Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem. 

5/5 rating. 410 pages.

Book #46 of 2020. Read July 10, 2020.

This was an absolutely phenomenal book by feminist, and complete badass, Gloria. It is a collection of her writing over the years about the fight for dignity, equality, and individual freedom that continues to this day.

This is one of those books that is eye-opening, but approachable and filled with Gloria’s beautiful writing and humor. While her main fight has been for feminism, Gloria talks at length in these essays about the link between all oppressed groups who need to stand united. This makes the book truly prescient with the overt racism and hatred against so many groups right now. We need to remember:

“Just as there can be no deep social change without art and music…there can be none without words that create the dream of change in our heads.”

Gloria goes on to quote Martin Luther King, Jr’s statement that,

“The patience of an oppressed people cannot endure forever.”

It is important to use the current energy to make a change, and this book is a great place to understand, as Susan B. Anthony said:

“Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform.”

We need to find the power to make changes in this world. Sometimes, we can shock even ourselves, as Gloria says:

“I am beginning, just beginning, to find out who I am.”

This is definitely one of the best books I’ve read, and it will keep me thinking and questioning for a while. Go out and get this book, period. If there’s one question that you should ask after reading this book, it is, “What outrageous act will I do today?” Let it be something glorious and meaningful!

Quotes:

“But of all the things to fight for, I’d say freedom and respect are pretty good ones!” – Emma Watson

“If feminism spreads in all the nations of the world where women are striving to take control of our own lives – and where many men, too, are challenging gender and race roles that maintain hierarchy – we may be better able to see our human connections on this shared planet Earth.”

“Just as we would not tell a woman to stay in a violent house, we, too, will not return to living in the old way. Because maybe, just maybe, we are about to be free.”

“[A]s Emma Goldman said, ‘If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution’”

“Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

“It was Flo especially who taught me that a revolution without humor is as hopeless as one without music.”

“Since then, years of getting up in front of audiences have taught me only three lessons: 1) you don’t die; 2) there’s no right way to speak, only your way; and 3) it’s worth it.”

“As an itinerant organizer, my own two biggest rewards are still a sense of making a difference and the birth of ideas. The first would be enough in itself, for that is how we know we are alive, but the second is magic. On a good night, a roomful of people can set off a chain of ideas that leads us all to a new place – a sudden explosion of understanding, a spontaneous invention. We hear ourselves saying things we had felt, but never named. It will take a lifetime to write them all down.”

“For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I’m doing it, I don’t feel that I should be doing something else instead; (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and (3) it’s frightening.”

“Now, I understand that the men who love war are mostly the ones who’ve never been in it.” – George McGovern

“When contributions failed to reach $1 million, however, [Patricia Schroeder] withdrew and gave a slightly teary speech. It got as much media attention as her whole campaign; a forerunner of the ridicule Hillary Clinton would receive for tearing up after being asked how she kept going. Yet Senator Biden would tear up while talking about his children in a 2008 vice-presidential debate, and be praised as a sensitive leader and good father.”

“Reporters kept asking [Vice-Presidential Candidate Geraldine] Ferraro if she would be ‘tough enough’ to push the button, though they didn’t ask male candidates if they could be wise enough not to.”

“[Lynn Woolsey’s] voice in Congress would make it difficult to deny that the most common route to poverty and welfare is the combination of divorce, unequal pay, and responsibility for children. No wonder the welfare rolls were 80 percent women and children.”

“Movements are crucial to raising hopes, new solutions, and organizing at the bottom for changes at the top.”

“Democracy is a seed that can only be planted where you stand.”

“This is the most tragic punishment that society inflicts on any second-class group. If we achieve a little success in the world, we may think of ourselves as ‘different.’”

“Any First Lady, no matter what she does or doesn’t do, is still more likely to top the lists of Most Admired Women than any woman who has succeeded on her own.”

“‘Do you ever get unanimity on anything?’ one of them asked. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘For me, that’s a way of avoiding controversy and any action at all.’”

“Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.”

“If her song inspires that, I think she would be the first to say: It was worth the singing.”

“‘Judges will be elected on their merits,’ for instance, is a perfectly okay sentence. The only problem is that we’re all accustomed to visualizing male judges, and a gender-free sentence may do nothing to jog our consciousness. For a while, we may need sentences like ‘a judge will be elected on her or his merits’ to force us to recognize that women judges do exist, just as we may need to enumerate by race in order to make diversity visible.”

“At a deeper level, many of us have raised our daughters more like our sons, but too few have raised our sons more like our daughters. Until men are socialized to raise children and care for the home as much as women are, this double burden will continue to restrict women, deprive children of nurturing fathers, and perpetuate gender roles.”

“A little natural togetherness would show us the Family of Woman, where each of us is beautiful and no one is the same.”

“An obsession with reacting to the present, feminine-style, or with controlling and living in the future, masculine-style, are both wasteful of time. And time is all there is.”

“There has not been one study which provides evidence that women talk more than men, and there have been numerous studies which indicate that men talk more than women.”

“In addition to a generally greater volume of talk, however, men interrupt women more often than vice versa.”

