I
have many books about feminism on my bookshelf, but only one by Gloria
Steinem. It’s an old copy, possibly a first edition, of Outrageous Acts and Everyday
Rebellions, the book she considered her first. (Prior to this, she’d
co-authored a book and curated an anthology of writing about the beach.)
Published in 1983, Outrageous Acts brings together 20 years’ worth of Steinem’s writing, most
of it previously published, ranging from her 1963 undercover report on the
labor practices of the Playboy Club—a piece that made her notorious in New York
media circles—to her 1982 profile of the poet and novelist Alice Walker, a
longtime contributor to Ms. Magazine, the feminist glossy Steinem and other
activists founded in 1971.
My copy of the book is a signed one, inscribed by
Steinem “To Robin—with gratitude for this International Women’s Day—and the
future.” I can’t be certain, but I like to think that the Robin addressed here
is the poet and activist Robin Morgan, Steinem’s friend and collaborator, and
one of the books many dedicatees (there are more than a dozen of them). Outrageous
Acts may have a single author, but Steinem knew that feminism is a
collective project.
Steinem,
who died
this past Wednesday at 92, was many things: an editor, an organizer, a
public speaker, a fundraiser, a co-founder, a mentor, and, in her own words, an
“entrepreneur of social change.” But before she was all these things, she was a
writer, and she remained one until her death. (Her final book, the memoir An Unexpected Life,
will be published on September 22.) It’s easy to forget this, despite her impressive
publication record—she published 11 books over the course of her lifetime—and
her evident way with words. A kind of poster girl for women’s liberation, with
her aviator sunglasses and her long sun-kissed hair, Steinem spent so much time
in the public eye that one could be forgiven for thinking she was more like the
jet-setting elites she occasionally profiled (and dated) than the working
writer toiling away in relative obscurity.
But writing
was Steinem’s first and perhaps most enduring love, the activity that gave her
a sense of purpose even though, or perhaps because, it could be so daunting. “For
me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of a metier: (1) when
I’m doing it, I don’t feel that I should be doing something else instead; (2)
it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and (3) it’s
frightening,” she wrote in Harper’s in 1965.
That
she felt so committed to writing is all the more impressive given the media
environment surrounding her. Media was a man’s world: Magazines and newspapers
were run by men, edited by men, and distributed by men—although much of the
work needed to put out an issue was done by women. Male journalists got
assigned better stories and earned higher fees. Even though many magazines were
marketed to women, male editors scarcely believed women knew how to read. (A
top editor at Ladies’ Home Journal described its audience as “mental
defectives with curlers in their hair.”) Steinem struggled to earn
respect, let alone interesting assignments. When she first tried to break into Life
magazine, the editor she spoke to told her, “We don’t want a pretty girl.
We want a writer.”
Steinem
was a writer, as the pieces in this book attest. At her best, as in the 1978
piece “If
Men Could Menstruate,” she is pointed and funny, displaying the same gift
for aphorism that she showcased in her public speeches. But she could also be
earnest and introspective, expressing complicated truths in a plainspoken
style. “I still don’t understand why so many, many years passed before I saw my
mother as a person and before I understood that many of the forces in her life
are patterns women share,” she writes in “Ruth’s Song,” a moving
autobiographical essay about her troubled mother, written specifically for Outrageous
Acts. “I suppose I couldn’t afford to admit that what had happened to my
mother was not all personal or accidental, and therefore could happen to me.”
But
she was not always the writer she wanted to be. During the 1960s, when she
wrote the most, she rarely expressed her political commitments or personal
values in print. During the 1970s, when she honed her politics, she rarely had
time to write. “It’s one of the ironies of trying to be a writer and an
activist at the same time that just when you feel you have the most to say, you
have the least time to say it,” she later recalled. Traveling on the lecture
circuit, often with Black feminists like Florynce Kennedy or Margaret Sloan-Hunter,
she couldn’t even find time to keep a diary.
It’s
a problem familiar to many activist writers: how to live according to your
political principles without sacrificing your art—or vice versa. (We’ll leave
aside, for now, the whole question of earning money.) How do you reach a wide
readership without diluting your message? When does the world need your words,
and when does it need your action? Should you go to that organizing meeting or meet
your deadline? Steinem lived these tensions, wrestling with them and,
sometimes, writing about them. If she never quite resolved them, she did
something perhaps equally admirable: She faced head-on the challenge of being a
writer while living a politically committed life.
