Gloria Steinem on marriage and kids | Throwback

Have you ever been married? No. That's all. Yeah, well, next question. Why not? Is that your next question? Yeah. I don't know. Do you want to meet? Eventually, but it keeps receding two years in the comfortable distance. Do you think about it a lot? Yeah, I think so. I think you imagine what it would be like to be married to people you're going out with or people you meet, even if it's only for a second. Think about it. Don't you think about it? No. You don't? Well, maybe it's a lady's thing. I don't know. I think about, you know, let's see, my name would be Gloria Burgermeister. No. And you've just rejected another guy. The women's liberation movement has changed my life enormously because before, I guess, I thought I was crazy and society was right somewhere deep in me and I felt guilty, you know, for not doing what I was supposed to do, getting married and having children and so forth. And I lacked confidence and I was fighting it by myself. Now I see that women, that none of us are second class, you know, that we really are full-fledged human beings and we need work just as men need work. It's very comforting, that feeling of community. For all the women who are out in the world and working, not married, don't have children, they get asked the question, what's the matter with you? Why don't you want to have children? What's your response to that given that, obviously, that's something that you have chosen not to do? Well, there was a psychologist who gave a great response, I thought. He said that there was no more reason why everyone should have a child than why everyone with vocal cords should be an opera singer. I mean, I think it is a gift and it is a chosen activity and when it is, now that it is becoming more chosen, we have better parents and less neglect of kids. It has to be positive. If it is something, nothing that everyone has to do can be other than a prison, if you see what I mean. There has to be choice.