Gloria Steinern
WINOKUR, L.A.
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Gloria Steinern BY L.A. WINOKUR Gloria Steinern has been a political and cultural icon since the 1960s when she first came into the public eye as a journalist in New...
...Why do you feel that way...
...The source of gender roles—which in turn becomes the source of incomplete human beings, violence, and the cult of masculinity—is the experience you had as a little child, when you were totally nurtured and raised by women...
...Every time I get the press to write about one economic-empowerment project they still don't understand that it's part of the women's movement as a whole...
...Q: Don't you think that just comes with the territory—the sense of urgency one feels when you see things for what they are...
...In the 1980s, Steinern also found the time to write two books: Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), a collection of feminist essays, and Marilyn: Norma Jean (1986), a biography of Marilyn Monroe...
...And he listens...
...Even though these services are interactive, I fear they may become more isolating...
...Foundation for Women, as an activist with Voters for Choice, as a welfare-rights advocate, and as an author who still feels she has "unwritten books stored away...
...It was still the prosperous 1950s, and nobody was really very interested...
...I think we have to name ourselves...
...When a reporter kindly said I didn't look forty (a well-meaning comment but ageist when you think about it), I said the first thing that came into my head: "This is what forty looks like...
...They're very conscious that they're part of the women's movement...
...But too few of us have imagined, and therefore we haven't convinced the country, that men can do what women can...
...But when I came home, nobody was interested in India...
...It isn't that I regret that time...
...Women come from Third World countries and trade expertise...
...essentially believes that the ends justify the means...
...Liberal" felt to me to be a little too top-down...
...We haven't heard as much about her lately...
...Q: How are e-mail and on-line services likely to impact the women's movement as we know it...
...If we are going to have a powerful movement, we need to have some women with jobs they can't be fired from...
...It really is the root, or radical view of gender.M L.A...
...It was populist and got to a fair number of people...
...Sometimes the level of noise gets so high it's hard to hear anything else...
...So, is he my ideal President...
...It was always the problem of poor women...
...We still face this problem...
...Broner has chronicled the yearly ritual of the feminist Passover seder (complete with "The Women's Hag-gadah") in which Broner, Steinern, and other feminist notables participate...
...So I had this incredible sense of urgency and was always grabbing people by the lapels and lecturing them on the way the rest of the world lives...
...After Clinton was elected and rescinded the policy by executive order, I could take that bracelet off...
...The anti-choice candidates wouldn't call themselves pro-choice if they didn't recognize the fact that the majority in this nation is overwhelmingly pro-choice...
...I always preferred "progressive," or some other term, to it...
...The most dangerous thing to me is when we ask the President what he is going to do for us...
...foreign aid from even talking about abortion...
...And the same thing has happened during this Administration...
...Even now you are still trying to come to terms with it...
...But we were meant as human beings to communicate with all five senses, sitting there looking at each other...
...So I hope that one day we can put it back in women's hands...
...And it was quite clear what it would and wouldn't do...
...And that's a problem for a magazine like Ms...
...But you're still by yourself...
...The Moral Majority says it has—and I have no reason to disbelieve it—9,000 fundamentalist Baptist churches churning out votes...
...That tells us that we have to have our own media and do a better job of turning out our own vote...
...I don't believe that change happens from the top down...
...Steinern: Because his views are more pro-equality, more feminist, or whatever you want to call it...
...We need to know in our hearts that men can raise children just as well as women can, and we need to be willing to raise our boys to raise children...
...Steinern: You can't get a bunch of women together without their being conscious that they're part of the women's movement because they start to talk to each other...
...Advertisers go where they get favorable editorial mention of all their products and no criticism of their corporations...
...It was too early...
...Until then I was wearing a third bracelet...
...So walking around the villages with this Gandhian group, I had this sudden feeling that, yes, this makes sense...
...and "Where do you live...
...Q: Would you consider the media to be complicit in all of this...
...and Moving Beyond Words (1994), a diverse collection of her feminist musings...
...the best-selling Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992...
...Now I'm wearing only these two bracelets all the time...
...So I hope we don't fall into the trap of looking for rescue, which is disempowering...