The
fact that Steinem became a writer at all is remarkable. Born in 1934 in Toledo,
Ohio, to Leo Steinem, an antiques dealer and the owner of a summer resort, and
Ruth Steinem, a journalist turned homemaker, Steinem, the second of two girls, had
a difficult, itinerant childhood. Her father was a schemer and a dreamer,
taking the family on the road in a trailer during the winter and evading the
debt collectors who tried to track them down. Ruth, meanwhile, struggled with
mental illness and underwent multiple hospitalizations.
When
Steinem was ten, her parents separated; with her sister away at college,
Steinem became her mother’s caretaker. The two lived in “a deteriorating farm
house” on a small fixed income. Steinem tended to her mother, who used
tranquilizers to calm her nerves and who often slipped into a stupor. When she
could, she escaped into books—and plotted her ultimate escape. “My ultimate
protection was this: I was just passing through, a guest in the house,” she
later reflected. She would get out of East Toledo and avoid her mother’s fate.
She
succeeded, matriculating at Smith College, where she majored in government. Smith
in the 1950s presented a different set of challenges than East Toledo did. Populated
by well-off, intelligent, entirely conventional women, Smith sent, in Steinem’s
words, a “double message” to its undergraduates. As she later wrote, students
were “encouraged toward personal accomplishment and excellence, and then
expected to subordinate themselves to children and a husband’s career.” Ambivalent
about marriage, and eager to chart her own course, Steinem left Smith for a
fellowship in India—but not before stopping in Britain to have an illegal abortion,
performed by a doctor who made her promise never to mention his name.
It
wasn’t until she was sent, as a journalist, to cover a 1970 Greenwich Village
speak-out on abortion that she would understand her abortion in political
terms. “Suddenly, I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong,” she
later wrote. “I knew.” She called it her “big click,” as in the “click of
recognition,” a term used in feminist consciousness-raising circles to describe
the moment when the scales fall from your eyes.
Radicalized
and galvanized, she did what journalists do: She pitched stories about her new
interest. There were a few takers: New York, where she was a regular
contributor, ran several of her columns about sexual politics. But for the most
part, editors were dismissive—as Steinem later wrote, the very same “editors
who had assumed I had some valuable biological insight into food, male movie
stars, and textured stockings now questioned whether I or other women writers
were biologically capable of writing objectively about feminism.” Such
stonewalling and sexism drove Steinem to “try speaking instead of writing,”
despite her longstanding fears of speaking publicly. Inspired by her companions
on the lecture circuit, by Kennedy in particular, she got more comfortable in
the limelight—so much so that other leading feminists, such as Betty Friedan,
came to resent her.
It also
drove Steinem to create her own magazine. In 1971, she hosted a group of female
journalists at her Manhattan apartment to talk about the sexism in their
industry. One of them, Brenda Feigen, suggested that the group produce a “slick
magazine,” something that would stand out from the pamphlets and newsletters
that various feminist groups distributed. With the help of Clay Felker, Steinem’s
editor, Ms.
magazine launched as a special insert in New York. Few
thought the project would be successful, but when Ms. published its
first standalone issue, the magazine sold out in eight days.
As a
founding editor of Ms., and one who remained with the magazine until
2001, Steinem did more than almost anyone to change the media environment for
women. Ms. was entirely run by women, and it solicited only female
contributors. It broke taboos about what could be published in a glossy,
running articles on lesbianism, welfare (a “woman’s issue”), abortion, and the
household division of labor. Editors solicited contributions from women of
color and put a Black woman on the cover of the June 1982 issue—to the dismay
of Southern newsstand owners, who refused
to distribute it. And Steinem and her fellow editors proved that there was,
in fact, a national audience of intelligent, curious, politically engaged women
who were willing to pay for a magazine that spoke to them about the real
problems they faced. Ms. eventually reached a circulation of 550,000,
spawned all sorts of feminist media successors, and recently published an
anthology celebrating its 50th anniversary.
