Quotes from Gloria Steinem

Men would support us, we are told, if only we learned how to ask in the right way. It's a subtle and effective way of not only blaming the victim, but making the victim blame herself.

Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could make those qualities seem inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, only kindness felt like home.

Also reporters kept asking Ferraro if a woman could be "tough enough" to "push the button," meaning declare a war, though they didn't ask male candidates if they could be wise enough not to.

As Vita Sackville-West wrote: I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong.

I think that we have successfully said that rape is not sex, it's violence. But what we have not successfully said is that pornography is not erotica. Porne means female slaves. Eros has an idea of love and mutual pleasure and free choice. I fear that pornography is taking over sex when in fact it's way more about domination.

Even graffiti above a tunnel can begin a journey that never ends.

Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, "It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.

This was a small taste of a general problem: the invisibility in the media of the many women of color who pioneered the women's movement.

Prostitution isn't the oldest profession, it's the oldest oppression.

Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel like I should be doing something else.

Spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before.

All of which is only to explain how I came by a piece of equipment that most writers have to acquire one way or another: an unusual tolerance, even a preference, for instability. Not that they don't suffer from being unsure of next year's plans or this month's rent. They do. But, unlike many people, they can live with it.

As we started on our journey, I noticed that without possessions, I felt oddly free.

We learn from difference, not from sameness.

Don't worry, honey," she said to me comfortingly, "it's important for someone who could play the game—and win—to say: 'The game isn't worth shit.'

I don't know if fury can compete with necessity as the mother of invention, but I recommend it.

I can go on the road - and I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued int he presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.

Men are liked better when they win. Women are liked better when they lose. This is how the patriarchy is enforced every day.

It's time to leave - there is so much out there to do and say and listen to.

Sometimes life is like trying to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling on the backs on five thousand turtles.

Women of all groups were measurably more likely than their male counterparts to vote for equality, health, and education, and against violence as a way of solving conflict. It wasn't about biology, but experience.

Needing approval is a female cultural disease

Now that being on the road was my choice, not my fate, I lost the melancholy feeling of 'everybody has a home but me'. I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of 'either/or', I discovered a whole world of 'and'.