When you stand up for yourself and try to be autonomous and self-determining, you're called a lot of names that we all know and that are very common. You may lose your job. You may lose custody of your child. You may be blamed for the failure of your marriage even though it was the man who couldn't tolerate an equal relationship.
Gloria SteinemThis idea of doing it all is the enemy of equality, not the path to do it. It's impossible to do two full-time jobs, and an impossible definition of success is just another way of making women feel like failures... Any definition of success has to include social policies that honor families and men who raise babies as much as women do.
Gloria SteinemElephants are so wise and so funny and so endangered and so intelligent. I just think there is a lot to learn from them.
Gloria SteinemThere is bias and sexism everywhere, just like there are problems of racism and homophobia stemming from the whole notion that we're arranged in a hierarchy, that we're ranked rather than linked.
Gloria SteinemI'm not saying that all women are blameless - all women are not. There are women with despicable characters who are cruel and terrible and some of them are mothers. But why do we blame our mothers more than our fathers? We let our fathers get away scot-free. We hardly even knew who they were in many cases, given the way this culture raises kids, and they may have been quite cruel. They may even have raped us as children, but even if they raped us, we will blame our mothers for not protecting us instead of blaming our fathers who actually did it.
Gloria Steinem