...Women here in the U.S., for the most part, have reinvented the wheel without knowing about the Third World example, the example being cooperative businesses and cooperatively accumulated capital...
...Everybody who worked at Ms...
...Especially in the Sommers book...
...We have to do things for ourselves...
...Steinern: In the early days, I think I was among the most externalized of people...
...Katie Roiphe's book, The Morning After, which has been out for a couple of years, is another case in point...
...Q: Why do you think there's so much hostility to Clinton...
...It's very important but it's terribly difficult...
...At least in that case the press finally made a point of getting to the bottom of what was really going on...
...There is a truly vicious organized effort against her...
...And the words lasted...
...Saying this unsayable thing and hearing six other women say, "You feel like that...
...The problem is, there should be many more such publications...
...And there are a lot of people, including a lot of liberal men and some women, who hate that, who've grown up believing that a so-called normal male/female power relationship is 70:30, or 60:40—50:50 is very threatening...
...both have historically tolerated and courted violence...
...WINOKUR Gloria Steinern has been a political and cultural icon since the 1960s when she first came into the public eye as a journalist in New York...
...I have yet to find one that asks people when they come in the door, "Are you registered to vote...
...for many women is the same: a feminist forum that you can find on your local newsstand...
...And that was true in many races...
...And that's not an unusual response...
...Change happens from the bottom up...
...And there's no real substitute for that...
...But I miss her...
...And that, of course, is where movements come from...
...Steinern: There have always been books like this...
...And it's not the same as being physically together...
...Now it's the problem of middle-class women...
...We're low on capital, low on technology, and labor intensive...
...We've been lying so long, who would know?'" In "Doing Sixty," an essay in her latest book, Steinern shared these thoughts: "I'm also finding a new perspective that comes from leaving the central plateau of life, and seeing more clearly the tyrannies of social expectation I've left behind...
...Winokur is a writer in New York City...
...We do need a better way of publicizing positions on the issues...
...Ever since Michael Dukakis refused to own up to the "L" word during the 1988 Presidential debates, terms like "liberal" have come under attack...
...There is a kind of gentleness and humor in the culture in spite of outbreaks of terrible violence from time to time...
...I think we have to say, "Let every flower bloom," because everybody has a right to be published...
...Q: It seems that every other day we pick up the newspaper or turn on the television to find some woman out there, passing herself off as a feminist but attacking the very heart and soul of the women's movement...
...Steinern still spends quite a bit of time on the road, campaigning for abortion-rights candidates and making the rounds of the talk shows and lecture halls...
...And I believe that...
...So it is a sort of portable friend or intake mechanism for the women's movement to some extent...
...But I realize now that I could have been a more effective activist if I had had more self-understanding— more understanding of why I feared conflict and what bruise it was hitting in me from the past...
...I think it's very helpful for writers, or anybody for that matter, to try to make something work...
...The rightwing doesn't trust the regular media...
...It's a departure from what has been almost universal in Presidents...
...I realize there are some advantages, because communicating on-line does allow people to tell the truth anonymously...
...And he did his best to get them through the Congress...
...Now go out and force me to do it...
...If I say it was how she was dressed, where she went jogging, or whom she married, I'm saying that I can keep it from happening to me...
...With the one big exception of welfare, which Clinton is bad on (and for which I don't think we can hold him responsible because we haven't educated the country on welfare), he's good on the issues...
...When we met for breakfast at one of her neighborhood coffee shops to do this interview last November, Steinern rushed in and greeted me as if we were old friends in desperate need of a cup of coffee and some good conversation...
...If you take the progressive forces all together, including feminists and others, I don't think we have 9,000 of anything that I know of...
...So it got buried in my life...
...In a way I'm glad that now the magazine doesn't have any advertising, and that it's doing well economically...
...Not one major part of the media ever did a white paper on what the Equal Rights Amendment really would and wouldn't do...
...Q: Let's talk about Ms., the magazine you helped to found...
...Q: In Revolution From Within, you also indicate that the time you spent in India, some thirty-plus years ago, represented a turning point for you...
...Steinern: In some sense, wherever we are, women are like a Third World country...
...Steinern has always pushed the limits of stereotype...
...Not from the top...
...And we have not done what every immigrant group in this country has done, which is to learn how to educate and deliver its own vote...
