A Quote by Gloria Steinem

Women well understood how to restrict birth through timing of sexual intercourse, herbs and abortifacients. I suspect the focus on men's control of women as the means of reproduction came later, in the last five percent or so of human history, with the idea of children as property and labor. One needed to have as many as possible, never mind about women's health or mobility or brainpower. Women's freedom was restricted in order to make sure of the paternity and ownership of children.

Gloria Steinem

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About Birth Came Children Control Five Focus Focus On Me Freedom Health Herbs History How Human Human History Idea Intercourse Labor Last Later Make Many Means Men Mind Mobility Needed Never Order Ownership Percent Possible Property Reproduction Restrict Restricted Sexual Sure Suspect Through Timing Understood Well Women Women's Health

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Gloria Steinem
American - Activist
Born: March 25, 1934

We are still in various kinds of patriarchal systems. The very definition of patriarchy is that men control women as the means of reproduction, so the idea that a woman's main role is to have children often means society wants more workers, more soldiers. The idea that how many children we have should be controlled by the family, the church, the nation - by anyone but women themselves - is still very deep and very strong.

Gloria Steinem

I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didn?t even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of women?of embryos, of eggs, of bodies?by a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasn?t freedom from men but total control by men.

Vandana Shiva

What's happened with the over-the-counter birth control issue is that the Democrats didn't see it coming. They think that they've got a monopoly on talking to women from the waist down. Anything that has to do with reproduction and birth control and abortion - they call it women's health, then they call it women's issues.

Kellyanne Conway

Women are an enslaved population - the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses. Women are forced into committing sexual acts with men that violate integrity because the universal religion - contempt for women - has as its first commandment that women exist purely as sexual fodder for men.

Andrea Dworkin

For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way.

Marilyn French

I honestly never understood how violence against women became a women's issue. 95 percent of the violence men are doing to women.

Eve Ensler

Women are only half responsible for children. Men raise children as much as women do. Until men are as nurturing as women are, and until women are as active outside the home as men are, we won't have democratic families, and therefore we won't have democracy, and we will continue this hierarchical notion of life.

Gloria Steinem

Ideas about mothers have swung historically with the roles of women. When women were needed to work the fields or shops, experts claimed that children didn't need them much. Mothers, who might be too soft and sentimental, could even be bad for children's character development. But when men left home during the Industrial Revolution to work elsewhere, women were "needed" at home. The cult of domesticity and motherhood became a virtue that kept women in their place.

Sandra Scarr

In economies in which women work, men and women in relationships make about the same amount of money, or women make more. Women are 40 percent of breadwinners in America, and that number's been rising.

Stephen Marche

When birth control pills were available in Europe but not in the United States, American women created an uproar about how the unwillingness to make the pill available showed a contempt for the lives of women. When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released birth control pills with high dosages of hormones that were later found to be unnecessarily high, they were attacked for not caring about women enough to do the necessary tests.

Warren Farrell

'Iraivi' is about women, men, and their priorities. It talks about women's freedom, how men look at it, and how women use it. It's neither preachy, nor is it about women's empowerment.

Karthik Subbaraj

You can't really protect women or men from their choices, so let them have their own lives and trust the process. Given the history of society's efforts to control women's sexuality and reproduction, this remained a revolutionary idea. No wonder it disturbed and frightened some people so deeply.

Stephen Singular

When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think.

Patricia Schroeder

The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.

Naomi Wolf

There are many things that black women can continue to do to help black folk. First, black women have historically been among the most vocal advocates for equality in our community. We must take full advantage of such courage by continuing to combat the sexism in our communities. Black women, whether in church, or hip-hop, don't receive their just due. Second, when black women are in charge of child-rearing, they must make ever so sure to raise black children who respect both men and women, and who root out the malevolent beliefs about women that shatter our culture.

Michael Eric Dyson

If women take their bodies seriously and ideally we should then its full expression, in terms of pleasure, maternity, and physical strength, seems to fare better when women control the means of production and reproduction. From this point of view, it is simply not in women's interest to support patriarchy or even a fabled "equality" with men. That women do so is more a sign of powerlessness than of any biologically based "superior" wisdom.

Phyllis Chesler

A Quote by Gloria Steinem

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