War & Peace Quote by Gloria Steinem

Steinem doesn’t flatter power; she anatomizes it. The line lands like a field manual disguised as a warning label: step outside the approved script of femininity and the first response won’t be a debate, it’ll be ridicule. “Dirty joke” is doing heavy work here. It’s not just insult, it’s a strategy of social control: sexualize, trivialize, smear. If you can make a woman’s ambition sound obscene or absurd, you don’t have to engage her ideas. You just make her socially expensive to take seriously.

The phrase “full human being” is the quiet provocation. Steinem implies that the baseline assumption in a patriarchal culture is partial humanity: woman as ornament, helper, symbol, exception. Choosing “to behave” like a full person suggests agency but also highlights the absurdity that personhood has to be performed, asserted, defended. It’s a sharp reversal: the “status quo” pretends to be neutral, but Steinem frames it as an “army,” organized and disciplined, with “natural and first” weapons. The metaphor makes backlash feel less like personal drama and more like predictable governance.

Context matters: second-wave feminism wasn’t only fighting laws; it was fighting the cultural machinery that turns dissenting women into punchlines (the shrew, the humorless scold, the slut, the fraud). “She will need her sisterhood” isn’t sentimental solidarity; it’s infrastructure. If ridicule is the opening salvo, community is the countermeasure that keeps you in the fight long enough to make change stick.