...Though some women can do well on a salary, they are always at risk...
...What about you...
...She plans to continue with the work she has been doing as a consulting editor to Ms...
...Steinern: I don't think I've fully realized it yet...
...Then she was less so...
...Much less say, "OK, here are the issues in this election...
...There are some very good regional ones...
...That has not been my experience...
...I must have been such a terrible burden as a friend, because I had also discovered that the rest of the world doesn't live the way this country lives...
...Illegally, I might add, in complete defiance of the separation of church and state, and what you're supposed to do with tax-exempt money...
...So, I don't think there are more of them now than there were before...
...One for Becky Bell, who was the first young woman to die because of the parental-consent laws surrounding abortion, and one for Rosie Jimenez, who was the first woman to die because of no Medicaid funding...
...CBS or someone would call me up about the Equal Rights Amendment and tell me to bring an "anti" along with me...
...Her last article for The Progressive was an interview with Larry Kramer in the June 1994 issue...
...And similarly, these writers wouldn't be calling themselves feminists if it wasn't a good thing to be...
...Instead, they have their own media, mailing lists, millions of voter guides they put out, and church basements where they mobilize voters...
...One is its use on campus...
...We, on the other hand, have been depending upon the regular media and some alternative press to get the word out on the various candidates and their positions...
...It was worth all the campaigning just to be able to do that...
...I sense that for both Roiphe and Sommers that's part of it...
...I like the term "feminist...
...Steinern: It's both the burden and the gift of trying to be a bridge...
...We don't even have 9,000 Democratic clubs...
...magazine, as a strategist for the Ms...
...And both were what I would call of a culturally masculine style which I never quite felt at ease with, though I pretended to so I would be accepted...
...But what's different about them now is that these women call themselves feminists...
...And there are some areas in which our imagination is already there, and we're working on the structure and on the reality...
...But it's what we have to do...
...Q: How conscious are these women that they're part of the women's movement...
...There was hardly any other place for women to get that kind of experience...
...has also been a great training ground for a generation of women in journalism and publishing...
...And that's very, very important...
...It's not unimportant that the Sommers book came out of a rightwing think tank...
...While you say you realized it then, you also have confessed that you weren't quite sure why...
...Before I'm a writer...
...Many women...
...And that's part of the problem...
...That's the most we can ask of him...
...Steinern: We as women ought to understand some of the reasons for the hatred of Bill Clinton...
...In spite of all the horrendous problems and everything we know about dowry murders and what happens to female babies, there is a female presence in that culture...
...I don't mean to be Pollyanna-ish about this, but I think in a sense it shows that we're winning...
...Steinern: I never liked "liberal...
...There are several of these kinds of books every decade...
...But it should be owned by women, and it's not...
...It has certainly gone through its share of changes over the years— changes in ownership, and along with that, resulting shifts in editorial emphasis...
...I hesitate to try to explain it, because it sounds as if I'm sentimentalizing the culture, and I don't mean to...
...It always makes me think of Franklin Roosevelt, who was reputed to have said to some constituency group, "OK, you've convinced me...
...I thought only I felt like that...
...But Gandhian thought, of course, is really built on nonviolence, and on the idea that the means dictate the ends...
...The reason there aren't—or symbolic of the reason—is the incredibly hard time we had...
...There is a whole newsletter and Washington rightwing office devoted to nothing but attacking Hillary...
...It seemed too much like people making poverty policies in Washington...
...And there are some areas in which our imagination isn't there yet...
...If Hillary were in the Senate on her own, she would be getting opposition, but she wouldn't be getting this degree of hatred...
...It was written by Arianna Stassinopoulos, now Huffington...
...It's alarming how inaccurate it is...
...has acquired other unexpected functions—functions it still has to this day...
...I would say that along with reproductive rights, which affect practically everybody, this is the next most important movement because it is a different economic paradigm...
...Q: In Revolution From Within, you talk about making progress "by a constant spiraling back and forth between the inner world and the outer one, the personal and the political, the self and the circumstance...
...They're both getting hatred because at a deep anthropological level they represent a threat to a certain kind of structure...
...In fact, the Ms...
...I have to go away someplace soon and figure out which one to do next," she says...
