The essential Gloria Steinem reader
The essential Gloria Steinem reader by Gloria Steinem is a 2014 Society & Culture book written by TED speaker Gloria Steinem, paired here with the talk they gave.
The pairing
- Paired talk: "To future generations of women, you are the roots of change" (2020), 1.7M views on TED.com
- Timing: Published 6 years before the talk.
- In the catalogue: The 2nd of 4 books by Gloria Steinem on Books Worth Reading (1987–2019), by publication year.
- Edition: Rupa Publications, 2014 · 274 pages
The paired TED talk
To future generations of women, you are the roots of change (2020), the TED talk by Gloria Steinem.
From the publisher
Gloria Steinem, one of the most iconic feminist thinkers of the world, spent her early years in India. Her time in the country revealed to Gloria the Gandhian insight that change, like a tree, must grow from the bottom up. Subsequently, her decades of work with the feminist movement in the US and across the world taught her that violence and domination are normalized by the false division of human beings into subject and object, the dominator and the dominated, 'masculine' and 'feminine'. In As if Women Matter, Gloria Steinem and activist Ruchira Gupta bring together a selection of ground-breaking essays by Gloria which, since the time that they were first written, have transcended borders and have laid the groundwork for much of modern feminist thought. In these pages, Gloria demonstrates how racism and discrimination based on caste and class differences cannot survive without controlling women's bodies-she also describes the many ways in which women and men are fighting that control. She brilliantly analyzes Adolf Hitler's obsession with masculinity, and finds a gendered understanding of violence in the making. She distinguishes between erotica and pornography, locating the difference between the two in the inequality that governs relations between the sexes. And, in addition to a trenchant account of a few days she spent as a Playboy Bunny, this volume also carries a never-before-published essay on sex trafficking by Gloria, 'The Third Way'. As if Women Matter is scholarly, profound, and leavened by a lightness of touch which makes the most complex arguments accessible to all readers.