Gloria Steinem’s revolutionary life

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, from undercover Playboy bunny to feminist icon, the many lives of Gloria Steinem.

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1:53the editor of the feminist magazine MS. She's there to talk about reproductive rights, but Spivak has something else he wants to discuss. Miss Starnam, may I ask you a question? You made a speech before the National Press Club this year, and you said, and I quote, women are not taken seriously. We are undervalued, ridiculed, or ignored. Now, what's your explanation for this serious state of affairs in view of the fact that males are at least virtually controlled and dominated by women from birth to puberty and often beyond that. Why haven't you done a better job if you're as smart as you say you are?

2:32Well, that's your statement, not mine, that men are virtually controlled by women. With her signature oversized glasses and her curtains of long blonde hair, Steinem is unfazed and unsurprised. But the truth of her situation is that she has no real power over her life outside the home, Nor does she have power over... This exchange speaks so much about just what Steinem and the feminist movement were up against. Well, hasn't she an opportunity to brainwash the male during those early formative years? Why doesn't she do it? Well, I think it's beginning to change, not to brainwash, but to be objective for change and to eliminate the sex and the race stereotypes.

3:20By the time she died last week at the age of 92, Gloria Steinem had become almost synonymous with the modern feminist movement in the US.

3:33All right, we have got here a revolution.

3:41I don't know that I can understate the impact that Gloria Steinem had on popularizing feminism. We understand that this is a revolution we will live for, not die for. It is just wild to me to think about how much change occurred in the scope of just one woman's life. Then this is a revolution that cannot fail. It has just begun and we cannot lose. The arc of Steinem's life and activism was a long one. from going undercover as a playboy bunny before becoming a radical publisher, bringing feminism into the mainstream to a fearless reproductive rights campaigner. Actually, the only alternative to being a feminist is being a masochist if you're a woman.

4:27Because, you know, either we're full human beings or we're not.

4:37But while her legacy as an icon is secure, By the time she died, many of the rights she fought so hard for are under attack. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, after Gloria Steinem, where does feminism go next?

5:00Carter Sherman, welcome to Today in Focus. We're going through The Guardian looking glass a little bit here, aren't we? Because you're a presenter on our sister podcast in the US. Stateside with Kyan Carter. But also a lot of your own reporting has focused on areas, you know, that were really fundamental to Gloria Steinem's work, and also to her legacy, which we're going to come to later. But first, I was just wondering if you could give us a sense to, you know, American feminist, young and old, what an important figure she was. I think Gloria Steinem was, for better and for worse, and to some degree of criticism, the personification of American feminism.

5:40When you look at her glasses, you just need to see the shape of them to fully see that image of her, right? Becoming a reference is, I think, a sign that you are now iconic within pop culture. How many other causes have an individual who stood up and stood there for generations and continue to say, this is the cause I'm standing for, this is the cause I'm fighting for? And so kind of, as you said, visibly and stylishly. She was stylish. She was super stylish. And she was very unashamedly herself. But I wanted to kind of go back to the beginning of her life. She was born in Ohio in 1934. Can you tell us a little bit about her childhood?

6:21Yeah, I think the defining moment, it seems, of Gloria Steinem's childhood was her parents' separation when she was 10. Afterwards, she really saw her mother struggle. And if you think about 1934, I mean, this is actually just a few years after the 19th Amendment was ratified, which means it's just a few years after American women got the constitutional right to vote nationwide. And she really watched her mother struggle to secure economic security, to have mental health. She talked often about how often her mother's concerns around her health were dismissed by medical providers. Her mother was repeatedly institutionalized.

6:57Her mother developed an addiction at one point. She was always lying on the couch with her eyes closed, kind of talking to people in another realm. And I think Gloria Steinem really saw in her mom the life of a woman who could not rise above her circumstances because it was so difficult for women to be allowed to achieve anything, to be allowed to be independent. She asked her mom at one point why she didn't leave before Gloria Steinem was born, why she didn't leave her marriage. and her mother told her that, well, if I had left, you would never have been born. And Gloria Steinem thought to herself, well, maybe you would have been born though.

7:36Maybe you would have become a full person. And I think that really formed how Gloria Steinem approached the rest of her life.

7:47I was really struck as well by her fear of mental illness after seeing her mother struggle so much and that idea of women's voices being shut out of the public health system when her mother wasn't listened to by doctors. And that kind of seemed to inform a lot of her work later on, didn't it? I think Gloria Steinem was constantly concerned about the silencing of women. Actually, the silencing of women is wrong. The way to put it, I think, is more that women just are being listened to when they speak. I think that's the thing that Gloria Steinem was so worried about throughout her career. So she came from a pretty disadvantaged, challenging childhood.