...If there was an Olympics for being non-introspective, I would have been right on the team...
...And too many of the institutions we do have—local battered-women's shelters, women's centers, rape-crisis programs, all of these programs that we have in almost every community—don't even ask people if they're registered to vote...
...was involved in making the magazine work...
...And a lot of men are impressed with her, too...
...Q: Do you see the socialization process of boys and girls as changing for the better...
...It took me a long time to realize that speaking was also important, because people sitting in a room together have an experience that you cannot have sitting by yourself with the written page...
...And angry that there aren't more publications like it...
...One of the recent ones is Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism...
...So both from an external and an internal point of view, I'm proud of the function the magazine has served...
...When I was campaigning out in California during this last election I had to get a copy of this book from the Library of Congress...
...The same is true, I think, of this technology...
...At the same time we need to point out the inaccurate facts...
...Incidentally, she deep-sixed this book and tried to buy up all of the copies...
...We haven't done that...
...I met Steinern a year and a half before I conducted this interview, at a book party she hosted at her residence on the East Side of Manhattan for Esther Broner, Steinem's longtime friend and fellow writer...
...Why is that so critical to the women's movement...
...Q: One area I know you feel passionately about is women's economic development, or empowerment...
...Just telling the truth...
...Is the magazine where you had hoped it would be by this point in time...
...When movements reach a certain point of maturity and influence, there is what we might think of as the Clarence Thomas Syndrome: that is, folks in power go and find some contrarian from the group and elevate that person...
...Q: I know you're fond of the term "radical," preferring it, in many ways, to "feminist...
...We've done something toward raising our daughters more like our sons, but fewer of us have had the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters...
...They represent a more equal male/female relationship at a very high level...
...As a writer I used to think writing was the most important activity...
...1972), she is best known for helping to give birth to the modern-day women's movement...
...We get so used to being critics, because that's the stance of the press, that we come at our work from a negative point of view...
...To me it means that if you don't go to the root of a problem, you're not only putting a Band-Aid on a wound too deep, but you're not being effective...
...Now they have to admit that if someone of Bill Clinton's origins could do it, so could they...
...In addition to being among the founders of two magazines, New York (1968) and Ms...
...But women's issues aren't the only ones that over the years have captured Steinem's heart...
...I feel very proud of it...
...So now we'll do something about it because there's a critical mass of women having this experience...
...Steinern: I worry very much about it polarizing men and women even further...
...For instance, the first thing he did when he got into office was to repeal the Mexico City Policy (of 1984), which was the international gag order that kept anybody who received U.S...
...I feel I'm a feminist before I'm an American.9 Clinton is also lower class in his origins, and my own male friends in the so-called liberal media hate that...
...Steinern: The mechanics have changed...
...In what way did it change you...
...Women are an immigrant group in a way...
...Men are much more likely to be well-versed in the technology, and thus to have a competitive edge here...
...That's the source of the gender roles...
...But in the end, what speaks to us is women's actual or visceral experience...
...I feel very proud of it...
...With the Equal Rights Amendment, they never really did investigate...
...And that's something the Administration has to deal with...
...I felt I always had to still this voice in me that kept saying, "Where are women in all of this...
...Foundation has an institute so women who are doing this work can come together...
...We all did everything...
...Both the political ethic of right and left that I'd been exposed to in the U.S...
...It needn't have the connotation of violence that has been given to it in its usage...
...People don't use it unless they've fought for it...
...In addition to this, Clinton has no military experience, and that threatens a lot of men...
...I think it's a tactical decision, and I can understand it...
...I also treasure the word "radical," which means going to the root...
...It's used in a lot of courses...
...And the other is that it's a place where the rest of the press picks things up...
...It's like emerging from a dark basement and trying to explain to people in the sunshine what it was like to be in the dark...
...Some of it, as I rationalized to myself at the time, was due to the resemblances of India to this country: big, diverse, multicultural...
...We also try to make it a place where previously unrecognized women get some recognition...
...Even if it happens from the top down, it is not real...
...We imagined, and therefore convinced the country and are now working on the reality, that women can do what men can do...
...And I worry about the economics of it, because the toll-booth on the information superhighway is so expensive...
