Best Of Gloria Steinem's "My Life on the Road"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem.

As you can, the first reason for this book is to share the most important, longest-running, yet least visible part of my life. It's my chance to do more than come home saying to friends, "I met an amazing person who ..." or "Here's a great new idea for..." or most of all, *We have to stop generalizing about the American people," as if we were one homogeneous lump. I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know ... " I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.

What we're told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides. Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two, and those who don't.

p.xx

This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. It may just be their fear and guilt talking: What if I am treated as I have treated others? But with all the power and money that is behind it, this backlash could imprison us in a hierarchy all over again.

As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, "Hate generalizes, love specifies." That's what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies.

p.xxi

Also I'm not sure we can understand another country if we don't understand our own.

p.xxii

After I joined the ranks of traveling organizers-which just means being an entrepreneur of social change— I discovered the magic of people telling their own stories to groups of strangers. It's as if attentive people create a magnetic force field for stories the tellers themselves didn't know they had within them. Also, one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.

p.xxiii

Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self- willed journey— and to be welcomed when she comes home.

p.xxv

Because this book is all about stories, I hope some here might lead you to tell your own and also to get hooked on the revolutionary act of listening to others.

p. xxvi, emphasis mine.

Like many daughters especially, I was living out the unlived life of my mother. Like my father, I inhabited the future, the land of possibilities [...].

p.22

I could see that, because the Gandhians listened, they were listened to. Because they depended on generosity, they created generosity. Because they walked a nonviolent path, they made one seem possible. This was the practical organizing wisdom they taught me:

If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.

If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. I

f you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.

p.37

When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.

p.44

Though I'd been a freelance writer all my professional life without being told that my appearance was the reason I got published, it now became the explanation for everything, no matter how hard I worked. Never mind that the opposite was sometimes the case, as when my literary agent had sent me to an editor at a major national magazine, who dismissed me by saying. "We don't want a pretty girl-we want a writer." The idea that whatever I had accomplished was all about looks would remain a biased and hurtful accusation even into my old age.

Fortunately, traveling and speaking took me to audiences full of down-home common sense. When a reporter raised the question of my looks as more important than anything I could possibly have to say, for example, an older woman rose in the audience. "Don't worry, honey," she said to me comfortingly, "it's important for someone who could play the game— and win— to say: 'The game isn't worth shit.'"

p.51

But the truth is, I didn't decide on not driving. It decided on me. Now when I'm asked with condescension why I don't drive- and I am still asked —I just say: Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.

p.70

"Only food and water are more important than music and privacy," he says seriously. "I'm a rescuer."

p.88, Steinem is quoting an unidentified taxi cab driver

If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.

p.95

It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion- the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. Einstein said he had to be very careful while shaving, because when he had an idea, he laughed —and he cut himself.

p.181

With the help of Paula Gunn Allen, I finally did understand. "Feminists too often believe," she wrote, "that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of rules and civilization. The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware ... is necessary confusion, division and much lost time." Her conclusion was simple and mind-blowing: "The root of oppression is the loss of memory."

p.225-226

Content warning

A minor note for readers who are considering reading My Life on the Road themselves: I love this book, obviously find a lot of value in it, and have read it twice now in the ten years since it was published in 2015. I own my own hard copy of this book. There is, however, one anecdote in particular which Steinem relays that is a bit questionable in that I find it a touch transphobic.

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