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Feminism’s Champion – Ms. Gloria Steinem

By Margaret Michniewicz

Gloria Steinem

“Gloria’s calling, Gloria’s calling!”

The news buzzed among the student protesters at Texas Women’s University in 1993 as word rapidly spread that Gloria Steinem was on the phone to offer her support and encouragement to the group in the wake of an objectionable closed-door decision by the school’s board of regents (a policy over which the students ultimately sued, successfully).

 

Sharon Snow of Winooski was one of those protesters. “It meant so much to us,” she recalls. “By the next morning word was all over campus that Gloria Steinem had called. It gave us all the boost we needed to keep up our 24-hour days as we organized and carried out our protest… It was like a blessing from a goddess and a proclamation from the wizard all at once.”

 

Steinem attained such iconic status by the early 1970s as one of the leading activists and spokespersons for the feminist movement in its so-called “second wave”. Today, at 75, she remains one of America’s preeminent figures advocating for women’s rights and fighting vigorously for the social justice issues of our time.

 

Among her many accomplishments, Steinem helped to found New York magazine in 1968, and in 1972, co-founded the ground-breaking publication that would literally transform the lives of women in America and beyond, Ms. Magazine. She helped to found the Women’s Action Alliance, the National Women’s Political Caucus, Voters for Choice, and was founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women. And most recently, she has co-founded in 2005, with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan, the Women’s Media Center.

Steinem won an Emmy Award in 1993 for her HBO documentary on child abuse, Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories. She is the author of classic feminist books including Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.

 

Steinem will be the next speaker in the Vermont Woman Lecture Series on Thursday evening, June 11 at 7:00 p.m. at the Hilton in Burlington (see Publisher’s Message for more information).

 

Vermont Woman spoke with Ms. Steinem by phone in April. In addition to our own topics for discussion, we solicited questions from a number of sources – from students and faculty of area college women’s studies programs, to stay-at-home moms; from 90-something retirees, to female and male Gen Xers. No matter the question, Steinem in her responses is thoughtful, provocative, and characteristically witty. The following conversation with her reveals that her address to Vermonters in June (after which she will field questions from the audience) promises to be a remarkable event.

 

Vermont Woman: What are some of the topics you plan to address when you speak here in June?

Gloria Steinem: I want to congratulate all of you for seizing control of the media and talk about how important the media is. We often find that the image is even more influential than reality… After all we’ve been sitting around campfires for 100,000 years listening to each others’ stories – our brains are organized by narrative. So unless we seize control of the image and of the [facts] that are out there, and unless we are able to tell our own stories – each one of us comes to feel crazy and alone, even though we may be in the majority.

Then I would also like to talk a little about the global nature of the movement now. And finally, also, the grounding of the movement in original societies. I think we’re often made to feel pessimistic because people will say to us, “It [an egalitarian society] has never been, so how can it be?” And of course there have been societies that were egalitarian – especially in Vermont – which were part of the Iroquois Confederacy. We should be more aware of that. I think it’s interesting and rarely taught that the Iroquois Confederacy especially, and native cultures in general, were an inspiration – probably the major inspiration – for the suffrage movement.

 

VW: Speaking of taking control of media – what do you think about publications that have come about since Ms., such as Bust or Bitch?

GS: I like them. I think they have a lot of spirit and they don’t fall into the occasional academic error of inventing an obscure language [laughs]. (I like to joke about the sign they should post in front of Yale, “Warning: Deconstruction Ahead!”) They speak in words that we use every day and connect to our hearts and minds.

 

VW: What are they getting to do that perhaps makes you wistful?

GS: Well I don’t feel wistful, because Ms. Magazine was something that I kept saying I was just doing for two years, and two years became longer and longer – it became decades and decades …. So I don’t feel wistful, I just feel supportive.

 

VW: What is your response to a college age woman of today or a working class woman of color who believe the tenets of feminism do not speak to their issues?

GS: Well, the public opinion polls show the opposite. Women of color are more likely to support feminist issues than white women; young women are more likely to support feminist issues than older women.

 

VW: Though we find many young women who don’t realize what the fight was about and take things for granted.

