Gloria in False Excelsis

...How could Steinem not know what she was doing...

...Hutchison won that election, and the one after, by more than a two-to-one margin...

...As Nora Ephron wrote, she projected "a calm, peaceful, subdued quality" completely at odds with the words she was saying...

...The cause is the absolute synergy between the Heilbrun and Steinem agendas: Heilbrun seems less to be looking at Steinem than to be looking out, through her eyes...

...The feminist premise is false...

...At all...

...Because it is true-of all women they know...

...It doesn't...

...Without the intimacy of true autobiography, or the context supplied by the dispassionate distance of biography, this book falls between the two: a once-removed, second-stage, less than personal project, without context or criticism, but larded with the sort of gauzy reverence no one would dare lavish on himself...

...Later, Fonda had breast implants, married a billionaire businessman, and moved into his mansion...

...In her history of the feminist movement, The Sisterhood, Marcia Cohen nails it: "'Friends, sisters,' [Steinem] would usually begin, 'we're not glamorous creatures who come to you from the outside,' all the while looking very glamorous in her leotard and tight jeans...

...This too had a political value: Heilbrun admits that Steinem reassured women, frightened of contracting a masculine image...

...They write for the Washington Times...

...Cohen admits, as Heilbrun does not, that it was also useful in seducing men...

...Much of the action takes place offstage...

...How to counter this backlash, particularly in the light of its extensive financing...

...But her creation, Kate Fansler, resembles the dazzling Katharine Hepburn-an uber-WASP from an old, moneyed family...

...Aglamour girl leading a grim little movement, Steinem intrigues as a study in contrasts, which she cannot perceive or admit...

...As a last resort, they call them Unnatural Women, a chestnut once used by Victorian dodos, for women who wanted careers...

...Women who are conforming to society's expectations view the nonconformists with justifiable alarm...

...What Steinem and Heilbrun do not seem to realize is that, as far as Steinem's distinctive contribution to feminism is rated, her looks are her work...

...Noemie Emery is working on a study of the selling of political families called Sex, War and Wives...

...Steinem and Heilbrun urge women to look to their own lives and instincts to counter male dogma...

...Articulate young women are in liberal think tanks, but they are also at the Heritage Foundation...

...They are not united but different, diverse...

...The leading Republican candidates are married to professional women with resumes as impressive as Hillary Clinton's...

...Heads turned . . . Gloria looked like a Barbie Doll [that term again], a department store mannequin, which made it absolutely amazing when she actually talked...

...2) that sometimes the personal is personal and not a common experience...

...As Steinem warns, "the status quo protects itself by punishing all challenges...

...The cause that began in a justified rebellion against limitations laid down by others has become exactly as narrow and bigoted...

...It is only when they confuse this with working for "women" that things tend to get strange...

...Cohen is more emphatic: "Meanwhile, Gloria's glittering lifestyle, which she clearly had no intention of relinquishing, continued...

...Like Jane Fonda, whom she somewhat resembles, she is a novel-in-progress, an ongoing saga, always waiting on the next development...

...In the lovely free world of feminist dogma, one song is allowed to be heard...

...Millions of women have posed their own selves against myths told by feminist dogma, and found it absurd...

...Heilbrun writes deep in her own mental bunker, fighting not only the frightening Other, but the terrible force of the real...

...It set the tone for the standard performance: She condemned the culture but in a glitzy piece, amply illustrated with photos of her, looking every inch the bunny in her suit...

...Most women in the western world are middle class...

...is the major question women the world over face...

...Women's voices are more authentic than men's, except when opposing abortion...

...They are pro-choice and pro-life, and all stations between...

...The Women's Caucus itself is no longer a monolith...

...Believing too much in the truth of their slogan, "the personal is the political," they have no hesitation in distilling their stories, reinforcing them with those of their friends and allies, and projecting them out onto millions of others, as the stories of women at large...

...Gloria Steinem is the Big Tease of the feminist movement, luring the men to the tents, whence they are bludgeoned with dogma...

...A gentle, harmonious book on a conflict-filled subject, Gloria Steinem: The Education of a Woman seems muffled, like oars...

...In 1993, Steinem went to Texas to call senatorial candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison a "female impersonator" for favoring lower taxes and abortion restrictions...

...Heilbrun the feminist is against sexism, racism, lookism, Eurocentric and phallocentric standards, the native class system, and inherited wealth...

...The princess turned into a frog, and then seemed to turn back again...

...in bell-bottoms and jersey body shirt, tinted glasses and a lion's mane that reaches below her shoulder-blades, she looks like a life-size, counter-culture Barbie Doll...

...She made her name with an expose of the Playboy clubs she wrote for the old Show magazine, when she sought work as a bunny, and wrote a funny, lethal account of the experience...

