Gloria Steinem – Sunday 25 March 1934 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Don’t remember when I first heard of Gloria Steinem, this icon of the feminist movement. There was a time when I regularly read the publication she founded, Ms. Magazine, but it has been years since I’ve picked up an issue. In any case, Gloria Steinem has been involved in all aspects of feminism since the late Twentieth century and her collection of essays in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions presents the various topics associated with the second feminist wave.


Excerpt from the chapter Words and Change in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“The nature of work has been a major area of new understanding, beginning with the word itself. Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style. Though still alarmingly common, the term is being protested, especially by homemakers who work harder than any other class of worker, and are still called people who “don’t work.” Feminists have always tried to speak of work inside the home or outside the home, of salaried or unsalaried workers. Attributing a financial value to work in the home would go a long way toward making marriage an equal partnership, as the Equal Rights Amendment would also do, and toward ending the semantic slavery inherent in the phrase women who don’t work.

It would also begin to untangle the double-role problem identified in the sixties-that is, the double burden of millions of women who work both inside and outside the home-by defining human maintenance and home care as a job in itself; a job that men can and should do as well as women.

Equal pay for equal work, the concept with which we entered the sixties, fell short of helping women in the mostly female, nonunionized jobs of the pink-collar ghetto-another new term. Blue-collar workers, who are overwhelmingly male, usually earn far more than workers in mostly female jobs. What did equal pay do for the nurse, for instance, who was getting the same low salary as the woman working next to her? Equal pay for comparable work has become the new goal, and comparability studies are going forward on the many jobs done largely by men that require less education and fewer skills but still get more pay than jobs done largely by women.”

Yesterday’s writer – Zadie Smith
Tomorrow’s writer – Maria Tatar

Source: Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. ISBN 0-03-063236-6. Excerpt: page 155

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

Center: Gloria Steinem from the website feminist.com