She wrote, with the light-touch irony that is her favourite defence, that at the same time as she was informed by a hand cream manufacturer that a survey had put her in the top 10 of American’s most confident women, she was falling apart. It was the story of her attempt to understand her “fate” of a perpetual life on the move, co-founding Ms magazine and a clutch of organisations including the Ms Foundation for Women, the Women’s Media Center, Direct Impact Africa and Equality Now.
Therapy also resulted in 1992’s Revolution from Within. ‘Each of us has an inner child of the past living with us’: Steinem in July 1977. Then the woman whom an enthusiastic Ladies Home Journal once described as “an unqualified beauty with the follow-me-on-to-the barricades charisma that makes a myth” ran out of steam. Bette Midler provided the cabaret.Ī very large part of what has moulded Steinem is her childhood, whose impact she refused to acknowledge, she has said many times, until she hit a metaphorical brick wall in her 50s. Steinem quotes Mary Lamberton Becker: “We grow neither better nor worse as we get older, but more like ourselves.” Is she more like herself? Has the enigma dissolved and the early contradictions resolved themselves? Scathing of the upper classes and celebrity, for instance, she attended a glitzy gala for her 50th birthday, tickets for which cost $250 each, to raise funds for her various causes. She no longer has the large aviator glasses, middle parting and streaked blond mane that as “a girl reporter” in the misogynistic 70s attracted the title “pin-up girl of the intelligentsia”, but there is something even more striking in its place a sense in this book that the jigsaw pieces are no longer uncomfortably out of place. In the process, perhaps for the first time, Steinem most certainly does delve.Īged 81, she is currently setting up a college for community organisers and collating the grassroots history of the American women’s movement.
In her latest book, My Life on the Road, Steinem, a social activist, writer, lecturer, itinerant feminist organiser and transformational leader, offers snapshots of dozens of women she has met crisscrossing America, including portraits of her powerful partners on speaking tours such as African American Florynce Kennedy and Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected chief of the Cherokee nation. Steinem, Heilbrun decided, “to work effectively for the righting of many social wrongs, required a personality ill at ease with introspection … a subject who had little interest in delving”.
Heilbrun was mystified by Steinem’s “endless lending of herself to causes great and small”, always on the road, always living out of suitcases and unpacked boxes in the Manhattan brownstone she had bought in 1968. The Education of a Woman was published in 1995 when Steinem was 61. T he late feminist academic Carolyn Heilbrun spent five years writing a biography of Gloria Steinem.
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