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Gloria Steinem: Warrior for Women By Eve Berliner |
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Gloria in her glory. |
Gloria in her years of wisdom. |
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By Eve Berliner Gloria
Steinem, a gorgeous revolutionary, symbol of womanhood, a monumental figure
in the evolution of human emancipation, a feminist warrior, a lifetime fought
against the subjugation of woman by the autocracy of man, a lifetime fought for
equality. Woman
consigned to dreams of new pots and pans, the slave mentality buried deep,
nourishing others but not self. Gloria opened the doors of possibility. After Steinem and her band of radical
sisters exploded on the 1960s and 70s, the outpouring of the generations were
drawn to the barricades, the women’s liberation movement a force that erupted from the soul, the guts, the suppressed
aspirations of women, a power to be reckoned with. “Male Chauvinist Pig!” the
outcry of the day! It
goes back to the caveman, the Neanderthals, buried deep in human history and
culture, the victimization and oppression of women, control and domination by
the male. There
is a softness and an edge to her, a great, steely, inner courage to fight the
battle of her gender. * * * It
began in her Bunny Days, 1963, Spy in the House of Playboy, the great inner
sanctum, the fantastical boudoir of the New York Playboy Club as
surreptitiously invaded by undercover bunny Gloria Steinem, who reinvented
herself as Maria, a former hostess-dancer in Bunny
applicants were tested for syphilis, and forced to undergo internal
examinations, presumably for virginity.
The rules were strict, but there were, of course, exceptions… Gloria
studiously pored over her Bunny Bible.
“If you’re my bunny can I take you
home?” “Here’s my Playboy key and room
key.” [The Hotel Astor]. Playboy,
in the aftermath of Steinem’s article, was legally required to maintain a
public liquor license while advertising as a private club. One
year earlier, in 1962, the prescient Esquire magazine features editor, Clay
Felker, had assigned a little known freelancer named Gloria Steinem, to write
a serious examination of the new and explosive contraceptive pill that was
soon to revolutionize sexuality in America.
With Felker’s guidance, Steinem produced a powerful article probing questions
of sexual politics and the “new science” that was to have impact on the
women’s movement about to explode on One
year later, 1963, Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.” In
1969, New York Magazine published a
Steinem bombshell, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” which proclaimed women, as well as blacks,
an oppressed class, exploring the relationship between black power and the
liberation of women, probing the myths and truths of race and oppression and
gender. “Because the idea is, in the long run, that
women’s liberation will be men’s liberation, too,” the article concluded. * * * The
childhood is somehow hidden inside her, barely discernible. Fierce
determination born early on, in The family on the move, living in a trailer, her father a
traveling antiques salesman, moving from town to town, city to city. Her mother suffered a nervous breakdown
when Gloria was one or two years of age and emerged crippled, broken
emotionally, incapable of normal life functioning. At age ten, her father left the family and
the parents were divorced. There was a
distant older sister. In
essence, her childhood was stolen from her, a heavy deep weight thrust upon
her, a clutching ever-present fear.
Ages ten to seventeen, living alone with the madness of her mother
– schizophrenic aberrations, black
depression, anxiety, visions, sanitariums, drunk on chloralhydrate, “hearing
voices of war and hostile threat…plunged her hand through a window to
escape…,” Gloria would write in her gripping portrait of her mother, “Ruth’s
Song (Because she Could Not Sing It).” Once
she was “bitten by a rat that shared the house and its back alley.” Her mother took Gloria to the hospital
despite the terror of leaving home. Gloria was advised by doctors to put her
mother in a state hospital but she would not.
“Never.” Her
mother loved her, that she always knew. In
a sense Gloria has lived out her mother’s unlived life. Her father was the editor of the university
newspaper when her mother, a rebellious spirit, fell madly in love with him.
