Steinem, Gloria

views updated

STEINEM, Gloria

Born 25 March 1934, Toledo, Ohio

Daughter of Leo and Ruth Nuneviller Steinem

As a child, Gloria Steinem moved around from city to city in a house trailer while her father Leo, who "never wore a hat and never had a job," looked for work. Her parents divorced when she was ten, and Steinem became the sole caretaker of her mentally ill mother. As a teenager, Steinem was an avid reader who dreamed of "dancing [her] way out of Toledo," not of following in the footsteps of her pioneer feminist grandmother, Pauline Steinem, who was president of the Ohio Women's Suffrage Association and one of two U.S. representatives to the 1908 International Council of Women.

In her teens Steinem worked part-time dancing for $10 a night at conventions. She left Toledo during her senior year in high school and moved to Washington, D.C., to live with her older sister. Winning an academic scholarship to Smith College, she graduated with a B.A. in government, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude (1956). Travel in southern India after graduation as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow helped her develop a lifelong understanding and empathy for oppressed peoples and started her writing career freelancing for Indian newspapers. In India she joined a group called the Radical Humanists and worked as part of a peacemaking team during the caste riots. Her first monograph, The Thousand Indias, a guidebook for the government in New Delhi, appeared in 1957. When Steinem returned to the U.S. in 1958, filled with an "enormous sense of urgency about the contrast between wealth and poverty," she became the codirector of the controversial Independent Research Service, an offshoot of the National Student Association.

Steinem moved to New York in 1960 to establish herself as a journalist. Her first job was as a writer of photo captions and celebrity liaison for Help!, a political satire magazine. In 1962 her first bylined article, a study of the contraceptive revolution called "The Moral Disarmament of Betty Co-ed," appeared in Esquire. Her second monograph, The Beach Book (1963), a coffee-table semibook filled with excerpts from literature about beaches, featured suggestions of things to do while sunbathing, beach fantasies, and a foil jacket that could double as a sun reflector.

"I Was a Playboy Bunny," written in 1963 for Show magazine, helped launch Steinem's freelance writing career and celebrity status by bringing her assignments on fashion, culture, celebrities, and books from such mass circulation magazines as Glamour, McCall's, and Look and from the New York Times. The essay, in the form of a diary, recounts Steinem's undercover experiences working in the New York Playboy Club, waiting on tables with a Kleenex-stuffed bosom. It is full of the beginnings of her feminist consciousness, the recognition of power differences, and illustrations of indignities suffered by the body. Looking back, Steinem refers to this work as "schizophrenic."

In 1968 she began taking on more serious writing assignments, becoming a cofounder, contributing editor, and political columnist for New York magazine. After attending a 1969 hearing on illegal abortions, organized by the radical feminist group Redstockings, Steinem wrote "After Black Power, Women's Liberation," her first openly feminist essay, which won her the Penney-Missouri Journalism award. Having come to believe that only a magazine controlled by women would advance women's issues, in 1972 Steinem was a cofounder, with Pat Carbine and others, of Ms., the first feminist mass circulation magazine.

Steinem's first major collection of articles, essays, and diary entries, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), chronicles her 20-year writing journey from prefeminist pretty "girl reporter," who never thought her work was good enough, to feminist editor of Ms. and spokeswoman-icon of American women's liberation. The collection begins with "I Was a Playboy Bunny," which was adapted for an ABC television movie, A Bunny's Tale, in 1985 starring Kirstie Alley.

Outrageous Acts also includes pieces on politicking with McGovern, McCarthy, Kennedy, King, and Chavez, the contradictory messages of the right-wing, the institution of marriage, the media, and the comical "If Men Could Menstruate." Steinem shows us where feminism has been and encourages women to network, find their sisters, and perform outrageous acts in order to advance the liberation of women and other powerless groups. Her personal journey to feminism is accompanied by empathic sketches of a diverse group of notable women that includes Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Onassis, Alice Walker, Pat Nixon, and Linda (Lovelace) Marchiano, and a moving tribute to Steinem's mother in "Ruth's Song." Like herself, the women Steinem profiles are both victims and survivors, sexual objects and, in most cases, feminist protagonists.

Steinem's biography of Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn: Norma Jean (1986), expands on her profiles of emblematic women. In a series of essays, Steinem provides a feminist and psychological portrait of a multidimensional sex goddess who is a prisoner of her neglected childhood and of an age characterized by sexual exploitation. Steinem explores her own identification with the actress, remembering that as a teenager in 1953 she walked out of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in embarrassment at the "whispering, simpering, big-breasted child-woman" who dared to be just as "vulnerable and unconfident" as she was. Focusing on the private, inner life of Norma Jean, not the mythical, public Marilyn Monroe, Steinem's sensitive portrayal weaves together the story of a neglected, abused, unparented child with a vulnerable woman, an "interchangeable pretty girl," living behind a mask of sexuality, struggling for independence, wanting only to please others but longing to be taken seriously.

Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992) is also a modern parable of a woman whose image of herself is very distant from the image others had of her. Steinem employs her autobiographical account of the search for identity and self-worth to help explore internal barriers to women's equality. She takes the reader from a rat-infested Toledo home where she is her mentally ill mother's caretaker to a television studio where her "imposter" self has become the mother of a movement. While supporting her argument that inner strength and self-esteem are the bases of liberation with extensive summaries of psychological research and exegeses of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, she also makes central the voices of diverse people: a lesbian, a man-junkie, a Cherokee Indian, and others whose comparable journeys of personal growth are linked to social activism. She associates women's loss of self-esteem with such factors as stereotypical gender roles, a preoccupation with romantic love, and male-imposed standards of female beauty. Steinem encourages both men and women to find their inner child, unlearn, reparent themselves, and imagine a future self in order to begin their own positive personal and social change.

