Gloria
Steinem
Few would blame Gloria Steinem if
she were in the mood to reminisce. Only
a few months ago, HBO celebrated this
iconic women’s movement leader with
the life-spanning documentary Gloria: In
Her O wn Words. And this January marks
40 years since the first newsstand appearance of Ms., the seminal publication she
co-founded with fellow writers and activists—a magazine by women, for women,
that helped take a revolution mainstream.
But Steinem, at 77, isn’t one who
seems given to looking back. Not when
there’s so much work still to be done.
When passing reference is made to an oral
history of the early days of Ms. that ran in
New York magazine (in which Ms. made its
inaugural appearance, as an insert), she
confesses to having not yet read it.
“I knew it would occupy my brain, and
I have all these deadlines,” she says. When
asked if there was anything from the days
before Ms. that was surprising to recall
from today’s vantage point, Steinem men-
tions briefly that, among all the women’s
magazines of the time, there was only one
black woman editor. Then she returns to
a critique of the present: “There’s still no
magazine for women owned by women,
except Ms.”
When Steinem speaks of deadlines,
one project she’s alluding to is the book
The feminist icon
on then, now and
celebrating the 40th
anniversary of Ms.
on which she is working,
Road to the Heart: America
as if Everyone Mattered.
The idea came out of her
realization that, for all the
visible work she’s proud to
do for organizations such
as the National Women’s
Political Caucus or Vot-
ers for Choice, “what I
actually have spent most
of my time doing, includ-
ing during the life of the
magazine, was being on the
road.” Now she’s pulling
together the stories she’s
collected from the road,
along with the reporting
she’s done, in large part to
show that “the country is
really profoundly different
from what the media tells
us it’s like.” Steinem will
talk more about her travels
and work in the U. S. and
abroad in an interview with
N Y1’s Budd Mishkin at New York’s 92nd
St. Y Feb. 28.
So what is Steinem’s view of where
the women’s movement stands now,
more than four decades since she
became an activist?
“You know, it stands wherever the
individual woman on Amtrak who’s read-
ing [these] words is,” she says, before
offering an insight into why her focus
seems so squarely on the present and the
future, rather than the past. “In a general
way, I think movements do have to last
about 100 years if they’re going to become
permanent changes in society.”
Earlier in the conversation, she’d
noted that we, as a society, have “realized
that women can do what men do but not
that men can do what women do.” Now,
in closing, she returns to that point, with
an eye toward the importance of women
and men continuing to transcend stereo-
types, particularly in raising children.
“We continue to remanufacture the
gender roles,” she says. “And the gender
roles are what prepare us for race and
class and other birth-based stuff outside
the family. You can kind of see from that,
that we’re—at best I think—halfway
there—and nowhere is it written that
we’ll survive the backlash, either. It’s not
automatic.”
92y.org. —Eric Wybenga