Her mother became the arts editor on the staff. Writing
was her mother’s dream. * * * Unpremeditated,
it was the issue of abortion which was to propel Gloria onto the stage of
political action. The
year 1969, Steinem now contributing editor and columnist for the nascent New York Magazine under esteemed
editor Clay Felker. Steinem herself
was one of its founders. Sitting
in a church basement in the Village covering a “speak-out” on the subject of
illegal abortion in an era when abortion itself was a criminal act, Steinem
listened to the harrowing stories, outcries and self-searching by women who
had undergone the brutal horror of illegal abortion. Steinem
herself had an abortion in “Speaking
for myself,” she was to tell Guardian
Observer writer, Rachel Cooke, in November of 2011, “I knew it was the
first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to let things happen to
me. I was going to direct my life and
therefore it felt positive. But still,
I didn’t tell anyone. Because I knew
that out there it was not.” Steinem
was to tell writer, Abigail Pogrebin, who was compiling an oral history of
Ms. Magazine that was featured in New
York Magazine, “I didn’t begin my life as an active feminist until that
day.” In
1972, Gloria Steinem co-founded the great pioneer feminist publication, Ms. Magazine, which had its beginnings
as a special first edition in It
contained its own brave proclamation of defiance, a feature entitled, “We
Have Had Abortions” and signed by such luminaries as Judy Collins, Billie
Jean King, Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, Anais Nin and Nora Ephron. In
1972, Gloria Steinem testified before the United States Senate Judiciary
Committee on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States
Constitution. Steiner
spoke forthrightly, decrying legal and social and economic discrimination
against women, and pointed to no lesser than Dr. Sigmund Freud as
perpetuating the myth of female inferiority. Herein
Section One of The Equal Rights Amendment: “Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not
be denied or abridged by the For
the record, the Equal Rights Amendment, proposed in March of 1972, failed
passage. But
one year later, in 1973, Roe vs.Wade became the law of the
land. * * * An
international figure on the world stage during more than five decades of
devotion to the human rights of women, Steinem, now 78 years of age, sees the
larger perspective of women’s oppression on a global scale. Today she battles
not just issues of equal pay and social injustice, but more horrific issues,
like sexual slavery, honor killings, rape as a methodical weapon of war, and
the international crime of female genital mutilation, seventy-five to one
hundred million women its brutal victims, the procedures so primitive and
horrific that they result in the total destruction of a woman’s sexuality and
inflict lifelong torture. Steinem
also opposes the circumcision of men. Steinem
is a staunch advocate of reproductive freedom. She
stands in vehement opposition to pornography -- rage, sexual violence,
humiliation, sadism, power -- but distinguishes it from erotica. As
she wrote in her fine 1984 collection of writings, “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, “Erotica is
as different from pornography as love is from rape, as dignity is from
slavery, as pleasure is from pain.” Steinem
is a signatore of the futuristic manifesto “Beyond Same Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All our Families and Relationships,”
exploring the place of woman in the new structures of society. Gloria
Steinem is the author of seven books, among them, Outrageous Acts and Everyday
Rebellions (1983), Revolution from Within (1992), Moving Beyond Words (1993), and Doing Sixty & Seventy (2006). Their
names tell the story. * * * She may have come from They
were wed in the year 2000, the ceremony conducted by and at the home of Gloria’s
cherished friend, Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. Their
fate, their destiny, was brief. Only
three years and he was gone. David Bale diagnosed with brain lymphoma. In 2003. at age 62, after a hard struggle,
he succumbed. Gloria
has carried on, the lost love a sadness buried deep within her. * * * The 30th Anniversary Issue of New York Magazine [1998], featured a
lead piece entitled, “Gloria Steinem: First Feminist.” Here is what Gloria had to say: “From the beginning, I was making choices, not because I
knew what I wanted to do but because I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to get married. It didn’t take courage not to want the
picture of marriage that had been painted for us. Once you got married, you could make no
other choices; that was it. You took
his name, his credit rating, his social identity. I have no idea why I resisted when so many
other women who felt the same way did not.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t go to school until I was 12, so I missed a
little bit of social conditioning. I
used to go to school until it was Halloween or something, and then we’d get
in our little house trailer and go somewhere else. “In my old age – really old age, since I’m going to live
past 100, I hope – I would love to have a diner. A little diner with blue gingham curtains
by the side of the road, because diners are the most democratic places. Everyone goes – truck drivers go, people
from the neighborhood, people in their tuxes after parties go. And they’re populist places. And in the back room, we could have a
little revolutionary meeting from time to time.” |
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