“For instance, women speakers are more likely to get some version of ‘You have a good point, but you’re not making it effectively,’ or ‘Your style is too aggressive/weak/loud/quiet.’ It is with such criticisms of the messenger that male politicians often dismiss the serious message of a female colleague, or that husbands turn aside the content of arguments made by their wives.”

“First, [‘helpful’ criticisms are] rarely used when a woman’s message is not challenging to male power. (How often are women criticized for being too fierce in defense of their families? How often are right-wing women criticized for being too aggressive in their opposition to abortion?)”

“Studies of young boys before puberty show that their vocal tones may deepen even before physiological changes can account for it. They are imitating the way the males around them speak. Dale Spender cites a study of males who were not mute, but who were born deaf and thus unable to imitate sound. Some of them never went through an adolescent voice change at all.”

“Economists say that scarcity increases value, but that rule doesn’t seem to hold when the commodity is female.”

“Perhaps food is still the first sign of respect – or the lack of it – that we pay to each other and to our bodies.”

“The United States is producing generations of an impoverished underclass; yet political resistance to food stamps, adequate welfare payments, even feeding programs confined to infants and pregnant or breastfeeding women, continues to increase.”

“According to the United Nations, females do one-third of the paid work in the world, and two-thirds of all work, paid and unpaid.”

“All women need strength – health, muscles, endurance – if we are to literally change the world.”

“‘We’re not lowering our standards,’ said a Houston woman when challenged on her group’s choice of a woman architect. ‘We may even be raising them. Statistically speaking, women professionals had to be better to get where they are.’”

“In a patriarchy, a poor man’s house may be his castle, but a rich woman’s body is not her own.”

“Yes, the internet is revolutionary and valuable for information, but it has proven to be a way of spreading falsehoods and fears as well as facts…”

“One wonders: Would a male political prisoner or hostage telling a similar story have been so disbelieved?”

“When I was younger, when I heard about a woman being raped, my secret feeling was that could never happen to me. I would never permit it to happen. Now I realize that can be about as meaningful as saying I won’t permit an avalanche.”

“Where did she find the courage to escape at all?“

“Clearly, the author is telling us something about the origin of God – about when we need to invent an unseen powerful friend and when we don’t.”

“What matters is that you are not cruel or wasteful; that you don’t keep the truth from those who need it, suppress someone’s will or talent, take more than you need from nature, or fail to use your own talent and will. It’s an organic morality of dignity, autonomy, nurturing, and balance.”

“What also matters is the acknowledgement that everybody, no matter how mean or passive that they may seem on the outside, has redemptive possibilities on the inside.”

“If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind. It makes you believe the world was created in silence.”

“‘He’s not a group,’ she told them fiercely. ‘He’s Mel – a person.’”

“‘We’re going to have to debunk the myth that Africa is a heaven for black people – especially black women,’ she now says firmly. ‘We’ve been the mule of the world there and the mule of the world here.’”

“If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for?”

“Or was it an admission that everything else was the Year of the Man?”

“I did not learn that several generations of our foremothers had nearly brought the country to a halt in order to win a legal identity as human beings for women of all races.”

“‘There is something wrong in a movement,’ the National Catholic Reporter editorialized, ‘which in spite of its current  clever adaptation of abolitionist sloganeering, can value life in just one stage of human development.’”

“A white male who does well economically is a public-spirited creator of jobs, but women and men of color who do well against all odds may be used as proof that discrimination is over.”

“Whatever a ‘superior’ group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an ‘inferior’ group has will be used to justify its plight. Black men were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be ‘stronger’ than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be ‘weaker.’ As the little boy said when asked if he wanted to be a lawyer like his mother, ‘Oh no, that’s women’s work.’ Logic has nothing to do with oppression.”

“Most of this is done in the name of a religious belief that, even when phrased in the most rational way by public-opinion polls, isn’t supported by a majority of anybody, including members of the major religions supposed to hold that belief.”

“Are these anti-choice forces seen as a tyrannical minority; one whose power jeopardizes individual rights, as well as the separation of church and state? Does a casual newspaper reader get the impression that some 60 to 70 percent of Americans support the right to choose – as the polls reflect? On the contrary, anti-abortion groups are often credited with being part of a ‘turn to the right’ by the ‘majority of Americans.’ And advocates of violence are seriously, constantly referred to as ‘pro-life.’”

“Wasn’t equal opportunity one of the rocks on which America was built? Why should we have to fight for, or expect resistance to, something we thought we already had?”

“In reality, most situations turn out to contain varieties of actions and ideas that number a dozen, fourteen, a hundred, or just one. To polarize everything into opposing pairs was to deprive ourselves of accuracy, subtlety, invention, and growth. It kept us from seeing the total spectrum of actions from which we could choose.”

“Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.” – Susan B. Anthony

“Lesson number three: we need to know the history of our sisters – both for inspiration and for accumulating a full arsenal of ideas – and adopt what translates into the present.”

“If each person in the room promises that in the twenty-four hours beginning the very next day, she or he will do at least one outrageous thing in the cause of simple justice, then I promise I will, too.”

“[T]here is no greater reward on earth than being part of a movement for justice and kindness.”

“People now ask me if I’m passing the torch. I always explain that no, I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much. And I’m using it to light the torches of others.”

“We each need a torch if we are to see where we’re going. And together, we create so much more light.”

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