Doing Sixty & Seventy Quotes

“Change seems recognizable only after it’s happened, like putting one’s foot down for a familiar stair—and it’s not there.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I recommend the freedom that comes from asking: Compared to what? Hierarchical systems prevail by making us feel inadequate and imperfect. Whatever we do, we will internalize the blame. But once we realize there is no such thing as adequacy or perfection, it sets us free to say: We might as well be who we really are.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I used to think I would be rewarded for good behavior. Therefore, if I wasn’t understood, I must not be understandable; if I wasn’t successful, I must try harder; if something was wrong, it was my fault. More and more now, I see that context is all. When someone judges me or anyone or anything, I ask: Compared to what?”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I’ve come to realize the pleasures of being a nothing-to-lose, take-no-shit older woman; of looking at what once seemed to be outer limits but turned out to be just road signs.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I, too, identified with every underdog in the world before realizing that women are primordial underdogs. Today, many still take injustice more seriously if it affects any group except women. Women ourselves may support other causes before having the self-respect to stand up for our own.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I realized that most women in their teens and twenties hadn’t yet experienced one or more of the great radicalizing events of a woman’s life: marrying and discovering it isn’t yet an equal (or even nonviolent) institution; getting into the paid labor force and experiencing its limits, from the corporate “glass ceiling” to the “sticky floor” of the pink-collar ghetto; having children and finding out who takes care of them and who doesn’t; and, finally, aging, still the most impoverishing and disempowering event for women of every race and so the most radicalizing.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“No editor asked me—nor did I ask myself—why I was so interested in the end of life when I was so near its beginning. I didn’t understand that we write what we need to know.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“When a woman fears the punishment that comes from calling herself a feminist, I ask: Will you be so unpunished if you don’t? When I fear conflict and condemnation for acting a certain way, I think: What peace or praise would I get if I didn’t?”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“As a group who can never afford the expensive fiction of having a nation—and whose bodies suffer from nationalism by being used as its means of reproduction—women of all races and cultures may be the most motivated to ask: How can we create a future beyond nationalism? After all, it has been around for less than five percent of humanity’s history. We know we have had more migratory and communal ways of sharing this Spaceship Earth. There could be again.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“Now I look at artificial boundaries—lines that can stop no current of air or drought or polluted river—and mourn the violence lavished on defending them. Long ago, in times suspiciously set aside as “prehistory,” we were mostly nomadic peoples who claimed nothing but crisscrossing migratory paths. Cultures were the richest where different peoples and paths were most intermingled. We’re still a nomadic species; indeed, we move and travel on this earth more than ever before. Yet we insist on the destructive fiction of nationalism, one that becomes even more dangerous when it joins with religions that try to create nationalistic gods.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“We understand that being able to help dependent children find what they need can be a gift in itself. Why shouldn’t we feel the same about the other end of life? Why shouldn’t the equally natural needs of age be an opportunity for others to give? Why indeed? Now I wonder if women’s fear of dependency doesn’t stem from being too much depended upon. Perhaps if we equalize the giving of care—with men, with society—this will bring a new freedom to receive.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I used to indulge in magical thinking when problems seemed insurmountable. Often, this focused on men, for they seemed to be the only ones with power to intercede with the gods. Now it has been so long since I fantasized a magical rescue that I can barely remember the intensity of that longing. Instead, I feel my own strength, take pleasure in the company of friends, male and female, who are mortals. I no longer believe in gods, except those in each of us.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“The truth is that every country has its own organic feminism. Far more than communism, capitalism, or any other philosophy I can think of, it is a grassroots event. It grows in women’s heads and hearts.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“I’m not sure feminism should require an adjective. Believing in the full social, political, and economic quality of women, which is what the dictionary says “feminism” means, is enough to make a revolution in itself. But if I had to choose only one adjective, I still would opt for radical feminist. I know our adversaries keep equating that word with violent or man-hating, crazy or extremist—though being a plain vanilla feminist doesn’t keep one safe from such epithets either. Neither does saying, “I’m not a feminist, but.…” Nonetheless, radical seems an honest indication of the fundamental change we have in mind: the false division of human nature into “feminine” and “masculine” is the root of all other divisions into subject and object, active and passive, and—the beginning of hierarchy.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back. Instead of trying to fit women into existing middle-class professions or working-class theories, these radical feminist groups assumed that women’s experience could be the root of theory. Whether at speak-outs or consciousness-raising groups, “talking circles” or public hearings, the essential idea was: Tell your personal truth, listen to other women’s stories, see what themes are shared, and discover that the personal is political.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“Most of us have a few events that divide our lives into “before” and “after.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“Today’s young women are encouraged to feel somewhat the same way about feminists who preceded them, a conscious or unconscious way of stopping change by distorting the image of changemakers.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“Men tend to rebel when young and become more conservative with age, but women tend to be more conservative when young and become rebellious as we grow older. I’d noticed this pattern in the suffragist/ abolitionist era, when women over fifty, sixty, even seventy were a disproportionate number of the activists and leaders—think of Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ida B. Wells—but I’d assumed it was due to the restrictions placed on younger women by uncontrolled childbirth and their status as household chattel: hard facts that limited all but a few single or widowed white women, and all but even fewer free women of color.”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy

“Carolyn Heilbrun’s”
― Gloria Steinem, Doing Sixty & Seventy