No Simple Reform

Gloria Steinem:

If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor in which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'

Most women are one man away from welfare.

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.

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.

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.

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.

Jone Johnson Lewis. From "Gloria Steinem Quotes." About Women's History. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/cs/quotes/qu_g_steinem.htm. Date accessed: 05/25/10.