GS: Yes, and I want them to take it for granted. Paraphrasing Susan B. Anthony, our job is not to make young women grateful – it’s to make them ungrateful. [laughs]. [Likewise] I did not walk around saying ‘thank you for the vote.’

 

VW: nor should you have…!

GS: Gratitude doesn’t radicalize anybody. What activates us and radicalizes us is the unfairness we ourselves experience. So, young women may not be as angry about an issue like abortion as we were because they may have experienced legal abortion even though it’s far from a complete right. But, they may be very angry about the lack of sex education in the schools, or the restriction on prescription birth control, or many other issues that all come under the same umbrella of reproductive freedom.

We have to trust each other’s experience. Now you said earlier you never personally encountered discrimination. But – it was probably always clear [to you] that women were always in somewhat more danger in the street than men were. That’s a feminist issue. It’s probably always been clear that the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home. That’s a feminist issue. It’s probably always been clear that prostitution was not an equal employer, and so on. There’s no shortage of [examples].

And the bias can survive privilege. For instance, families of inherited wealth have more incidence of child sexual abuse than poor or middle class families. Because that’s sort of the patriarchy pure – powerful men [with] invulnerability… and also, the community is less likely to intervene.

 

VW: On the topic of reproductive freedom – since you’ve been fighting on this front, are there complexities to the issue that have arisen, presenting challenges to your stand – for instance, with technological advances…

GS: It’s certainly become evermore clear that what we wanted in the first place was the repeal of abortion laws – that would have been much more practical than trimesters which is what we got in the ruling. That’s why NARAL was originally called the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws: because why should it be the only surgical procedure governed by the courts? You can’t govern a surgical procedure by the court, each one is individual. The idea was that it should be in the hands of physicians and patients. So we got an imperfect ruling and it’s become ever more clear that it’s imperfect, because of the notion of trimesters.

 

VW: What about issues of abortion in places to select gender in favor of male children…

GS: The way you combat that is to combat bias against female children. Female children who are born in a male-biased culture don’t get the same education, or even food or health care.

 

VW: I understand that you are working on a book that’s due out next year [Road to the Heart: America as if Everyone Mattered]?,

GS: Well, I’m supposed to be working on it! [laughing]

 

VW: Can you give us a sneak preview?

GS: Well it’s an on-the-road book, because for 40 years now I’ve been on the road as a feminist organizer and it’s been the biggest part of my time – the most important part of my time in my life – but it’s invisible. So I thought it was important to write about it if only to encourage other people to become feminist organizers.

 

VW: Elaborate on what you mean by invisible?

GS: By its nature, feminist organizing is dispersed – for example, I just spoke to the librarians of Texas at a campus in Lubbock… and by its nature it’s not visible in the same way. [In comparison] people might know the magazine or they might know the Ms. Foundation, they might know the Women’s Media Center…

People marching

 

VW: A question submitted to us by a reader was, if you had a female child today, what would you teach her differently today than if you had had her in 1971, for example?

GS: [pause] Well I would not say ‘you can do anything you want to do’ – I don’t know if I would have said that in ’71 either… Because it’s not true, and you can’t tell children things that aren’t true. I would say, you should be able to do anything you want to do, and defeating the barriers and opening up new freedoms is – and will be – part of the fun of your life.

 

VW: Is there a time you recall in your life that you felt most defeated, most scared, most hopeless – and how did you get through it?

GS: Hmmmm, good question. Well, for all those years to keep Ms. Magazine going, despite the fact that we couldn’t do what other magazines did to earn advertising – women’s magazines write nicely about products, to get the ads – and we could not do that. So we were always struggling, and there were times when it was so hard – and that had been hard for so long – that I found myself fantasizing pleasurably that the building we were in would burn down and then we would be free, but we would also be blameless because it would have been an outside circumstance! So… that was pretty extreme. [laughing] There were probably at least a dozen years when I don’t think I ever saw my neighborhood in the daytime. But the object for how you get through it is you have companionship – there are other women, it’s a group of women doing it together. I don’t think you can do it by yourself.

 

VW: Who have been some of those at your side who got you through it?

GS: Suzanne Levine who was really the editor of Ms. Magazine – all the time people thought I was; Pat Carbine who was the publisher; Alice Walker who wrote for us and kept inspiring us with new names of great African authors and who gave us a sense of purpose… so many.

