My Friend Gloria Steinem

Substack

This week, I find myself unexpectedly very sad. Gloria Steinem’s death on Wednesday marked the passing of our second-wave feminist generation. There are but a handful of us still standing, and ever fewer of us still working.

I knew Gloria very well back in the day. She originally came to my attention in 1963, soon after Betty Friedan published her legendary book The Feminine Mystique. That year, Gloria went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for a piece published in Show magazine—an exercise intended to expose the way in which women were treated as “sex objects.” I always found this an interesting contradiction. Gloria condemned the objectification, yet she also used it to her own advantage, and to the advantage of liberal feminism.

In early 1971, I attended the very first meeting that led to Gloria’s founding of Ms. magazine. I forget how I came to be there, but Gloria and I had already been meeting and talking for at least three years, maybe a bit more, because I wrote to her after her piece about the Playboy Club was published. Indeed, I never really “joined” the feminist movement. As someone who was very early aligned with its goals, I simply almost instantly, as did so many other radical feminists, became a leader. I attended National Organization of Women (NOW) meetings in New York City, including one in Ti-Grace Atkinson’s home. I remember that Kate Millett wore her hair in a neat little bun and spoke in a slightly British accent. But that was not as important as Kate’s 1970 book, Sexual Politics or Shulie Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. I remember reading them both while standing up in a bookstore in Greenwich Village.

This was my community. I remember that we all came out to “dance in the streets” of New York City, so many of Henrik Ibsen’s Noras out of the dollhouses together, all at once. This is what changed my life from being a “girl” and led me to my calling. I probably would have published my 20 books (two remain unpublished) whether there was a movement or not. But I would not have had such support, and such a moment in history that has kept me going ever since.

In 1972, my first book, Women and Madness, was published, which was about the catastrophic gender double standard in the mental-health profession. I was grateful that Ms. published two excerpts of my book. But at the time, I did not realize why Gloria had such passion for the book. I did not yet know about her mother, who had severe mental illness—something she wrote about very eloquently in her 1983 essay, “Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It).” I did not yet know that Gloria was something of a motherless child—but, so many daughters living within a patriarchy were just that. Our mothers were not heroic role models. With some exceptions, many were unhappy and, pro forma, were more devoted to sons than to daughters. There are many ways in which daughters can be “unmothered”—but Gloria, to her credit, insisted on defending her mother forever after. She in no way blamed her. She became her mother’s mother.

Here’s a tale told out of school. Gloria endorsed most of my books until it came to Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, published in 2002. The book explored competition and “indirect aggression” among women. This was not about feminist women—it was about all women everywhere. My former agent (deceased, deceased) told me that Gloria refused to endorse this one because of what I wrote about mothers and daughters. Apparently, she insisted that she had only known a very positive mother-daughter relationship, and that my three chapters on this very subject had gotten her too upset.

Oh, darling Gloria. What compassion and what denial.

Gloria and I collaborated frequently throughout the years. In 1972, she pulled me into a project she was working on: an anthology of 1940s Wonder Woman comic strips that later became Wonder Woman: A Ms. Book. I wrote an essay that was included in the book—an academic history of the Amazons of Greece, Africa, and Central Asia—and helped Gloria write the introduction. Together, we chose the comic strips. We even posed right outside her brownstone wearing Greek (but not Amazon) helmets. These photos have never seen the light of day.

Gloria had a way of making herself “liked.” All through the 1970s, she was always so. . . Midwestern. She was polite. She listened. She asked for advice. She was in no way a bully, as some other feminists were. It was uncanny—was it a mixture of projected vulnerability? Or was she simply disarming enough, dry-witted enough, “pretty enough—for a feminist,” (this was her line), to always get what she came for?

But not everyone liked her. Some radical feminist groups resented her mainstream brand of feminism, alleging that it was subverting their priorities. In 1975, a radical group called Redstockings released a report alleging that Gloria had extensive ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. I never believed this. We were quite adept at sabotaging and turning on each other. Why would the CIA or the FBI even bother?

But I do think that this traumatized Gloria and led to her refusal to attend certain international conferences if she and Ms. did not control them. Once, when a group of us posed for the cover of The New York Times Magazine, I took it upon myself to invite Gloria to join us. She bowed out. Only later did I come to conjecture that at least two of us in the photo, maybe more, had attacked Gloria without mercy.

