Quote of the Day

There is a clear continuum from the feminization of poverty to the masculinization of wealth.  It's no accident.

-- Gloria Steinem, Moving Beyond Words, 2012

Quote of the Day

It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.

-- Gloria Steinem

Quote of the Day

We are here and around the world for a deep democracy that says we will not be quiet, we will not be controlled, we will work for a world in which all countries are connected.  God may be in the details, but the goddess is in connections.  We are at one with each other, we are looking at each other, not up.  No more asking daddy.

-- Gloria Steinem, Women's March on Washington D.C.

Bookin' It in 2016

I read the following 14 books in 2016. The titles in bold were particularly influential, inspiring or intriguing.

1. My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem
2. The L Word Book by Jennifer Beals
3. Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus
4. How to Be Here: A Guide to Creating a Life Worth Living by Rob Bell
5. A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today by Kate Bornstein
6. The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss by Anderson Cooper & Gloria Vanderbilt
7. Switching Teams: What Coming Out Later in Life Taught Me About Love, Conquering Fear and Accepting Change by Dawn Elizabeth Waters
8. Lynnee Breedlove's One Freak Show by Lynn Breedlove
9. Sum It Up: 1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective by Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins
10. Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
11. Boy Erased: A Memoir by Garrard Conley
12. I'm Just a Person by Tig Notaro
13. Blue Horses by Mary Oliver
14. Forward by Abby Wambach

Quote of the Day

The simple right to reproductive freedom -- to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction -- is basic to restoring women's power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 204

Quote of the Day

Only in the last five hundred to five thousand years -- depending on where we live in the world -- has godliness been withdrawn from nature, withdrawn from females, and withdrawn from particular races of men, all in order to allow the conquering of nature, females, and certain races of men.  Though patriarchal cultures and religions have made hierarchy seems inevitable, humans for 95 percent of history have been more likely to see the circle as our natural paradigm.  Indeed, millions still do, from traditional Native Americans here to original cultures around the world.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 204

Quote of the Day

When I visit clinics, I've learned to ask the staff if they have ever seen a picketer come in, have an abortion, and go back to picketing again.  From Atlanta to Wichita, the answer is yes.  Yet because staff members see the woman's suffering and guard her right to privacy, they don't blow the whistle.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 190

Quote of the Day

A [Blue Mountain Clinic] staff member tells me that one of the female picketers has come in when the men were not around, had an abortion, and gone back to picket the next day.  This sounds surrealistic to me -- but not to the staff member.  She explains that women in such anti-abortion groups are more likely to be deprived of birth control and so to need an abortion.  They then feel guilty -- and picket even more.  This restriction on birth control may also explain why studies have long shown that Catholic women in general are more likely to have an abortion than are their Protestant counterparts.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 190

Quote of the Day

Thanks to Mrs. Greene -- and many others brave enough to stand up for themselves and other women -- I began to understand that females were an out-group, too.  That realization solved such mysteries as why the face of Congress was male but the face of welfare was female; why homemakers were called women who "don't work," though they worked longer, harder, and for less pay than any other class of worker; why women did 70 percent of the productive labor in the world, paid and unpaid, yet owned only 1 percent of the property; why masculinity meant leading and femininity meant following in the odd dance of daily life.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 45

Quote of the Day

If Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer and others had been heard fifty years ago -- if women had been half the speakers in 1963 -- we might have heard that the civil rights movement was partly a protest against the ritualistic rape and terrorizing of black women by white men ... We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself -- or will use military violence against another country -- is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it's violence against females.  It normalizes all other violence.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 43

Quote of the Day

You white women, Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind, if you don't stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 42

Quote of the Day

Home is a symbol of the self.  Caring for a home is caring for one's self.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 249

Quote of the Day

Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 245

Quote of the Day

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.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 237-238

Quote of the Day

I discovered that Native languages, Cherokee and others -- like Bengali and other ancient languages -- didn't have gendered pronouns like he and she.  A human being was a human being.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 223

Quote of the Day

When new people guide us, we see a new country.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 211

Quote of the Day

The Catholic Church not only didn't oppose abortion but actually regulated it until the mid-nineteenth century.  It was made a mortal sin mostly for population reasons.  Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools -- plus the doctrine of papal infallibility -- so they traded.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 204

Quote of the Day

The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 209

Quote of the Day

In truth, we don't know which of our acts in the present will shape the future.  But we have to behave as if everything we do matters.  Because it might.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 176-177

Quote of the Day

The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the most powerful.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 176