 

VW: Also on the media front, one of my contacts worked for the affiliate of Greenstone Media that we had here in Vermont; she inquired if you had any thoughts on what you would have done differently or what you’re thinking in hindsight…

GS: In hindsight, we probably should have known it was too soon. Because, we didn’t have enough money to keep going…. The programming was quite popular in the small stations where it was and we were even recommended by the programming director of ClearChannel, just on the basis of the appeal of the programming… But on the basis of the politics ClearChannel said no, and we just didn’t have enough money to keep going. The programming was by no means perfect; but it didn’t have to be perfect to be better than most of what’s out there! [laughing]

 

VW: When you got married [in 2000 at age 66 to David Bale] what had changed – previously I believe you had stated you “never” would? Many people don’t realize some of the things that were different not so long ago.

GS: We had changed the laws. We spent 30 years making the marriage laws equal. You know, if I had gotten married when I was “supposed” to get married in my 20s or my 30s I would have lost my name, my credit rating, my legal domicile – most of my civil rights – my ability to start a business without my husband’s signature. It varies state to state but you lost a lot of civil rights. By then – by the time I was 66 – the marriage laws were equal.

And actually I never said I would never get married; I never said I’ll never do anything. [laughing] I suppose if I’d gotten married at 18 I wouldn’t have known how bad the laws were, but by the time I learned how bad they were then I couldn’t have signed that marriage license.

 

VW: What was your turning point ‘from a girly-girl to a feminist’; what was it that inspired you to take the path so you didn’t get married in a premature time and entrapped?

GS: […] I believed what society told me – society said that one should get married; you really had no other choices because you were meeting the needs of your husband’s career and of children and since I really believed that in the 1950s it made marriage seem a lot like death. That was the last choice you could make.

 

VW: What goes through your mind when you have a person – Elliot Spitzer for example – speaking at the microphone resigning over a sex scandal and right there, faithfully at his side, is his wife.

GS: Well first of all it’s her decision. Secondly I always hope she was having a nice sex life, too. [laughing] What’s interesting about him is that he supported good legislation – he was different from, say politicians who support anti-gay legislation when they themselves are gay. He didn’t do that. He supported legislation that was constructive. So, an interesting case. But I think when we talk about marriage we need to define what we mean by it – because, suppose two people marry and agree that sexual fidelity is not part of their marriage contract – that’s okay, that’s not our business.

 

VW: And then we have the case of the Buffalo beheading [of Aasiya Zubair Hassan] and it seems like there was very little coverage of that.

GS: There’s a group of women here starting a Muslim women’s fund internationally and they were just overcome by this terrible crime. They were speaking out about it and to make clear that this crime had nothing to do with Islam.

 

VW: Some believe it seems like maybe we’re pussyfooting around in order to not be culturally insensitive.

GS: Well we don’t need to pussyfoot around, I mean, he’s a murderer. He shouldn’t get away with pretending it’s justified by the Koran, any more than it is by the Bible. [pause]. Personally I can’t abide by any monotheism because [it seems to me if god is man, man is god] but, there are a lot of very good feminists inside those traditions trying to transform the [religious structure] – trying to keep the good part, [throw out the bad].

 

VW: In the comments section of a recent New York Times article – “Husbands & Wives in Hard Times” – one of the readers said “I think this recession is the perfect opportunity to advance feminism; perhaps the best one we’ve had since 1970.”

GS: Yes I think that’s true, it won’t be true for everyone but men could meet their children and become closer to their children in this [phase of] joblessness.

 

VW: What did the experiences of both your mother’s illness and your husband’s illness each bring to your feminist beliefs?

GS: [long pause.] Because I was my mother’s caregiver much of the time I didn’t – how shall I say – I, without realizing it – I came to believe that I could help other women but other women couldn’t help me. It doesn’t make sense, but your childhood experience is such a [strong influence] – so feminism helped me learn that that was absolutely not the case: women could help me. And my husband’s illness in a way gave me an opportunity to relive as an adult what I had lived as a child and so, to be a caregiver without being terrified by it – because then I was an adult and I could manage.

