Therefore, send not to know/for whom the bell tolls/

Substack

Just yesterday, I sent Gloria my article about the Lindsay Clancy trial. I thought that she might appreciate how I dealt with the mental health issues involved.

Today, I find myself unexpectedly very sad. Gloria Steinem’s death marks the passing of our Second Wave feminist generation. There are but a handful of us still standing and ever fewer of us are still working.

Gloria had a way of making herself “liked.” 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?

I knew Gloria very well back in the day. I attended the very first meeting that led to the founding of Ms Magazine. I was grateful that Ms excerpted my first book “Women and Madness” and that Gloria pulled me into our joint project on Wonder Woman comic strips. I wrote an academic history of Amazons 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.

I had Gloria’s back on certain issues. I did not believe that she was a CIA agent as a group of radical feminists, with the backing of Betty Friedan, had charged.

I am also unexpectedly angry by how the media has published photo after photo of Gloria all from the early 1970s. Her Obit in the New York Times includes fifteen photos, ten of which were all taken in the 1970s and five of which were taken later but all at a distance. Eternally young. Eternally blonde. Eternally a Hollywood-like celebrity (Marilyn Monroe? Brigitte Bardot?) So far, the NYT has published three different Obits and counting. There may very well be more before the week is out.

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 nineteenth century, Susan B. Anthony, the Pankhursts, Harriet Tubman, 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 DC on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, (I think that’s what it was, and she asked would I 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 Jonny Appleseed or as something of a Paul Bunyon.

Ah, Gloria. You are now gone and I cannot say all the things I might otherwise have said about what we disagreed about and in what ways I thought that you failed your own feminist principles. One example only: You failed to respond to Hamas’s/Iran’s pogrom on 10/7 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.

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 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?