Amazing Gloria Steinem

[Madspirit]

Conversations with
Amazing Women:
Gloria Steinem
by Marianne Schnall


http://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/interviews/gloriasteinem.html

excerpt of one question...

MS: What do you think are the biggest challenges that women face today?

GS: Whatever each individual woman is facing; only she knows her biggest challenge. However, if we add up the problems that affect the biggest numbers of women, then issues having to do with physical safety and reproduction are still the biggest. Female bodies are still the battleground, whether that means restricting freedom, birth control and safe abortion in order to turn them into factories, or abandoning female infants because females are less valuable for everything other than reproduction. If you add up all the forms of gynocide, from female infanticide and genital mutilation to so-called honor crimes, sex trafficking, and domestic abuse, everything, we lose about 6 million humans every year just because they were born female. That’s a holocaust every year. It makes sense that reproductive freedom is still the biggest issue – because the reason females got in this jam in the first place was because the patriarchal state or religion or family wanted to control reproduction -- to decide how many workers, how many children the nation needs, and who owned them in systems of legitimacy -- or even outright slavery. The International Labor Organization says there are about 12 million people living in literal slavery around the world, and 80 percent of them are women and girls.