And also, I’ve always been a supporter of gay marriage – I just found something I wrote in 1969 I think it is, or ’70 – I was surprised to see that gay marriage was already there in the text as an issue I was supporting. But, until I had the experience of David’s year-long illness and realized how difficult it would have been had we not been legally married – both from the point of view of medical permissions and insurance; he would not have been covered by my health insurance – so it made me all the more fervent in supporting gay marriage, and understanding how important it is.

 

VW: Do you think we still need a federal ERA?

GS: Yes, we do because to rectify one law at a time is time-consuming [in itself] – I remember Reagan, when he advocated changing one law at a time as opposed to having the Equal Rights Amendment, we figured it out at that point – and at the rate we were going it would have taken 235 years or something! So it’s extremely slow but also without an Equal Rights Amendment any capricious city council or legislature can make law – a new law, and then you have to fight that. So we do need a constitutional principle to raise discrimination based on sex to the same level as discrimination based on race or national origin or religion.

 

VW: If you were 20 years of age right now what would you be working on – would it be feminism, the environment, the anti-capitalist movement….? And why?

GS: The answer is “yes” because they’re all the same movement. The same forces that say men should dominate women say men should dominate nature. Capitalism is just another form of patriarchy.

 

VW: And with young women we see such a hyper-sexualization of girls – and I guess they feel as though they’re being liberated being able to do this. Thoughts?

GS: It depends on if it’s really self-willed and celebratory or whether it’s compelled in some way. To be able to paint our bodies and experience sexuality as power is fine but – that is rare, I would say. It’s much more young girls trying to be popular and do what the boys want – provide oral sex even though they get no satisfaction from it – it’s not sexuality that’s the problem, it’s whose sexuality and why?

 

VW: Another reader, a mother, addressed the idea that sometimes feminism gets the bad rap of not encouraging or supporting stay at home moms. Do you think the feminist movement really did serve moms?

GS: It’s true that in the mid-60’s, you know, with the Feminine Mystique, it was housewives who were rebelling and saying we don’t want to be housewives, we want to be in the labor force – in the paid labor force. Their rejection may have seemed like a judgment but in fact in general, the women’s movement has been the only force elevating work in the home: by calling it work in the home, by never saying homemakers don’t work, by advocating for social security, for pensions, health insurance, and, I think most importantly, for a piece of legislation we don’t have yet which would give an attribute value for care-giving whether it’s raising children or taking care of invalids or AIDS patients or elderly parents. Care-giving is about 30 percent of the domestic work in the country but it is completely invisible. This IRS change would allow an attributed value at replacement levels to caregiving whether it’s done by women or by men and make that tax deductible if you pay taxes and tax refundable if you’re too poor to pay taxes. And that would go a long way towards making all productive work visible.

I think it would help, actually, if a lot of the groups that are by, for and about moms would call themselves “parents” – because the point is, men are parents too, and that would at least allow the mind and perhaps the actuality to change!

 

VW: You would favor that and not feel it’s taking away from women’s efforts as mothers?

GS: No. We should all be able to call ourselves anything we want and I would certainly support a group that wanted to continue to say moms – but I’m just saying from a tactical point of view if, for instance, we ask for leave for mothers then it makes it a penalty to employing women – if we ask for leave for parents it’s clear that men can take advantage as well, which is what we want.

 

VW: In the past year, what was the most exasperating or heartbreaking moment for you, given the efforts you’ve exerted for women’s rights?

GS: It was while standing in Calcutta – where the Gates Foundation and others are supplying condoms and supporting the idea of a so-called prostitutes’ union – sex-workers’ union – on the grounds that this union is keeping out child prostitution and also diminishing AIDS by using condoms – standing there and seeing children – you can see the children – you know they must clean it up before the Gates Foundation people come – but if you go unannounced you can see the children in the brothels – and you can easily discover that they just charge more for sex without condoms. So, until the foundations give at least as much money to helping women and children escape [these circumstances] as they do for condoms they’re not going to be helpful.

 

VW: And what was the moment of most satisfaction in the past year?

GS: It was satisfying to see that Obama was elected by a more than 60 percent female vote margin – (not to mention that his budget passed thanks to two female senators) –because the dangers posed by the McCain presidency were so extreme.

 

Editor Margaret Michniewicz can be contacted at editor@vermontwoman.com.