A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men. – Gloria Steinem
I happen to come across this the first time. This made me search about Gloria Steinem and my, my what brilliant quotes she came up with. Each has an inner meaning and an underlying truth. Most of it contains truth about being a feminist. So, I thought why not pick up few that would influence me to be a better woman. I will list them out in the order I liked them.
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
This conveys the logic that the fish lives happily without the bicycle so in the same analogy a woman can also live well without a man.
A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.
Anyone who believes in equality of both sex and trusts that both have equal right and opportunities in all fields can be deemed to be a feminist.
“I believe that change comes from the bottom, not the top.”.
We cannot expect a change to happen from the top of the pyramid. Only when it starts from the bottom, it can be set right on the top.
”Self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.”
This statement is self- explainable. If you see there is nothing more than self-respect, we have. But she also deems that it isn’t everything.
”So whatever you want to do, just do it…Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.”
The above statement says that we can do all it takes just to accomplish what we want, so making a fool of our self is essential. Why don’t we go that extra mile to achieve our goal and why bother if the world thinks you are a fool.
”We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.”
We all think of teaching our kids, what we learnt from our ancestors, but we fail to realize that the reverse is also important. We have so much to learn from them compared to what we would want to let them know.
”Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.”
We fail to understand that dreaming would help us plan, think out of box by imagining. This does give us a number of possibilities. But we generally don’t do it.
”If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?”
Yes, that’s true. If it doesn’t fit, we should be looking for another shoe and not think about changing the foot. As this is normally put, when things don’t work by the plan, try changing the plan and not what we are trying to achieve.
“Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.”
This is absolutely bang on. We also look for the right person who should match the qualities we are looking for. Instead we fail to notice if we in the first place are equally good.
“The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.”
This is a gem. We should try to learn from what life gives us, instead sitting all day to set things right for a perfect day. Every experience is a learning. We have no control upon an extent to what life is holding for us, but what actually happens can give us a valuable lesson and we can make use of it.
Every statement of Gloria does leave us thinking. I loved all of the above. I hope that would influence me to be a better person and I hope that you would benefit too.
I’m Writing Bravely for the Write Tribe Festival of Words – March 2019’.
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