I think I’ve wasted some of my time, but used most of it well, and have realized that my life is not separate from other people’s lives or from the universe. I think our moments of happiness really come from a feeling of unity.
I would put all the efforts to humanize the “masculine” and “feminine” gender roles that are the beginning of a false human hierarchy and normalize race, class and other systems of domination to come.
The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home.
I’m not sure that it’s up to me to sum up what I’ve done with it in the past. I’m not sure there’s a way of knowing what we have done that is useful or important.
Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it’s amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects.
When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was, and that my real parents were going to come get me. I was just too different from the rest of the family, so I lived in books and in my imagination.
Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change.
I was not considered beautiful before I was a feminist. I was a pretty girl before, but suddenly, after I was publicly identified as a feminist, I was beautiful. So, many people were really commenting on what they thought feminists looked like.
No matter how hard I worked, whatever I accomplished was attributed to my looks. If you’re working your ass off, then you don’t want to be told that you only got whatever because of the way you look. It takes the heart out of you.
Allowing women the power to decide when and whether to have children is the only way to solve the 7 billion human load on this planet that threatens to destroy it. Women’s equality is also men’s survival.
You may very well fall in love with somebody who makes less money, who’s younger than you, who weighs less than you.
The young women seem to think that they can only go out with or marry a man who is superior to them. The problem there is that they are wanting to be defeated, as opposed to finding a partner.
The kind of power I want is the power to persuade. But I do not want the power to tell other people what to do.
Elephants are so wise and so funny and so endangered and so intelligent. I just think there is a lot to learn from them.
To punish the individual for the sins of the system makes no sense. We’re responsible for changing it, yes. But we can’t actually invent another universe, so we have to start where we are.
There are many ways of supporting gender equality, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all care-giving, and making that amount tax deductible.
Unequal access to money and media plus bias, external and internalized, and male-dominant religions and illegality at the polls – all those are reasons for women’s wildly unequal political power.
The voting booth is the only place that a pauper equals a billionaire, and any woman equals any man.
The Internet is an almost miraculous way of getting information, of finding and organizing with each other, both minutely and globally. A million times better than the phone and the mimeograph! Also much better than TV, which is one-way and passive.
As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I’ve always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other’s lives are our best textbooks.