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Gloria Steinem sent me a personal message not long ago thanking me for my “generous and encouraging” words that “make it worth getting older.” Not worth it enough, apparently. Because one of the most visible faces of American second-wave feminism has just passed away peacefully at her New York home on September 2, at the age of 92.
Somewhere out there, I know she’s laughing at that joke. My all-time favorite line of hers came when she was talking about the benefits of women’s collaborative communication style, while conceding that men’s communication style can also be useful on occasion - like when there’s a fire.
Since her passing, the reactions to Steinem and her fiery career have been rife with that male-style communication - on all political sides. That’s the ultimate proof of independence, and the biggest honor that you can give a political figure: the fact that people are still arguing with you even after you’re gone.
So what could a political analyst with a populist, right-leaning bent possibly have in common with Gloria Steinem? More than you might think.
Steinem’s political engagement began in her 20s after a two-year trip to India in the 1950s, where she was paid to write geopolitical and cultural commentary following Gandhi’s assassination. Now archived at Smith College, her alma mater, it’s some of the most impressive political analysis that I’ve ever seen.
Seeking mainstream platforms for her political writing, she found it difficult to get published as a woman writing about politics, unless she could find a way to feminize the subject, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. In a 1974 interview, Steinem recalled that she initially didn’t think that feminism applied to her because she wasn’t a homemaker living in the suburbs. She was an unmarried working woman with no kids, living in the city. Then she encountered what she described as an institutional “caste system” that applied to her too, particularly as a woman.
Critics on the left argue that she ultimately prevented feminism from becoming more radical. More radical than what? Your dudes showing up to race at women’s swim meets? Looks like she didn’t get in the way of that. If she had, she would have been excommunicated by her movement’s self-appointed intersectionalist successors. And don’t think she didn’t know it.
Critics on the left say that Steinem didn’t do enough for blue-collar workers, despite her success advocating for farm workers and female factory workers seeking equal pay. They accuse her of hijacking the civil rights conversation by shifting attention from race toward gender. Because apparently women were supposed to sit quietly and wait to be called upon like at the local deli.
The right has long held her responsible for destroying the family unit. Really? How, exactly? By promoting greater equality between the people inside it? By normalizing the idea that women should have agency? A family in which one person has no meaningful autonomy is the ideal? It’s certainly not democratic.
The recent HBO documentary about the women’s issue magazine that Steinem co-founded in 1972, “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print,” showed her describing feminism back then as a populist movement.
Steinem never arrived at the fully anti-establishment freedom-first destination idealized by some of us women. She spent her career arguing that women should have more control over their own lives. Given that’s no longer considered radical, she clearly succeeded.
But as she said, she’s not passing the torch to anyone in particular. Instead, she lit a whole lot of torches with the hope of them building on her work.