...But, Cohen tells us, "Helen would insist that Gloria herself had used many of the subtle male-flattering techniques that she so abhorred...

...But she is this ideal, plastic image...

...and 3) that for each voice they hear, there are millions of others, whose conclusions are different, but who have as much right as they do to claim themselves as representatives of other women's lives...

...Steinem was so good looking," a friend told Cohen, after a male friend had raved to her about Gloria...

...These Texas elections explain the whole matter...

...In a debate with Helen Gurley Brown, she had accused the original Cosmopolitan girl of demeaning women by urging them to dissemble and flatter...

...There is only One Truth, and only they know it...

...Most women don't consider "traditional marriage" to be "prostitution," as Steinem once called it...

...Why are people like Heilbrun and Steinem so ready to say what is true of all women...

...Terrific...

...But is this what they came in to buy...

...Steinem and her allies urge women of all parties to vote by gender, on the grounds that we need more "people who look the way we do" in office...

...They do not think the "feminine role" a complete imposition...

...Though married, Heilbrun has called marriage "death for women as individuals," "the traditional haven for the one sex, conditioned on the mutilation of the other," an institution deserving of "scorn...

...It was a marvelous opportunity...

...Lines of inquiry emerge that are never admitted, much less followed to their logical conclusion...

...About the same time Steinem embarked on her radical mission, the one-time Barbarella turned into a political activist, moved to a tract house with one of the Chicago Seven, and became a feminist heroine, denouncing the rich and the market economy...

...the unified feminist Party of Progress, opposing the Forces of Night...

...How does this play out in the world of Carolyn Heilbrun and Gloria Steinem...

...that western classics expressed hatred for women in general...

...They write liberal and conservative columns...

...There is no Women's Voice, but a whole range of voices...

...Steinem, Heilbrun says, has an "inherent dislike of middle-class culture...

...Already the source of a fictional heroine, Heilbrun has worked a variation on the theme...

...and that "traditional marriage" as an institution fell somewhere between a brothel and a jail...

...Thatcher, "We must not support those who look like us and sound like them...

...The italics are mine...

...They couldn't read the signals...

...She, Heilbrun, and others think themselves able to speak for this interest, despite repeated and extensive evidence that, on many key issues, they and most women are miles apart...

...But Steinem told a group of woman Democrats, re Mrs...

...It never dawned on him that a woman with that kind of face or figure would be bitter or resentful of men...

...A great many want it curtailed...

...Women's complaints should be honored as gospel, unless Paula Jones makes them...

...Gloria Steinem: The Education of a Woman is a great read...

...She was thus perceived as being gentle and moderate, while expressing such views as that religion existed to support a white racist culture...

...To most women, abortion is not a "sacrament," but an agonizing dilemma...

...So too her own cause and her function within it, which seem to be all of a piece...

...Pat Buchanan's campaigns are run by . . . his sister, an assertive, no-holds-barred political operative, whose life does the feminists proud...

...They are left, right, and all shades of the center...

...Night, of course, is the right-wing agenda, "a worldwide backlash . . . defined by established religions, and neoconservative ideals...

...Fine...

...Some months later, McCall's called her "a household word . . . the most viable of all the activists...

...As a political lobby, feminists have a right to organize, rally, campaign, push their causes, and try to recruit other people...

...But this is the problem...

...She has rejected her family's traditional politics, but not its income, on which she leads a privileged existence...

...Steinem, too, recently dated a billionaire businessman, and moved in East Hampton society...

...Most women are religious and want to get married...

...Gloria Steinem, the star of the movement that insists women should not be judged by their looks, seen as sex objects, or judged by male consorts, is famous mainly as a beautiful woman who has slept with many great men...

...In it, a good-looking woman, in posh surroundings, gets up to some interesting things...

...The crimes Kate Fansler investigates take place in the sort of atmosphere in which the chance to write the official biography of a middling novelist is readily accepted as a motive for murder, while murder itself is seen as less dire than sexism, classism, or macho behavior in the canon of sins...

...When feminists say so...

...The liberal Democratic pro-choice class of 1992 was succeeded by the conservative Republican pro-life class of 1994...

...I thought...

...Her ideas, her theories, her professional skills at writing and editing, are not all that different from those of 25 other women, of whom the public knows little...

...Neither Heilbrun nor Steinem seems to find this a problem...

...Steinem and Heilbrun despise religion as serving the white male establishment...

...politics, sex, and the magazine business-a literary version of CBS's prime-time soap opera, Central Park West Buy it today...

...Who then would read Carolyn Heilbrun's Gloria Steinem: The Education of a Woman (Dial Press, 451 pages, $24.95), a new account of her life and adventures...

...Many believed that the contrast between Gloria's glamorous life and her public pronouncements that she-like all other women-was still an oppressed victim of a patriarchal style . . . was also disorienting...

