Gloria Steinem: Still angry, still funny, still tireless

One of the most admired and loved leaders of second-wave feminism is coming to Stanford this week as part of the 40th anniversary celebration of Ms. magazine. Gloria Steinem reflects on the movement’s history and future.



BY STANFORD REPORT STAFF

The first issue of Ms. – which actually was a pre-issue, an insert in New York magazine – sold out. It also drew 20,000 letters. That was in 1972. Today, 40 years later, Gloria Steinem is still selling out the house. Tickets for her upcoming talk at Stanford were gone in less than five minutes. Springsteen should be so lucky.

A year after that first issue, Ms. had 200,000 paid subscriptions, and more than 1,000 letters and hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts were arriving every week.

Steinem was a co-founder of Ms., remained one of its editors for 15 years and still serves as a consulting editor. She writes, speaks, receives honors, agitates, organizes, produces films and generally makes the rest of the feminist community look – and feel – like defeatist couch potatoes.

"We all owe her a debt," said Stanford history Professor Estelle Freedman, co-founder of the university’s Feminist Studies Program.

Ms. magazine

The world and the feminist movement are not what they were back in July 1972. The first issue clocked in at a fat 138 pages, with something for everyone: the arts, motherhood, fatherhood, "populist mechanics," electoral politics (it was the year of McGovern), Wonder Woman, women’s history (Stanford history Professor Carl Degler was an early contributor), black women, poetry, lesbianism, sports, marriage, fiction, psychology and stories for children.

The title of the new magazine was provocative and ended up ushering in a new word, a new way for women to think about themselves as individuals.

"We of course came up with many different titles," Steinem said in an with Stanford Report last week. "We thought of Sojourner, in honor of Sojourner Truth, but that sounded like it was a travel magazine. Then we thought of Sisters, but that sounded too Catholic.

"And then, I had seen, and others had too, secretarial handbooks from the 1950s that contained the word ’Ms.’ for those disastrous circumstances when a secretary did not know if a woman was married or not. So someone suggested that, and we all thought it was perfect, because it’s an exact equivalent of Mister.

"The connotation was equality."

(Some time after the magazine began, the editors realized the term actually had a very long history; it appears on a 1767 tombstone in Plymouth, Mass., and may have emerged centuries earlier as an abbreviation for the courtesy title of "mistress," a term not denoting marital status.)

Race, sex and class

The all-encompassing nature of Ms. magazine, all those pages, reflected the women’s movement’s early breadth, something that mysteriously has vanished from the history, Steinem said. The multiracial and economically diverse movement is today often depicted as white, middle-class and radical.

In a June 1973 article, "If We’re So Smart, Why Aren’t We Rich?" Steinem tackled the inextricable linkages of race, class and gender: "Racism and sexism are the twin problems of caste," she wrote then. "Both have an economic motive: the creation of a cheap labor force that is visibly marked for the job."

"I learned feminism from the National Welfare Rights Organization," Steinem remarked last week, thinking back to the early days. The NWRO, which existed from 1966 to 1975, largely comprised black women organizing around issues of democracy, income, dignity and justice. "I’d be traveling around the country, always lecturing with black women, and at the press conferences the reporters would ask me about the women’s movement, and they’d ask my speaking partner about the civil rights movement." So the women would call the reporters on it and say, you can’t have one without the other.

Steinem’s frequent better half in those years was the remarkable Flo Kennedy, the first black woman to graduate from Columbia Law School, a tireless activist for civil rights and the women’s movement, and founder of the Feminist Party. They called themselves Topsy and Little Eva, after the young black slave and the young white woman in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

But that history largely has been lost. "What they’ve done is wipe out all the women of color who were there," Steinem said. "They have to remember Shirley Chisholm, of course," the first black woman elected to Congress and a candidate for the presidency in 1972, "but the rest just got wiped out."

Feminism in the age of blogs

In the wake of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, it might strike students today as remarkable that a new, ambitious and sweeping social movement chose to publish 138 pages of paper rather than a blog or a Tweet or a Facebook post.

"It’s possible that the web has rescued feminist writings from academia," Steinem said, though Ms. was never really academic, despite felling many forests. "Not that there isn’t wonderful writing in academia, but in general it’s outside personal experience, and then there’s that language. … I was always threatening to put a sign on the road to Yale reading, ’Beware, Deconstruction Ahead!’ I have the sense that the web has balanced that. The blogs are so much more personal and direct and action-based. But all words are good words."