Gloria Steinem Quotes

is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality. Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice. Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself. The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry. 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. For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable. By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God. A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after. The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government. I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

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