8:22and then she moved into journalism. How did she make that leap? She moved in 1960 to become a journalist in New York. When I first came to New York and tried to get an apartment, I discovered that landlords felt single women were not financially responsible. And if you could earn enough, you must be a hooker. And I think what's really striking is actually that her mom was a journalist and she even wrote under a pseudonym, a male pseudonym, Duncan McKenzie, which is like, I say this is a person whose name is Carter Sherman, like a very like clearly meant to be male name. Yeah, that's a pretty blokey name, isn't it?

8:59Duncan McKenzie. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, at the time, female reporters weren't really allowed oftentimes to be very hard hitting. My mother was a pioneer in journalism, but she just couldn't make it all work together, you know, to be the perfect wife and mother and to have a pioneering career at the same time. She had what was then called a nervous breakdown, which made it difficult for her to keep her newspaper job. Oftentimes women were relegated to writing about things like housekeeping or how to catch a man or beauty tips. And so it was very difficult for women to break through and to be taken seriously within the journalistic community.

9:39What kind of articles was she concentrating on writing initially? Well, I think the most famous article that she ever wrote was an article that came out in 1963. It was an expose about working at the Playboy Club. Expressing the philosophy of publisher Hugh Hefner, the man who turned the gentle, if prolific, rabbit into the sex symbol of the 60s. It seems very Mad Men to me. Women at the Playboy Club were servers, and they would wear these incredibly tight leotards with bunny ears and bunny tails. And Gloria Steinem went undercover there and worked there for a time and then wrote this expose about her experience there and talked about, you know, like losing weight because it was so hard and so degrading to work there.

10:25I learned of what it's like to be hung on a meat hook. I mean, that's essentially, that's the emotional experience of walking around in a costume that's so tight it would give a man a cleavage. She ended up, I think, actually finding herself to be treated as a little bit frivolous after that expose came out. It made her famous, but it also made her look like she wasn't very serious. And it meant I got less serious assignments. And even now, sometimes I'm still introduced as a former bunny. And I think to myself, well, should I? I don't want to desert the women who were working there who were having a hard time.

10:57But should I explain that it was for an expose or should is that a betrayal of them? I must say, I didn't find it frivolous. I mean, I actually thought that it was quite groundbreaking at the time, wasn't it? In terms of going in and talking about the physical discomfort and harassment and the pressure that these women were being put. Oh, for sure. I mean, I remember reading that piece when I was in high school, and it actually was very inspiring to me in choosing to become a journalist because I felt that, yes, it was hard hitting and it did expose how difficult it was to be a working woman in that time.

11:32And also it did so with like a lot of verb and panache and the writing is just very good. Yeah, the writing's great. Yeah, she talks about the boning in the corset of the Playboy Bunny costume being so tight that it would make Scarlett O 'Hara blanche. And I just, you know, it's such a vivid picture of what that work really looked like. And I think this idea that it was dismissed as frivolous speaks to this idea that was prevalent at the time and really is still prevalent now that whatever concerns women is frivolous, that women's worries are not real, are not serious, that it's men's concerns that are the things that we should all really be thinking about.

12:10It was really in her early 20s as well that she had this kind of transformative moment, didn't she? When she had her big feminist awakening, it was something that she called the big click when this all fell into place, what it was that she needs to do with her life. What happened? When she was in her early 20s, she decided to break off an engagement and she moved to India for a few years. And on her way to India, she discovered that she was pregnant and she didn't want to be. And while she was in London, she managed to get an abortion. Because it was for me the first time in my life I refused to be passive and I took responsibility for my own life.

12:51And at the time, it was illegal for doctors in England to perform an abortion for any reason other than for a woman's health. And so this was a dangerous thing for her to do. It was a dangerous thing for the doctor who referred her to do. And the doctor was a very nice man who said, you must promise me two things. You will never tell anyone my name and you will do what you want to do with your life. She didn't quite, I think, put that experience into perspective until much later in the late 1960s, when I believe she was in her mid-30s, she attended an abortion speakout while she was reporting for New York Magazine.

13:28And I listened to these women testify about all that they had to go through, the injury, the danger, the infection, the sexual humiliation, you know, to get an illegal abortion. And I suddenly realized, why is it a secret? You know, if one in three women has needed an abortion in her lifetime in this country, why is it a secret and why is it criminal and why is it dangerous? And she had, yes, what she called the big click, which is when she finally understood that experience in the context of the systems that oppress women and keep them from being able to live their full lives. And it was after that that she ended up writing her first openly feminist article for New York magazine, which was called After Black Power, Women's Liberation.

14:17this was really at a time when second wave feminism which was the feminist movement of the late 1960s 1970s here in the U.S. that was really taking off and so she got in right at that moment and became uh it just was on the ground floor of something that ended up transforming American politics and women's rights we are only 10 years into this wave it is alive all over the world and we cannot lose. And could you talk about how reproductive health rights and abortion rights fit into that second wave? So just for a little context for folks who are maybe less familiar with American feminism and our tendency to, for some reason, separate it out into waves.

