Moving Beyond Words

I decided to go back to the signed Gloria Steinem book, and it has been a great experience. There are 6 essays and all of them were fantastic. Here are a few quotes from "The Masculinization of Wealth."

"Inherited wealth and power enforce patriarchy pure, and envy of this ladylike trap makes the rest of us behave against our own best interests." - p 175.

"Upper class men...are no more likely to be shaken in their positions as heads of their families than they are to be shaken from their positions as heads of society's economic institutions." - Susan Ostrander

"There are many ways class doesn't work for women - and some in which it's actually reversed." - p 184.

"The closer women are to power, the weaker those women have to be kept." - p 187.

"There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother, for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it." - Susan B. Anthony

"Women with wealth and women without wealth share a sense of isolation, alienation , and powerlessness...we feel this way no matter where we are...people like me need people like you, and people like you need people like me. Together, we make a wonderful whole...we must look inside ourselves, take the risk to learn who we are and acknowledge all the pieces." - Byllye Avery, founder and director of the National Black Women's Health Project, addressing a group of women of inherited wealth.

Moving Beyond Words - Revaluing Economics

"In addition to degree of value, however, there are productive areas that aren't valued at all. Take the economic vacuum called "women who don't work." It's a form of semantic slavery that industrialized countries reserve for homemakers (in spite of the fact that homemakers in the United States work longer hours for less pay, and have more likelihood of being replaced by a younger worker, than any other category)....The truth is that almost every woman knows this economic invisibility in some part of her life. Whether or not she is in the paid labor force, a major part of her energy is probably devoted to productive work within the family and household, work that isn't counted as work at all. Its a reality of patriarchal economic systems both in capitalist countries like the United States, where the invisibility of homemaking leads to employed women having two jobs, and in the socialist past or hybrid present of countries in East Europe and Russia, were the so-called emancipation meant the right to do two jobs, one visible and one not." - p 214

"Thanks to our new ability to measure worldwide suffering with computers, the United Nations has come up with conclusions like this often cited one: Women do a third of all the paid work in the world, and two thirds of all work, paid and unpaid, yet receive only 10 percent of the world's salaries, and own only one percent of its property." - 216.

"A woman taking care of her own children is a person who is "not working" - which is why welfare, initially conceived as a widowed mothers' allowance, is treated as a handout, but unemployment compensation, which involves doing nothing at all, is not- though a person or institution raising the same children if that mother died or deserted would be "working" and getting much more than a welfare-level payment." - 216

"Personally, I like the option of treating the full-time homemaker and her or his wage-earning spouse as partners at least as equal as a business partnership - as we are so often assured marriage is - and crediting the homemaker with half of her (or his) spouse's total income. Especially at middle and upper levels, this could half compensate for the fact that consumption increases and elaborates as income goes up, thus demanding a consumption manager with more time and expertise. - p 219-220.

"All this was summed up in Lenore Weitzman's famous statistic from The Divorce Revolution: Women with dependent children experience a 73 percent drop in standard of living after a divorce, while their ex-husbands' living standard goes up by 42 percent. The colloquial summing up is simpler: If women have young children, they are only one man away from welfare...Yet if two homemakers were to cross the street and work for each other's husbands, they would be entitled to an eight-hour day and a forty-hour week, Social Security, disability pay, and unemployment compensation - and perhaps paid vacations, transferable health benefits, and a retirement plan (not to mention a better legal safeguard against violence, which also has economic value). Something is very wrong here." - 220-221

Gloria Steinem's 75th Birthday Wishes

This was printed in the latest issue of Ms. Magazine and I thought it was great. This wasn't exactly what was printed there - that doesn't appear to be online yet - but still great none-the-less. These are things I also hope will come to pass in the next 25 years, for the sake of both my children.

One of the highlights of my time in the Women's Studies department at PSU was meeting Gloria Steinem. She was very kind and I will save the book she autographed for me for my daughter.

Here's her list:

I want all grown-ups to be able to get married as long as they don't hit each other.

I want to walk past the newsstand and see a lot of erotica and no pornography.

I want schools and childcare centers to have a military budget, and the military to have the school and childcare budget--provided they use that budget for peacekeeping.

I want to turn on the news and see women and men of all colors and ages reporting what went right, as well as what went wrong. And I don't want to see everything divided into two. It is ready-made hostility in the media. In Japan, when they are discussing something important, they at least have three people. That alone is like water in the desert.

I want us all to know that you can't reach useful ends by violent means.

I want to walk into Central Park and see as many white guys wheeling babies of color as there are nannies of color wheeling white babies. And I want all of them to be well paid.

I want to turn on Oprah and see a show about men trying to combine work and family.

I want all of us to understand, we all came from Africa, all of us.

I hope that we learn from the original wisdom of this country, the land on which we stand, which is that it took four generations to heal one violent act.

I want to see a history about back in the day when people thought they had to surgically change their bodies to fit society - breast implants! nose jobs! liposuction! - Instead of changing society to fit our different bodies.

I want to walk past buildings that used to house Wal-Mart, Bloomingdale's, Banana Republic and all the other chains - as well as masses of concrete once known as shopping malls - and find them turned into really nice schools, community centers, rollerblade rinks, tennis courts, pocket parks, whatever the community needs. This has become possible because now, people only buy what they really need or love.

A River of Truth

"A river of Truth Ends at a dam of bias - Truth floods and moves on."

- Gloria Steinem

I actually met Gloria Steinem while I was an undergraduate. I didn't fully understand who she was yet, but she did inspire me to take more women's studies classes. What I do remember is that she is teeny-tiny and was very kind and gracious. She signed one of her books for me, and I have always treasured it. I hope to meet her again someday!