...Nor do they think, as does Heilbrun, that "patriarchy and fascism are intimately related," or that the "heterosexual plot," as she calls it, is behind the class system...

...Fansler, who looks a great deal like Steinem, is wholly a creature of Heilbrun's own fancy, and a key to the contradictory mind of the left...

...Steinem calls women a whole "caste" of people, despised as a group by the total male culture, and possessing one common political interest...

...By the mid-1980s, she was dating a man who was not only massively wealthy, but whose high stakes financial practices offended many...

...There is a movement, but it is only part of the picture...

...As Steinem herself wrote in the People article, "We need the regular sight of our diverse reality to wear away the plastic-stereotyped-perfect image against which we've been encouraged to measure ourselves...

...Probably because she could not avoid it completely, Heilbrun gives a token nod to this dissonance: "Steinem had to know that she is good-looking...

...She posits an ultimate light-and-dark struggle...

...Like the worst of the fogies they once rose to challenge, they are dogmatic, pedantic, self-righteous, and dense...

...Part of the story appears to be missing...

...or is Steinem in hers...

...Who publicizes a political book, dressed mainly in bubbles...

...These blocs, of course, are all hostile to women...

...But women are in the "established religions...

...Steinem would continue to insist that her looks, dress, and manner were "irrelevant," and would become testy when pressured...

...Women who conform to the feminists' standards see challengers as threats to their own claims of gender authority, and try to punish or denigrate them by calling them Quislings, cowards, people too stupid or scared to know better, or-this is a favorite- Threatened by Change...

...Lacking the distance that could give it authority, Heilbrun's biography reads like one of her Fansler novels-an entertainment, laced with political comments, and following a well-tested formula...

...An editor quoted by Cohen recalled a lunch in the late 60s when Steinem spoke seriously, and a little tendentiously, about weighty matters, but came to the table in thigh-high boots and a mass of gold jewelry, through a force-field of masculine eyes...

...It never seems to occur to them that 1) this is a self-selecting process, and that those who do not concur would never approach them...

...It has ever been her looks, her glamour, her clothes, the high-profile affairs with media stars, sports stars, aides to ex-presidents, that crashed their way through the obscurity barrier, drawing the attention of millions of people with little real interest in radical politics, who wanted to read of, and of course look at, her...

...Who, outside the small country of radical politics, would care for her theories, without the twitch, the glitch, the incongruity, that turns work into celebrity, name into money, and fame into gold...

...Meanwhile, the feminist governor lost...

...From the very beginning of her fame, Steinem seemed to follow one path...

...The incongruity was a key element of what made her fascinating...

...More women are in the Christian Coalition than in NOW and the abortion lobbies put together...

...we had the advantage of surprise...

...Yet her actions were increasingly dissonant: In 1983, she posed for People in a bubble bath-and to publicize a new book of essays, one of which roundly attacked the "commercial, idealized, feminine image" pushed, one might imagine, by men...

...Sisterhood is powerful, except when it isn't: a good reason, it seems, to elect Democrat Barbara Boxer but not to elect Republican Olympia Snowe...

...The prime boomer stars are Mary Matalin and Peggy Noo-nan, who worked for Bush and Reagan...

...A cause-a life-style-is a small town, a self-selected small neighborhood, where people, no matter how much they move through the country, always meet people like themselves...

...Heilbrun finds something "grating" in the egregious contrasts...

...Her Gloria Steinem is Kate Fansler's cousin, from the underprivileged side of the family, minus the trust fund, but with even more glamour and rich, famous friends...

...With this in mind, Heilbrun is ideally poised to deal with, rationalize, or explain away the central fascination of Steinem's existence: Steinem is the star of a cause who promotes her agenda by means she affects to despise...

...In the name of liberation, it seeks to impose a rigid thought system on a vast and diverse group of people...

...But is Heilbrun in Steinem's brain...

...to trust the "skeptical self" above myths told by others...

...She claims to speak for a great many women whose values she simultaneously seems to despise...

...What she seems to be saying here is that she does not want to believe that her looks are counted more important than her years of work...

...What gets everyone about Steinem the liberationist is that she doesn't have to," said Newsweek in a 1971 story that featured her face on the cover, flagging the article "A Liberated Woman Despite Beauty, Chic, and Success...

...Somehow, these other voices have never made it into their calculus...

...It makes you want to try for the paperback jacket: From the streets of Bengal to the vistas of the Hamptons, from Madison Avenue to the Upper West Side, the action is brisk, the cast star-studded, the milieus diverting...

...When are women not women, for practical purposes...

...Before Steinem, Heilbrun had created another feminist heroine in a series of detective novels: Kate Fansler, like Heilbrun a professor of English at Columbia University...

...With this went a deferential manner- "incredibly flattering"-that made men feel important...

...There is only one female ideal...