Whenever the strains of the famous Helen Reddy song “I am woman, hear me roar” hit the sound waves, the one face that surely comes to mind is that of Gloria Steinem, the lovely and brilliant forerunner of the women’s movement. In a recent interview on television’s “Sunday Morning,” the woman who helped to found Ms Magazine revealed that she still lectures as much as she always did and is still “rocking the boat” with the same force and fervor as she did one-third of a century ago. She still “worries about things that are unequal between the sexes.”
She has not lost her touch and she is as much of a draw at high schools and universities today, particularly Yale, as she always was. She says that she is always somewhat amused that most audiences expect to hear a woman with very radical views and they find themselves very surprised. She is still slim and lovely and despite her own reference to herself as being “a golden oldie”, she appears much less than her seventy-one years.
She spoke about how surprised some people are as well to learn that she has a feminine and frilly side, particularly as demonstrated by the trappings in her home. Her reply to those who wonder is “those who feel that way, really don’t understand feminism, which is and always has been about choices”. “Besides”, she adds, “I think my home looks more papal than frilly.”
This eloquent, quintessential liberated woman grew up in the Midwest. Much of her youth was spent caring for her ailing mother. She graduated Smith College in 1956, and her first career was as a journalist and not a feminist. At the age of twenty-eight, she took an undercover assignment at the Playboy Club, but it wasn’t until she came across the exclusively female issue of legalized abortion that she became a true activist.
According to Ms. Steinem, “women still have a long way to go. The barrier has been moved, but it is still there. The feminist movement may be quiet, but it is not dead.”
She once said that the institution of marriage degraded women, but changed her mind in 2000 when at the age of 66, she married an animal rights activist. Unfortunately, he died three years later of lymphoma. She said of his loss: “Losing him made me understand the difference between sadness and depression. In the case of the latter, nothing matters, in the case of the former, everything does.”
Three cheers for a champion and an icon.
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