But quiet wasn’t how Steinem rolled
throughout most of her lifetime. As late as this year, she was interviewed by The
New York Times, on the subject of what it felt like to reach eighty. It may
have seemed a bit belated, considering that she was already well past ninety,
but there was a social issue at work—with her you could bet there was always a
social issue at work—since the piece was timed to coincide with Donald Trump’s
eightieth birthday on June 14th.
From a personal standpoint, Steinem said
the worst part about reaching eighty (and above) was that you kept “losing the
people you love.” But when the subject turned to Trump’s birthday, Steinem was asked what advice she had for the newly
octogenarian president. Her one-word response? “Resign.”
A graduate of the
famed women’s liberal arts institution, Smith College, she would have a varied
and storied career that required a kind of adventurous inspiration and courage
that few women of her generation had possessed. She would be one of the primary
leaders who empowered other women to rise up and embrace that same courage. That
adventurous and pioneering spirit led her to reinvent herself again and again
in iterations that included stints as a CIA agent, as a bunny at Hugh Hefner’s
famous (or infamous depending on how you look at it) Playboy Mansion, as a
free-lance writer and journalist for major periodicals, as a columnist for New
York Magazine, and as the founder and editor of Ms Magazine, a
publication that embodied the spirit and essence of the emerging women’s lib
movement, of which Steinem was a unique pop icon.
It was a New York
Magazine article that launched Steinem to national recognition as a feminist
leader. Published in 1969, at the height of the protest era, the piece was
entitled After Black Power, Women's Liberation, and was a clarion
call to American women to stand up and fight for their civil rights in the same
way the African Americans had done throughout the Civil Rights Era. Three years later, as the pop culture
influence of Steinem and other feminist leaders burgeoned, the combative spirit
of that article and ‘call to arms’ would be embodied in a controversial John
Lennon and Yoko Ono song entitled Woman Is the
Nigger of the World, included in their Some
Time in New York City album.
Gloria Steinem seemed to thrive on
protest and activism and to have the kind of boundless energy to always have
time for one more activist organization. She was a co-founder in 1971 for the National Women’s Political Caucus.
This was an organization designed to provide support and vital training for
women seeking both elected and appointed office. That same year, she co-founded
the Women’s Action Alliance, which, for the next quarter-century, would back a
network of feminist activists working to advance causes and legislation aimed
at empowering women and defending their civil and human rights.
Even as the Women’s
Action Alliance continued with its important work, Gloria Steinem helped
establish “Take Our Daughters to Work Day”. This was a day set aside as an occasion
for girls to share in the workdays of career women in all walks of life, and to
learn about future vocational opportunities.
In 2005, Steinem
was joined by actor and veteran peace and women’s activist Jane Fonda, and by
former child actor, poet, writer, journalist and
lecturer Robin Morgan—who, from the early sixties onward had been a major,
radical voice for feminism through the American Women’s Movement—in founding
the Women’s Media Center, an organization that continues to work to provide
women with higher visibility and power in the media.
Steinem came by her activism honestly.
Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was a Suffragette, and chaired the National Woman Suffrage
Association (NWSA). In 1908, Pauline was also an American delegate to the
International Council of Women. She would later go on to be the first woman
ever elected to the Toledo Board of Education and was to become a leader in the
vocational education movement. In the years leading up to World War II and
during the war, Pauline Steinem would
become a fervent anti-Nazi activist, and would manage to save many members of
her family from the Holocaust.
Gloria, for her
part, became one of the highest-profile leaders of what would come to be known
as second-wave feminism in the 1960s and ‘70s and she would remain publicly synonymous
with the women’s rights movement in the US well into the 1990s.
Second-wave feminism
differed from the early twentieth-century women’s movement in that the original
Suffragettes were focused almost entirely on winning the vote for women in the
US—a feat they finally achieved in 1920. The second-wave feminists were bent on
equal rights at all levels, and were universal and transcultural in their
ambitions. This feminist movement began
in the early 1960s and lasted through the 1980s. It delved into all aspects of
women’s lives from sexuality and reproductive rights to work and family.
The second-wave feminism that much of
Steinem’s writing and activism helped fuel concerned the widespread isolation and
silent frustrations of women enslaved by the post-World War II domesticity of
the late-forties and the fifties. Major early influences for the growth of this
movement included Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering
1949 book, The Second Sex, and a 1963 work by early second-wave feminist
leader Betty Freidan entitled The Feminine Mystique. This was the
standard that Gloria Steinem would take up and vastly expand as of the late
1960s. All of these feminist pioneers centered the thrust of their literature
on challenging traditional societal roles and on asking why women should be
treated as secondary to males.
Taking their cue from the Civil Rights
Movement, Steinem and other second-wave feminists fought wage and job
discrimination, seeking to tear down labor barriers and to break through the
glass ceiling at the top of the pyramid. They vigorously campaigned for access
to birth control pills and to abortion on demand, emphasizing the right of
women to control their own bodies and for the State to stay out of their bedrooms.
They also posited that “the personal is political” and underscored the fact
that private household roles and domestic inequalities were not the exclusive province
of husbands and fathers, but systemic political issues that required immediate
change.
The work of Steinem and other feminists
of her era led to an expansion of the women’s movement to include areas that
had been totally marginalized previously. So it was that spinoff groups like COYOTE
were born.
COYOTE was an acronym for Call Off Your
Tired Old Ethics. It was founded in San Francisco in 1973, by sex worker Margo
St. James, in defense of sex-workers’ civil and human rights. But in carrying
out its activist work, it also ended up shaping yet another movement dedicated
to sex-positive feminism. Its core goal was to inspire society to treat “the
world’s oldest profession” as a valid source of work.
COYOTE argued that selling sex was
equivalent to any other job in the service and hospitality sectors. It called
for sex workers to not only not be punished for plying their trade, but also to
be accorded the full rights and protections under the law that were guaranteed
to other service professionals. It thus demanded fair pay, access to proper
health care and standard workplace protections to ensure safety and freedom
from illicit exploitation. Through educational tools, interviews and sectorial
newsletters COYOTE sought to end society’s stigmatization of prostitution, and
the legalization of the profession.
These were the highly varied issues that
Gloria Steinem dealt with and wrote about throughout her long and illustrious
career as an author, journalist, speaker and radical activist.
Steinem was a pop icon of the protest
era and well beyond, and someone young people would do well to emulate today
unless they want to end up living The Handmaid's Tale "live"
and direct from fiction to fact. She was, in fact one of the most influential
cultural icons of the twentieth century, and made an extraordinary contribution
to a positive and progressive age that is all but forgotten by anyone but those
of my own generation.
I am daily devastated to see how all of
the advancements that the extraordinary leaders of the Civil Rights and Women’s
Lib eras fought for are being systematically dismantled in this age of
neo-fascism that is gripping the US and infecting much of the rest of the
world. Those who are propagating it are bent on not only returning society to
the unequal and unfair world of a century ago, but also on further deepening
the repression of the rights won over the course of half a century, and of
oppressing the groups, individuals and ethnicities that fought the noble fight
to obtain those rights.
To tell Gloria Steinem to rest in peace
is an impossible demand. If there is, indeed, an afterlife, wherever she is, in
whatever dimension she is now manifesting herself, Gloria Steinem is bound to
be making “good trouble” in service to positive and progressive change.
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