“The Truth will p** you off but first it will set you free.”
“We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”
“Being nuns is excellent. We need women to be able to choose whether to have one child or four children. And the amazing thing is that when you allow women to do that, the population rate comes out just a little above replacement level, which is where it’s supposed to be.”
“A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage, and a job after.” –Gloria Steinem (US feminist, writer and scholar)
Today in memoriam of the iconic feminist-writer, Gloria Steinem (1934-2026), who passed away aged a grand old 92 years on September 2nd, am re-posting an article I wrote about her and male patriarchal culture in Buddhism:
In that article, I posted Steinem’s recent poem, “I Hope to Be an Old Woman Who Dresses Very Inappropriately“, a glorious ode to women refusing to be dictated to by the male gaze and norms of women’s physical appearance and dress.
One report about Steinem’s passing said:
“Gloria Steinem died Wednesday at the Manhattan brownstone she’d lived in for more than fifty years — the one with the living room that hosted hundreds of Talking Circles: strangers, organizers, kids with a cause, anyone who needed a room. Her foundation says those gatherings continue.
Steinem was known for the time she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny to expose the conditions the women there faced. She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972 when the men running print media assumed nobody would buy one, and built the Women’s Action Alliance, the Ms. Foundation, and Take Our Daughters to Work Day.
She built almost none of it alone, and said so. Ms. and the Women’s Action Alliance were co-founded with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the Black child-care organizer who toured the country with her as a speaking partner — that raised-fist photo of the two of them is the movement’s most famous image.”
Esquire named Steinem one of their 75 Greatest Women of All Time in 2010, and in 2013, she won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the USA’s highest civilian honor. So it’s no surprise that she also became one of the most quotable figures in modern history.
Thank you Steinem for saying the unsayable things that needed to be said, and still do. For being a woman who was unafraid to show her beauty, sexuality, intelligence, courage and kindness to all in the name of genuine women’s empowerment and equality.
For more articles about women’s empowerment and female principles in the Buddhist context, see:
Music? Superwoman by Alicia Keys , 50ft Queenie by PJ Harvey, and I am Woman by Emmy Meli, and You Don’t Own Me by Leslie Gore.
Here are a few quotes I picked from many excellent ones:
