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Page 8
Street Roots • March 25-31,2016
Street Roots • March 25-31,2016
A promise
in progress
When a
doctor came
to her a id
years before
abortion
was legal,
G loria
Steinem
vowed sh e d
do what she
wanted with
her life.
A t 81, the
journalist,
fem in ist
and
political
activist is
still m akin g
good on her
word.
BY ANTONIA CHARLESWORTH
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
v Aresh from college in 1957, then 22, Gloria
W Steinem headed to India to avoid her
J L engagement to a man she describes as good,
but wrong. En route she found herself in England,
waiting for her visa.
“It was here I incidentally discovered I was
pregnant and became desperate to find an
abortionist,” she said on a return trip to the U.K. 58
years on. “In those years, there was no publicly
identified feminism in either of our countries so each
of us thought we were searching as individuals for an
abortion. It felt very isolated and very wrong.”
A decade before physicians in England could
legally perform the procedure, it was Dr. John
Sharpe who came to her aid. Her new memoir is
dedicated to him. In it, Steinem recalls his asking
her to promise him she’d do what she wanted to do .
with her life. She’s done the best she could, she
humbly added.
For reproductive freedom, she co-founded
campaign groups Voters for Choice and Choice USA.
She has written about and campaigned on this, and
many other women’s issues, for more than 50 years.
And she continues to be highly influential. In March,
U.S. clothes retailer Lands’ End removed an
interview she had given to its chief executive from its
website after socially conservative customers
complained about her pro-choice views.
A key figure in the women’s liberation movement
of the ’60s and ’70s - often known as second-wave
feminism - Steinem was one of 300 women who
founded the National Women’s Political Caucus to
support women in politics. As a journalist, she was
the only woman to help found the ground-breaking
New York Magazine. She co-founded the radical
feminist Ms. magazine, and she has been published
in magazines internationally. Her books include
“Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem” and
“Moving Beyond Words.”
She says her career has meant she has spent half
her adult life traveling - and much of her childhood,
too, as her father was a traveling antiques dealer.
“The road is perceived as dangerous, so most road
books are written by men,” she said. “I think there is
an understandable feeling that home is safer than
the road, when actually, statistically it’s the other
way around.”
On a rare sunny February day in Manchester, the
morning after an event for Manchester Literature
Festival, she arrived at the Malmaison Hotel to meet
local street paper Big Issue North. Wearing large
dark sunglasses and dressed elegantly from head to
toe in black - apart from her signature Native
American hip-hugger belt - her appearance belies
her 81 years. Her looks have been a contentious
source of interest over the years - on one hand
dismantling the feminist stereotype, used to alienate
women from feminism, and on the other an ongoing
tool to undermine her.
They enabled her to write an exposé of the
working conditions in the new New York Playboy
Club for Show magazine in 1963. By getting a job as
Gloria Steinem has written about and campaigned on women’s issues fo r more th a n 5 0 years.
a Playboy Bunny, she revealed exploitative working
conditions underneath the phony glamour, including
a controversial requirement that would-be Bunnies
have a pelvic exam. Playboy subsequently scrapped
the exam, which checked for sexually transmitted
diseases, and working conditions improved for the
club’s employees, but Steinem also lost serious
journalistic work and still believes it was a mistake
for her career.
“People still say, ‘She’s just a bunny,’ and I’m
always tom at that point,” she said. “Should I say I
was actually a journalist writing an expose? And then
I think, no, I shouldn’t do that because that’s like
abandoning the women who were really working
there. Why am I saying I’m different from them? I’m
not different from them.”
In an updated intro to “A Bunny’s Tale in her 1995
collection “Outrageous Acts and Everyday
Rebellions,” Steinem points out triumphantly that
the piece outlived the clubs. This month marks the
end of Playboy’s nude centerfolds, but Steinem is
less than jubilant
“Playboy saying they’re not going to publish nudes
is like our National Rifle Association saying we’re not
going to sell handguns anymore because now we
have assault rifles,” she said, acknowledging the
Internet pom that makes Playboy centerfolds look
twee in comparison. And, to her dismay, the Playboy
clubs are making a return in India, where Ghandian
activism first inspired her.
“It’s like colonialism - our leftover shit is still
floating out there somewhere and being imposed on
other countries.”
What does she think is the key issue for global
feminism?
“We know our problems and solutions better than
anybody out there, but collectively I do think that it’s
violence in many, many different forms,” she said,
pointing out that for the first time we know of there
are fewer females on Earth than males because of
violence against women. “And reproductive freedom
- being able to decide the fates of our own bodies.”
The war on women has perhaps no more high-
profile example than the systematic attacks on
women’s rights from the Republican Party.
Steinem’s political campaigning precedes her
feminist campaigns, and she began her career with
ambitions to be a political journalist. With her
parents having divorced and her mother suffering
from mental Ulness, she went to Smith College, the
private liberal women’s college in Massachusetts
where an earlier pioneering feminist, Betty Friedan
who later accused Steinem of being a disrupter of
the movement for her inclusion of lesbian women
within it - had also studied. There, Steinem found
herself stuffing envelopes in the campaign offices of
Adlai Stevenson. She has backed Democratic
presidential candidates since then, including Hillary
Clinton today, with fundraising, speech writing and
campaigning. She’s faced countless barriers as a
woman along the way - famously being denied the
chance to join George McGovern’s 1972 campaign
when one adviser told him flatly: “No broads.”
During the 1968 election, she supported the only
anti-Vietnam War candidate, Eugene McCarthy. “He
turned out to be an empty promise - which I knew
from the moment I met him,” she said with a dry
laugh. “He ended up supporting Reagan.”
It felt like progress then when in the 2008
election she was spoiled for choice.
Clinton and Barack Obama “were both wonderful,
excellent, principled, caring candidates, and they
were almost identical on the issues so it wasn’t
drastic.in that sense,” said Steinem, who praises
Obama as a feminist and Clinton as a civil rights
activist She chose to campaign for Clinton, writing
in her memoir that in the end, Clinton might have
felt betrayed if she hadn’t, where Obama wouldn’t.
“It was really about experience,” she said. “She
was way more experienced than Obama, and by
experience I mean with the ultra-right wing. We have
a very crazy ultra-right wing that is now in control of
the Republican Party, and you can see in the first
two years of the Obama presidency that he, being
the decent, good person that he is, tried to reach out
to the other side - and you can’t If they had cancer
and Obama had the cure, they wouldn’t accept it. I
think had she been president, we would not have
wasted the first two years and there would have been
a chance toward progress.
“What was sad to me was that we had two good
people that were the firsts of their group running
against each other. And our media kept saying, which
is more important - sex or race? Excuse me, that’s
like saying which is more important - air or water?
And what about women of color? It was just
maddening, but they were looking for conflict, and
they created conflict"
Conflict has been created during the current
campaign too, with female support for Clinton and
rival candidate Bernie Sanders being framed as a
generational divide after Steinem suggested young
women might support Sanders because “the boys are
with Bernie” during an interview with talk show host
Bill Maher. A storm of outrage was fueled by the
first female secretary of state, Madeleine Albright,
who declared the next day at a Clinton rally that
“there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t
help each other,” cuing laughter and applause from
the audience and Clinton, who stood awkwardly
beside her.
Steinem believes she was goaded by Maher, a
comedian.
“He is terribly sexist, but I knew that going in,”
she said, adding that the only reason he tolerates
her, “against his better judgment," is because she
defended him when he was censored following
controversial remarks denying that the 9/11
attackers were cowardly.
“What I don’t forgive myself for is that I didn’t get
News
i t I didn’t get how he was taking it to sex because I
was talking about power. I said how justifiably angry
young women are because they’re graduating in huge
debt and not earning nearly as much as men to pay it
back. I didn’t quite get what he was doing ... and I
should have just stopped him. I just didn’t realize
that if you took that one clip of mine, it would seem
like I was talking about sex and dates. I was appalled.
I think if I had meant what people thought I meant,
I’d be mad too.”
She was stung by the backlash to her comments,
for which she has apologized. “It was like a perfect
storm because it was Twitter; it (the soundbite) was
short, out of context; it was in the news anyway
because of the presidential campaign. It was very
instructive - I learned a lo t.... I’ve never
experienced the huge capability of Twitter before.”
Steinem believes Sanders’ popularity with young
women “makes perfect sense” as he represents
idealism, whereas older voters see Clinton as a more
realistic candidate.
On prison reforms and abolishing tuition fees, the
way Sanders talks “makes it sound as if he could do
more than he could,” she said. “It’s the difference
between promising the moon and being able to
deliver dawn.”
Steinem has done much to bridge the generational
gap in feminism, lecturing at campuses across the
country and mentoring young women in her New
York home.
“I do think there are things we have to be aware
of - that older women, having been so isolated and
punished for what they did and not being rewarded,
sometimes expect gratitude from younger women.
And that is just not fair.”
But she does not think there is hostility between
the generations.
“I don’t want to speak for everybody, but I don’t
experience it that way. I experience, just in terms of
numbers, so many more activist, feminist, amazing
young women than there ever were. We were this
small group of rebels, but this is a majority
movement and I am so inspired by them. So what I
should have said, and what I usually say when people
ask me about young women, is: Ask young women;
don’t ask me. The whole idea is we’re supporting
them.”
Another influential second-wave feminist,
Germaine Greer, recently became the target of a
petition against her delivering a lecture at Cardiff
University on the grounds that she expressed
transphobic views when she said: “I don’t believe a
woman is a man without a cock.” Steinem believes
Greer was right to give the lecture. She points to
tactics she has witnessed at Stanford University
against the Bush administration, and in India, against
Mother Teresa, where audience members turned
their backs to speakers. “They listened, but they just
made it clear how they felt.”
Do people who assert a right to not be offended
risk stifling free speech?
“I am not sure we can generalize,” Steinem said.
“We probably have to listen carefully to each
situation because there is hate speech, and hate
speech can be quite dangerous. But in general, I
would rather demand equal time and not silence
anyone.”
Steinem said that we have to support the right of
everyone to define themselves and that anything that
blows up the gender binary is a good thing.
“At Ms. magazine, we published (Welsh trans
historian) Jan Morris 35 years ago, writing about
having been a man in the British army. It was
fascinating because she’s a wonderful writer, and a
wonderful human being, and she had a female
sensibility in the army. That’s great. I think it’s hard
for a lot of bom women to look at Caitlyn Jenner
because they feel that this is woman as performance,
just raiding a closet of the clothes. It’s hard, but we
have to respect i t There’s no other way. You can’t
judge what somebody else is feeling.”
Page 9
Audience Q&& Glone Steinem
Gloria Steinem visited Manchester Literature Festival, where she was
in conversation with British journalist Rachel Cooke, followed by a
Q&A with the audience. Here are some of the highlights.
Should 1 tell my 17-year-oid daughter she can have it all?
“We made an error when we said they can have it all because it’s a lie.
When men look after children as much as women, they can. No one
ever told a man they could have it a ll. ... Sometimes women say to
me, with alarm: My daughter doesn’t know who you are.' I say: ‘But
does she know who she is?’ People do what they see more than what
You’ve spoken much about sexism, but have you encountered
“In this patriarchal culture, we're valued for our wombs rather than our
brains, so men suffer, too, but women suffer more. It has changed a
fair amount. ...T h e feminine role comes down on you at 9 or 10 years
old. then that 10-year-old comes back at 5 0 .... It’s a whole new
courtly after 60 - there's a terrific freedom:*
Is Hillary Clinton going to be the next president?
“She has to be,”
What would it mean to you to see a woman in the White House?
“It’s not about a job for one woman. It s jobs for many w o m e n .... I
would vote for her if she was called Harry. I wouldn’t vote for Sarah
Do you feel you’ve made life sacrifices tor your work?
“I don't really. I feel so lucky. I get over-rewarded because I’m
accidentally recognizable. I get shit too, for the same reasons, but no,
absolutely not"
What would you like your legacy to be?
“I haven't done ft yet. I five in toe future."
Second-wave feminism was often accused of being
a white, middle-class affair, a charge Steinem said
has been “very disheartening and a source of
continued pain” for her. Race has always been
central in her work, and her continued activism for
Native Americans is well documented. But did the
movement take sufficient account of the class
differences that could divide women?
“It’s just common sense,” she said. “If you were
a middle-class homemaker, dependent on your
husband’s salary, you were not experiencing
discrimination in the work force in the way a
working-class woman was. The women of the UAW
(the United Auto Workers, the first trade union to
endorse the Equal Rights Amendment in 1970)
were pioneer feminists because they could see,
hello, that they were not getting paid the same.
There really were working-class women there, but
the middle-class women were the writers, they’re
writing the books - that skews the media right
away.”
Today, she said, feminist literature should be
available to everybody, not just women in the
affluent world.
But although the Internet goes some way to giving
women a positive voice, it’s limited to those with
electricity and money.
“We must remember that the huge majority of the
world’s illiterate are women, and there’s a way in
which technology can be divisive. My dream is to
have a satellite with multilingual programming and,
you know, those little radios that you can wind up.
You don’t even need electricity, so women could get
information and a sense of community on the
ground. I would love to see th a t”
Courtesy ofINSP.ngo / Big Issue North