Moving Beyond Words (1994) is another of Steinem's essay collections, this time containing three original essays, the wicked satire "What If Freud Were Phyllis? or, The Watergate of the Western World"; "Revaluing Economics"; and "Doing Sixty"; and three that were recastings of articles that had originally appeared in Ms., "The Strongest Woman in the World" (on body-builder Bev Francis); "The Masculinization of Wealth" (an analysis of the position of wealthy women); and the much-reprinted and frequently taught indictment, "Sex, Lies, and Advertising."

While her earlier books were and are still bestsellers, Moving Beyond Words has not enjoyed this success, though the book continues to demonstrate Steinem's intellectual acumen, her writing ability, and her admirable candor. "Doing Sixty," written as its author enters her seventh decade, identifies herself as "a nothing-to-lose, take-no-shit older woman," and exults, "I'm looking forward to trading moderation for excess, defiance for openness, and planning for the unknown….More and more, there is only the full, glorious, alive-in-the-moment, don't-give-a-damn yet caring-for-everything sense of the right now."

Steinem was chosen by the World Almanac as one of the Twenty-five Most Influential Women in America for nine consecutive years and has received the Front Page, Clarion, and ACLU Bill of Rights awards, the United Nations' Ceres Medal, and the first Doctorate of Human Justice awarded by Simmons College (1973). In 1978 she studied the impact of feminism on the premises of political theory as a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at the Smithsonian Institution. Arguing that "we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know," she has been credited with inventing the phrase "reproductive freedom" and popularizing the usage of "Ms." to address women. Her nearly constant travel as a lecturer and feminist organizer (nearly two decades of plane travel every week is documented) and her constant presence in connection with Ms. magazine since its founding have earned her the distinction of being, probably, the leading American feminist of her time, although throughout she has also been one of the most controversial—and, assuredly, much misunderstood—of famous Americans.

She has served as a board member or adviser to the Ms. Foundation for Women, the National Women's Political Caucus, Voters for Choice, Women's Action Alliance, and the Coalition of Labor Union Women. At her sixtieth birthday party, organized by friends and other famous feminist leaders, a "Gloria fund" was established at the Ms. Foundation, which raised more than $2,000,000 in two months. The object was, according to Marlo Thomas, to enable Steinem "to continue doing what she always did—giving away every cent of every dollar she had."

Bella Abzug, the former U.S. congresswoman, said about Steinem, "She's served as our most vivid expression of our hopes and demands. She's our pen and our tongue and our heart. She's Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and Emma Goldman all rolled up into one." There have been several biographies of Steinem, one for children, and, most notable, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995) by Carolyn G. Heilbrun (which Steinem authorized), and Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique (1997) by Sydney Ladensohn Stern.

Assessing Steinem's impact, Stern concluded her book by saying, "Bella [Abzug] and Stan Pottinger and Marie Wilson and so many others inside and outside the movement understand [Steinem's] place in history. Feminism's second wave had better theorists. There were more graceful writers. There were more eloquent speakers. There was no better leader."

Other Works:

The Steinem papers are in the Sophia Smith Collection and College Archives at Smith College

Bibliography:

Cohen, M., The Sisterhood: The Inside Story of the Women's Movement and the Leaders Who Made It Happen (1988). Daffron, C., Gloria Steinem (1988). Davis, F., Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America since 1960 (1991). Diamonstein, B., Open Secrets: Ninety-Four Women in Touch with Our Time (1970). Echols, A., Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (1989). Gilbert, L., and G. Moore, Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped Our Times (1981). Heilbrun, C. G., The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995). Henry, S., and E. Taitz, One Woman's Power: A Biography of Gloria Steinem (juvenile, includes afterword by Steinem, 1987). Lazo, C., Gloria Steinem:Feminist Extraordinaire (1998). Stern, S. L., Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique (1997).

Reference works:

CANR 28 (1990). CBY (1988). CLC 63 (1991). Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Journalists (1986). FC (1990). MTCW (1991).

Other references:

Booklist (15 Sept. 1995). Boston Globe (17 Jan. 1973, 15 Jan. 1992, 22 Jan. 1992). Chicago Tribune (20, 22 Jan. 1992). Christianity and Crisis (14 Dec. 1992). Commentary (May 1992). Humanist (May/June 1987). LAT (3 Feb. 1992). LJ (1 Oct. 1995). Nation (6 Nov. 1995). Newsweek (16 Aug. 1971, 2 Oct. 1995). TLS (8 June 1984). NYT (11 Dec. 1984; 9 Feb. 1995; 9 Oct. 1997; 2 Nov. 1997; 14, 19 Dec. 1997; 25 Jan. 1998; 3 May 1998; 22, 24, 25, 27, 28 Mar. 1998; 11 Oct. 1998). NYTBR (21 Dec. 1986, 2 Feb. 1992, 10 Sept. 1995). Sewanee Review (Fall 1984). WSJ (6 Mar. 1992). WP (9 Oct. 1983, 12 Jan. 1992). WRB (Dec. 1983, June 1992, Dec. 1995). Yale Review (Winter 1988).