...Steinern: It seems as if the imagination of change has to always precede the reality of change...
...It's different having a phone conversation from being together with someone...
...They didn't even know an "anti," but they wouldn't cover what they viewed as a pro-Equal Rights Amendment stance without an "anti" stance...
...What happens to women in this society is sufficiently alarming so that many want to say it's the fault of the victim...
...It's a myth that advertisers go where the readers are...
...I feel I'm a feminist before I'm an American...
...So, instead, we had half the folks saying the sky was blue, and half saying the sky was green, and pretty soon a lot of people wondered if it wasn't green...
...Plus, he's an internal as well as an external person, which is not the masculine paradigm...
...What do you make of all this...
...The same problem was there in the early days of the civil-rights coverage when reporters would go south and write that the SNCC workers would say they were beaten up in jail but that the sheriff says they beat each other up...
...But Clinton's the best we could possibly expect, and he certainly deserves our support...
...But it was deeper than that...
...She became active in the movement in the late 1960s, and then, in 1971, helped organize the National Women's Political Caucus...
...The first feminist was somebody who believed women were equal to men...
...And of Hillary, for that matter...
...Q: That sounds like a fairly strong endorsement...
...At the time I experienced India, I felt as if I were "at home," though I didn't understand why...
...As a case in point, twenty-five years ago there was The Female Woman, the hostile response to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch...
...Little by little...
...But the function of Ms...
...She marched alongside the United Farm Workers, supported the struggle for civil rights, and was active in the anti-war movement, as well...
...4 like the term "feminist...
...Over the years Ms...
...It's much harder: We're much bigger and more diverse...
...And you only see men in positions of authority, and thus, think men have to be authoritative...
...These days, it isn't uncommon to find politicians—and even activists—who are afraid of being labeled, especially by a term that they perceive links them to a particular ideology...
...When they learned he was anti-choice, they said they would change their votes...
...And I think we have to understand that...
...Every year, the Ms...
...I don't think we ever realized how incomplete textbooks were...
...The media's version of depth is to show the pro and con to a story...
...Steinern: She was very prominent during the Presidential election...
...So you think women have to be the nurturing ones...
...There was a third bracelet that said, "One woman dies every three minutes internationally because of the Mexico City Policy...
...It takes what we used to call a "pro-woman" stance and tries to look at the world as if women matter...
...It really is a major business movement, which has not gotten attention...
...But there's nothing else as nationally available and as easily accessible as Ms...
...This is the way real deep change happens...
...In the last five years, she has added several more works to her credits, including Sex, Lies and Advertising, a spirited and deeply insightful expose of the advertising industry's stranglehold over women's magazines...
...For instance, in the governor's race here in New York with George Pataki, when I started to campaign in my own neighborhood, not one person knew that he was anti-choice...
...If I had my ideal President, we would all join the Cherokee Nation, have Wilma Mankiller as President, and declare her chief of the country...
...She does make women proud...
...Why do you think that is...
...All of those things make him hated, and we've got to understand that, because many of those same things make women hated...
...Q: You mentioned Hillary Rodham Clinton...
...You can at least have a dialogue, which is more than you can have with a book...
...Q: Where do you think Bill Clinton falls on the spectrum with regard to women's issues...
...For some reason, I just felt at home there, especially with those who had been raised in a Gandhian ethic...
...Steinern: Well, he's not perfect, but he's the best we've ever had in the history of the country...
...As a result, a problem for many women now—the women who have jobs, at least—is that they have two jobs: they're taking care of the kids and taking care of the house, and they're working outside of the home besides...
...Do self-esteem and feminism go hand in hand...
...Steinern: Take what happened in the case of the Equal Rights Amendment...
...It's different sitting in front of your television screen than being together...
...They're upset by that, because as long as it was a Jack Kennedy or a George Bush who was in office, they could say, "Well, of course I couldn't be President because I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth...
...His opponents see this as indecision...
...When she turned forty, "I did so publicly with enormous relief," she wrote in Moving Beyond Words...
...Here's how the services you're now using connect to the election...
...Foundation for Women—through the Collaborative Fund for Women's Economic Development, which connects funders across the country with job-creation programs—is quite active on this front...
Vol. 59 • June 1995 • No. 6
