“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
These familiar words from the famous quatrain of Edward FitzGerald’s brilliant 1859 translation of the Rubꞻiyꞻt of Omar Khayyꞻm remind us poignantly not only of the march of time but also of the coming end to all our stories. The words resonate as we contemplate the deaths of the well-known. This week is no different as we pause to recall the life–the very long life–of Gloria Steinem. Born in 1934, Steinem became the standard-bearer of feminism’s so-called second wave. Thousands of women and even some men mourn her passing as the life of this political activist, journalist, and fierce protector of women’s rights came to a close after 92 years.
After earning a degree in 1956 at what was once an all-women’s college, Smith, Steinem quickly became known for her reporting on women’s rights. One of her best-known pieces was her “undercover” (the word is in quotes since she was hardly in cover at all) work as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club. Mirabile dictu, she discovered that women who ran about scantily clad in a men’s club were not treated all that well. The pay was bad, the conditions poor, and the women who worked there were not taken seriously. The story got wide coverage, but it begs the question of whether she did it for effect, since hardly anyone who knew about Playboy Bunnies and the clubs would have thought these women were treated like queens. This does not excuse the poor treatment, of course, but it does cause one to wonder if she would have found clowns at a circus taken seriously.
Her signature oversized rose-colored glasses became something of a trademark, as much as her writing. Throughout the sixties, she sported these glasses as she tackled the predictable themes of employment discrimination, abortion, contraception, sexuality, and women’s equality. She found a wide audience for these themes as the sixties saw Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, as well as the Australian counterpart, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, heralded in the 1970s. Unlike the academician Greer, Steinem’s work remained mainly journalistic.
The closest Steinem’s work came to a quasi-academic theme was her role in founding Ms. Magazine. Following Greer’s book in 1970, Steinem and her feminist friends premiered the first issue of Ms. in 1970. The regular issues followed in 1972. Once again, the themes of the magazine followed Steinem’s early journalistic work: domestic violence, reproductive rights, popular culture and its treatment of women, and workplace discrimination. For up-and-coming feminists, Ms. proved required reading. It did not take long for fellow female travelers in academia to add some of the articles to their syllabi.
Steinem soon became a regular fixture at NOW, the National Organization for Women, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the Women’s Action Alliance. (Ostensibly, back then, no one, even progressives, had trouble defining what a woman was.) She was a stalwart defender of the failed Equal Rights Amendment. Congress passed the ERA in 1972 and gave the states seven years to ratify it. When that time had expired, Congress approved another decade for states to ratify, but at the end of 1982, only 35 of the required 38 had passed it. It remains in that purgatory even today.
Her journalistic writing led to several books, some of which were réchauffés of past articles. Among those are Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, My Life on the Road, a 2015 memoir of her work over the years, and a companion piece of her quotations in The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will P*ss You Off!
It is no surprise that Steinem championed both Democratic candidates and anyone else who promised progressive political change. Moreover, over the twilight of her career, she was very much involved in racial and economic equality, LGBTQ+ rights, the fight against sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and reproductive rights. Interestingly, she parted company with Greer, who is not in favor of the transgender movement. Greer believes (she’s 87) that a fundamental part of the women’s movement is the identification of, well, women. She bristles at those who struggle to define, or ignore, what a woman is.
While thousands of women mourned her passing, many of them failed to reflect on one of the key parts of Steinem’s fame. In 1970, Steinem testified about her own abortion in 1957. Her testimony made abortion rights a more openly discussed political issue and, sadly, abortion itself a more commonly practiced form of deadly birth control.
The burning question inquiring minds want to know today is whether all these women mourning her are relieved that Steinem was not their mother, especially in 1957.