There were some feminists who had genuine disagreements about—well, about everything. They were passionate and arrogant Marxists. Some were more radical than God. Others feared that for Ms. to succeed, it would have to water down various brands of radical feminism. Some were simply jealous of Gloria’s increasing fame.

The wars among second-wave feminists were way over the top. The issues of pornography versus censorship and free speech sometimes led to actual fistfights. It still all feels so very familiar.

***

I find myself unexpectedly angry by how the media, in the wake of Gloria’s passing, has published photo after photo of her, nearly all from the early 1970s. Her obituary in The New York Times includes 15 photos, 10 of which were taken in the 1970s and five of which were taken later, but at a distance. Eternally young. Eternally blonde. Eternally a Hollywood-like celebrity (Marilyn Monroe? Brigitte Bardot?). So far, the Times has published at least three different obituaries and counting. There may very well be more.

I don’t think that Gloria very much minded being portrayed as a “sex kitten” (she was very broad-minded), but really!—what kind of role model is the media focused upon? Although it was the 19th century, Susan B. Anthony, the Pankhursts, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth did not pose in such a way, nor did Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, or Barbara Jordan in the 20th century.

I am not blaming Gloria. I am reacting to how the media insists on presenting women, and the potentially toxic effect it has upon young women, on other women—and on men.

True—when Gloria once posed in a bubble bath for People magazine, I called her up and said, “What’s this?” She laughed and responded: “Girls gotta have fun.” (Privately, I thought she should have said: “Girls gotta have funds.”) But that’s mean and inappropriate to say now that she’s gone. I’ve already broken so many commandments. . . no way I’m getting into heaven.

Long ago, Gloria asked me to “come clubbing” with her. “Are you mad?” I responded. “I have classes to teach and research to do.” She had amazing energy; she was “at it,” whatever it was, both day and night. And then, when she went to Washington, D.C., on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship (I think that’s what it was, and she asked if I would also come “if another fellowship fell out of someone’s back pocket”) I again said that I was rooted to my academic position and could not simply take off and live “on the road.”

Gloria was a bit like her Jewish father, who was on the road most of the time, peddling whatever. Gloria did not acknowledge him as such; rather, at least in her writing, she presented him as an assimilated Johnny Appleseed or as something of a Paul Bunyan.

Ah, Gloria. You are now gone, and I cannot say all the things I may otherwise have said about what we disagreed about, and the ways in I thought that you failed your own feminist principles.

I disagreed with your views which prioritized gender rights over and above sex-based rights. While I deeply respected and understood your choice of mainly African American women to take along with you on your lecture tours, I also thought that you came to prioritize African American race-based rights over and above caste-based rights (which would include women of all colors), and over and above women’s profound economic sorrows. Oddly enough, in my view, you did not take a strong enough position on behalf of Muslim women’s rights to live free from the most extreme misogyny. This difference of opinion would require a long essay, which I am not prepared to write at this time, right after your death. The fact that you so proudly stood with the antisemitic, race-card tricksters at two of the Women’s Marches saddened me enormously.

Then, there is October 7. One example only: You failed to respond to Hamas’s pogrom for two months until the Democratic Party finally said something, and until all the Democratic Party feminists safely published an agonizingly “balanced” presentation of the matter. That letter you signed, on behalf of all women’s suffering, in both Israel and Gaza—it was agonizing. I tried very hard to get your attention and your support, but I already knew that you always knew on which side your bread was buttered.

But you, too, were only human. Yes? And you were, first and last, a political being.

You were also kind. And witty. And pleasant. And hospitable. And determined to keep Ms. afloat no matter what. It was more than your brand; it was your baby.

Gloria, you turned a relatively non-palatable movement for women’s rights and women’s freedom into a mainstream movement. Hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of women were attracted by your spin on feminism, by your balanced presentations, by your beauty, and by your increasing celebrity. You fought on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment—something we still do not have. You also fought for greater visibility for women of color. You were generous toward other women, either in need or who became enormously useful to your projects. You were very loyal to them.

Gloria, my dear: Rest in peace, or as they now say, rest in power. As for myself, I say: Why don’t you just rest a bit before you continue your work in the world to come?