside the home.

I don\'t remember being thought of as good-looking until I became a feminist. It\'s more of a comment on people\'s expectations than of what a feminist would look like. They assumed that if you could get a man, you wouldn\'t want anything else - what else could you possibly want? So that feminists who were talking about such things as equal pay must be doing so because they were unable to get a husband to support them, and therefore they must be ugl - this was the sort of train of thought. So because I looked different from the stereotype, then people would comment.

I don\'t know Beyoncé, but I have the impression that she\'s sincere, that she really is a feminist and wanted to put the word out there to make it a good word in a big way by putting it in big letters on the stage, and especially because she was quoting the African novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who said, \'We should all be feminists.\' She\'s a very accomplished and important novelist.

Why are solutions not just as newsworthy as problems? The notion that hostility is necessary all the time to create interest and news is not going to help us [humanity] come to agreements and solve the huge problems we have.

Inside each of us is a unique person resulting from millennia of environment and heredity combined in a way that could never happen again and could never have happened before. We aren\'t blank slates, but we are also communal creatures who are born before our brains are fully developed, so we\'re very sensitive to our environment. The question is: How to find the support and the circumstances that allow you to express what\'s inside you?

If we were going to address what involves the biggest number of women, reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right - like freedom of speech, the most basic right. Freedom from violence, since women worldwide are still like 70% at least of all victims of violence. Equality in the family, democracy in the family, since the family is the microcosm of everything else, so if you have inequality and violence in the family, it normalizes it in the street, for foreign policy, for every place else.

If you listen to the Catholic bishops you would think that Catholics are against contraception and legal abortion, but if you ask actual Catholics, you discover that more than 90% of Catholic women use contraception and Catholic women seem to need and choose legal abortion at about the same rate as everybody else. The problem is that the backlash occupies positions of power, not that it represents the majority of people.

The most obvious ones inspiring me are probably women in political life. There are also many women in artistic endeavors, but if they\'re painters, you don\'t necessarily see them, or if they\'re actors, you see the role they\'re playing. In political life, you see women of enormous courage and smarts and humor, and that releases the talent, especially in little girls who are watching.

The phenomenon of the woman who\'s asked what movie she wants to see, and she says, \'I don\'t know. What do you want to see?\' It\'s a tiny version of a big tendency. Women need to say, \'This is what I want.\'

Women well understood how to restrict birth through timing of sexual intercourse, herbs and abortifacients. I suspect the focus on men\'s control of women as the means of reproduction came later, in the last five percent or so of human history, with the idea of children as property and labor. One needed to have as many as possible, never mind about women\'s health or mobility or brainpower. Women\'s freedom was restricted in order to make sure of the paternity and ownership of children.

I live in the land of delight - of just walking in the street, and the sun is shining, and I\'m on my way to Starbucks and I\'m feeling good. I also live for those aha! moments when you understand something new, when you see two things fitting together to make a surprising third. There\'s actually a chemical that\'s produced in the brain by learning that gives you that little ecstatic moment of, Oh, that\'s why.

I\'m clearly not frightened of flying because I fly all the time, but every once in a while I do, as we all do, think, What if this plane goes down? And I think, Well, if I\'m holding the hand of the person sitting next to me, then I\'m holding everyone\'s hand.

If you look at many of the women who find themselves with cold, distant, difficult, cruel men, it\'s because they had cold, distant, difficult, cruel fathers who made them feel that there was no alternative or, at a minimum, who made them choose someone like their father in order to change in this other man what they couldn\'t change in their fathers.

I think that part of everybody\'s success is due to their looks, but it just works in different ways. If you\'re whatever society calls attractive, then people say that you got ahead because of your looks-especially if you\'re a woman. If you\'re whatever society says is not attractive, then they say you got ahead because you\'re compensating, you couldn\'t get a man or whatever. So everybody pays the same penalty for the fact that women are assessed for their outsides rather than for what\'s in our heads and our hearts.

Whatever each individual woman is facing; only she knows her biggest challenge. However, if we add up the problems that affect the biggest numbers of women, then issues having to do with physical safety and reproduction are still the biggest. Female bodies are still the battleground, whether that means restricting freedom, birth control and safe abortion in order to turn them into factories, or abandoning female infants because females are less valuable for everything other than reproduction.

When I was growing up, you were supposed to marry and therefore didn\'t plan ahead. Planning ahead is one of the few reliable measures of class in the sense that rich people plan for generations forward and poor people plan for Saturday night, and by that measure, women have been lower class. We were less likely to plan ahead because we\'re more likely to think that who we marry and our children are going to dictate our plans.

The gender prism is just descending upon us. For instance, when we\'re girls of nine or 10 we may be climbing trees and saying, \'I know what I want. I know what I think.\' And then suddenly at 11 or 12, the gender role takes hold, and adults tell us, \'How clever of you to know what time it is.\' It happens to boys, too and even sooner - between five and eight. Before that, boys cry and express uncertainty.

I can only tell you the kind of power I want, which is the power to persuade. But I do not want the power to tell other people what to do. Persuade assumes that the other person is going to make the decision. Especially as a writer and an activist, I want the power to put ideas and possibilities out there, but I understand that they will only work if they are freely chosen, so I don\'t want the power to dictate or to force the choice, ever.

The women\'s movement and gay and lesbian movements always come together, and our adversaries are always the same because the male supremacist, patriarchal, ultra-right-wing, religious fundamentalists, whatever you want to call it is devoted to saying that sex is only moral and okay when it is directed towards having children and occurs in patriarchal marriage, so the children are owned.

As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I\'ve always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing for instance. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other\'s lives are our best textbooks. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences. So, if we\'ve shared many experiences, then it probably has something to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change.

We move away from only the binary boxes of \'masculine\' or \'feminine\' and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.

Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change. You have to have the idea of change or at least have a hope before you can proceed. And that stage goes very quickly because a contagion of consciousness is within your control. But when you get to the stage of institutional change, it becomes a much slower process.

If we have reproductive freedom, that is the ability to decide for ourselves when and whether to have children and what happens to our bodies, sexism can be reversed. It\'s the understanding that it\'s not inevitable. I think that is crucial.

Any group of people that has been subordinate absorbs the idea of our own subordination, and that it is natural, and comes to think that the only way to survive is to identify with the powerful. And I think that is not surprising, and it is what happens to a lot of right-wing women. I mean they think they better do what the powerful tell them do otherwise they\'ll be in even more trouble.