Gloria Steinem Quotes About Culture
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For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness.
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They would say well there's always been wars, men have always beaten women. But it isn't true in all cultures. It doesn't have to be true. And the first step is imaging.
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The androcentric, patriarchal cultures, whatever you want to call it, are quite new. So, every economic statement should start with reproduction, not production. Every statement for human rights ought to include reproduction as a basic human right, like freedom of speech.
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I've finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.
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Women with body image or eating disorders are not a special category; [they’re] just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.
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The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture.
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Men, through no fault of theirs, get born into cultures that tell them that if a woman can do it, it's not worth doing, or if they're not superior to women in one way or another, they're not really masculine.
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I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.
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I'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.
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... we've allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyondfifty, sixty, or seventy--all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics--many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.
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I think laughter is crucial. Some of the original cultures, like the Dalit and the Native American, don't separate laughter and seriousness.
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