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| Gloria Steinem |
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Gloria Steinem, one of the most well-known leaders of the American feminist movement and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, spoke candidly to a crowd of several hundred on Saturday, November 7. The event, co-sponsored by Ipas, was hosted by NARAL North Carolina.
During her hour-long talk, she reminded the audience, which was filled with mostly women of varying ages, “The reason we’re still doing this is because reproductive freedom is the whole ball game.” She connected the reproductive rights movement to several relevant social issues of our time, saying that “the gender roles that come out of the politics of reproduction are the root of all other violence.”
Steinem spent a fair portion of the talk discussing how domestic and family violence normalize other types of violence, even bringing up the murder of Dr. Tiller, an abortion provider gunned down earlier this year in Wichita, Kansas while attending his church. “There hasn’t been that kind of violence since the last time the right wing lost the White House,” she said.
Steinem addressed myriad topics relevant to women — and men. She brought up equal pay for equal work, saying “Equal pay doesn't work if you’re in the pink collar ghetto.” She went on to urge and recommend a system of comparable worth in the United States for people who work in the home or in traditionally undervalued professions. Our country, she says, “needs to attribute value to work that has no value — caregiving. The women’s movement never said we should do it all.”
More in-depth discussion with Gloria Steinem will be featured in the upcoming winter issue of Ipas’s Because magazine.
For more information, contact media@ipas.org