15:02The first wave of feminism occurs in the late 19th century, early 20th century. It is mostly centered around the fight for women's suffrage. I'd had one sentence in my textbook somewhere in the past that said women were given the vote. I thought it was all finished, it was all won, and that if I was still having a lot of difficulty, it must be my personal fault. Second wave feminism takes off around the late 1960s, 1970s. Today, throughout the land, there is a growing demand by some women that society begin to treat them as men. Different from men, but equal to them. And it's concerned with a lot of things.

15:39It's concerned with women's economic freedom. It's concerned with making marriage a more equal institution. And a big part of that is expanding access to reproductive rights and softening the abortion restrictions that had really taken off in this country in the 19th century. And so, of course, one of the big things that happened in second wave feminism was the deciding of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide. The decision to end the pregnancy during the first three months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government. And Gloria Steinem was very, very much a champion of abortion rights throughout her career.

16:20I think it's also, you know, when she went public with the fact that she herself had had an abortion, it was quite a big thing to go public and talk about having your own abortion at that time. She combined her journalism with talking about her own experiences. How do you think that helped shape the conversation at that time around what the women's rights movement was going to be and what it was going to be fighting for? Well, one of the things that she did was she talked openly about having an abortion as part of a letter. She founded Ms. Magazine. That magazine, in its very first issue, had a letter called We Have Had Abortions.

16:57And it was signed by more than 50 women, many of whom were famous, including Gloria Steinem, including folks like Susan Sontag and Billie Jean King. And I think this is really a founding tenant of second wave feminism, that the personal is political. Yeah. Right. To say, hey, guys, let's share our experiences. And actually what you might think is a personal experience that only you're going through. Maybe I'm going through that, too. And maybe the reason you and I are both going through that isn't because of our individual circumstances, but because of mass realities that are pushing us to be, I don't know, housewives who feel like we don't have anything to offer the world other than our uteruses.

17:37Yeah. And as you said, a big platform for that was this magazine that she co-founded, Ms. Magazine, in 1971.

17:52It's disquieting to her, but nonetheless still hard to say whether she's attracted so much attention because of what she's done, what she says or how she looks. This really was a groundbreaking publication, wasn't it? Can you tell us a bit about that? Oh, my gosh. I mean, I have read Ms. Magazine articles from that time and I'm like, these ideas are still groundbreaking. Like they were talking about paying women wages for housework. Like that is still a very radical idea. In those first few issues, they talked about things like body hair, and they talked about women who loved women. They even talked at some points about people who we would now recognize as being transgender.

18:29The kind of foundation of this magazine, and makes it different from others, is that it simply considers that women are human beings. That doesn't sound very revolutionary, but it is, because the other magazines are still arguing about it. And the thing was, it sounds like people were extremely hungry for the perspective that Ms. Magazine offered. All 300 ,000 copies of that first issue sold out within eight days.

18:59It also spawned, I mean, a huge raft of women's magazines and free sheets all across the world. My own mum worked on one that was inspired by Ms. Magazine in the early 1970s. And she has always talked about what an exciting time it was to be able to create your own publication that was inspired by what was going on. And I think you also interned as well at Ms. Magazine. Is that right? I did intern at Ms. Magazine. This was obviously many years later. I did not meet Gloria Steinem nor work with her when I was there. But I still think it felt like at that time there was still such a dedication to the idea that feminist causes need to be championed and supported in the work that was started by the co-founders of Ms., including Gloria Steinem.

19:43That is not over. And by this time, as you said, she was kind of reaching icon status with The Glasses and with Ms. Magazine and all of the other kind of very provocative journalism she was doing. All the way throughout her career, people really focused on her appearance. The hard part for me, I must say the painful part, is I work really hard and then the result is attributed to looks. And you would think at 76 that would go away, but it's still there sometimes. So how did some in the feminist community feel about the attention or the attention that her looks were receiving? Well, they didn't love it.

20:20I think that many people within the feminist movement really felt that Gloria Steinem was unfairly elevated because she was so beautiful. Right. Because she wore miniskirts, because she did really cultivate a particular look. Like she made herself into an icon. Let's not say that this was something that happened to her on accident. She knew the power of how she looked, even though, yes, she talked later on about feeling like the emphasis on her appearance really undercut her professionalism and her accolades. The idea that if you were a pretty girl, whatever that meant, that you must be getting assignments for that reason.

20:59so.

21:04Betty Friedan, who is the writer of The Feminine Mystique, which is, it's a book about what's called The Problem That Has No Name. And it's basically about why do housewives feel so bad? And the book is really credited with sparking second wave feminism because it was such a runaway bestseller, but it was also extremely concerned with the issues facing white middle class housewives. And I think that this was also a critique leveled at Gloria Steinem, fairly or unfairly, that as a white woman in particular, she was taking up a lot of the spotlight. And that was why she was so, so elevated and pedestaled by people outside the movement.

21:43Coming up, backlash about the Clintons, civil rights and the CIA.