Gloria Steinem (Toledo, Ohio, United States, 87 years old) opens the door of her Manhattan apartment with a huge porcelain smile and a disarming vitality. She continues to wear, now gray and somewhat shorter, that unmistakable mane with a parted in the middle that, together with her aviator-style sunglasses, made her so identifiable, so iconic, in the images of rallies and demonstrations. Living legend of the feminist revolution of the 70s, Steinem likes to talk, above all, of the present. Next week she will receive the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in Spain, a country that, despite being an inveterate traveler, she is visiting for the first time. Since her work as a journalist, writer and activist, she has been fighting for women’s rights for more than half a century.
Slim, dressed in black, neat, beautiful and flirtatious, she lights up with the here and now, but laughs cheerfully remembering anecdotes. It is easy to imagine the young reporter infiltrating as a playboy bunny to denounce the conditions of those girls; the tireless fundraiser who showed up at Donald Trump’s office in the 1980s and ripped him a check for $ 500; to the woman who, sharing a taxi with the authors Saul Bellow and Gay Talese, heard the latter refer to her like this: “Do you know that every year a pretty girl comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl. “
Question. Today’s gay tales are more unlikely to say such things to a woman’s face, but do you think they still think so?
Answer. As for what literary critics take seriously, that gender difference probably still occurs. A horrible writer, in my opinion, like Philip Roth is taken more seriously and more remembered than, say, Mary McCarthy, who is from the same era. I think we have made progress on matters of race. If James Baldwin were alive today he would probably have more recognition [que entonces]. We are better than before, anyway. The Internet has been a democratizing force, in a sense, because everyone can be their own publisher and reach an audience that in the past would have been more restricted by male publishers. Still, if you look at the institutions, for example The New York Times or newspapers in other countries, the people who make the professional judgments are disproportionately white men.
P. In 1970 the magazine Time published his famous essay: What would it be like if women won. [Hablaba de que la biología no es destino, que a los hombres también se les liberaría de las responsabilidades que se les atribuye por serlo, que las mujeres ocuparían la mitad de cargos electos…] Do you think women have won?
R. I think we have won a lot. In those days, for example, if a woman was raped, the question asked by judges and even journalists was often what she did in that neighborhood, why did she wear those clothes … That is no longer the case. There is a greater assumption that our bodies, whether we are male or female, belong to us.
P. What did it do to you, a feminist, what made you look at how things were and say: I don’t buy it?
R. I think I experienced very special circumstances, which may or may not be considered lucky, and one is that I did not go to school regularly until I was 12 years old because my parents traveled continuously. So I missed a lot of the normalization [de las ideas de género] that was in the classroom. That was fortunate, because children have a genuine conception of justice. Look around the world, in any language, it’s a children’s phrase: It’s not fair!
P. In your memories (My life on the road) highlights how fundamental the figure of her father was in that lack of gender awareness.
R. Yes, because I was his comrade. We had a regular joke when we were riding the elevator. I was very little, maybe five years old, and when everyone was silent I had to ask him: “Dad, what did you tell them?” And he answered me, so that they would listen to him: “I told them: keep your 50,000 dollars!” And the people left in shock. Life was full of games like that. When I was in high school and college I always felt that there was another way to live your life, different from the conventional one, that there was no need to conform to the norm.
Gloria Steinem radiates a somewhat melancholic tenderness when she talks about her father, about whom she tells a few more stories. The house, simple but located in the select Upper East Side of New York, it is colorful and houses dozens of photos from various eras in his life that look like multiple lives. Collaborations with the CIA, when he was very young, have been attributed to him for his participation in youth festivals during the Cold War. From the magazine More, which he founded in 1972, launched a good part of his battles. She rebelled against the marriage, but in 2000 she married environmental activist David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale, who died in 2003. That wedding was shocking, but she explained that marriage has changed for women.
P. There is now a wave of right-wing populism, both in the United States and in Europe, that has taken feminism as a target, as an enemy to beat. Do you fear a general setback, do you think it is a risk for feminism as a movement?
R. Yes. I don’t know the situation in Europe like you do, but there has been a reaction. When we talk about populism, it has a dictatorial basis. Feminists interfere at the base of their hierarchy, which is the home. From the moment we suggest that boys should work at home the same as girls or that women should be able to work if they want, we are proposing measures to democratize the family nucleus and that becomes a threat [para ese populismo].
P. New restrictions on abortion in Texas show that acquired rights are reversible.
R. They will never be able to reverse everything. Even when abortion was illegal, women in America aborted. The crucial difference is that, being illegal, they had to pay more, it was more unsafe, but the drive for women to make decisions about their bodies has always been there. The most basic difference from patriarchy is control over women’s bodies, especially conception. When Hitler was elected, and many people forget he was elected, the first thing he did was close family planning clinics and declared abortion a crime against the state. Mussolini did the same. Authoritarianism often begins with [el control sobre] Women’s body.
P. Why, after so many feminist waves, are gender stereotypes still so dominant?
R. Both gender and race are complete cultural constructions and patriarchy has been a very strong and very normalizing system. [de esa construcción]. Still, I think women feel freer than before. Age also has to do with it. In some women, the central years of their life are strongly marked by gender, but childhood and old age, on the other hand, are not. First, because gender is in the culture and a girl of eight or nine years old has not received that culture, since she is not of reproductive age. It’s that age when they climb trees and say they know what they want. In adolescence that changes. And then the older women become incredibly free, go back to that little girl who does what she wants.
P. Do you think that if those gender roles really disappeared there would be fewer gender identity problems?
R. Probably because if you are free to be the way you want to be, as a unique individual, you don’t have to change to fit. [con la convención].
P. What is your position on the open conflict between the struggle for rights trans, and gender self-determination, and a part of feminism? Some feminists warn of the erasure of women, for example.
R. No, I believe that everyone has the right to identify with themselves how they authentically feel.
P. If sexism is still powerful, don’t you think it is because it also has many women convinced, that is, that they consider themselves less highly?
R. If we look at a group of people having dinner in a restaurant, I bet it still happens that men talk more about themselves and their work and women ask them more questions, but … who knows? It depends on the group. I think all of that has improved, the social justice movement has exposed it, and those things are less likely to happen. I see the change, perhaps because I am old and I know how it was before. How do you see him as a journalist?
P. Well, misogyny is deliberate, it despises women on purpose. Machismo can be unconscious, a bias that is not perceived as such. Isn’t that just why it’s harder to fight?
R. That’s what social justice movements are for. 30 or 50 years ago we might not have noticed that an entire group is white and today we say: what about this group? It does not resemble what our country is like. There is an awareness.
The figure of Steinem has become topical in recent years. In the heat of the feminist wave, veteran icons have received a new impetus and recognition, in the style of the fever that at the end of her life aroused Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The activist has inspired a recent play, Gloria: A Life , a movie, The Glorias, and a television series, Mrs America, who does not want to see and repudiates because, he says, part of an erroneous premise: “He says that the amendment of women’s equality was stopped by Phyllis Schlafly and it is not true, it was the insurance companies because they were going to lose a lot of money.” He wants to live, he says, at least 100 years, and not miss one of the next battles.
Q. What is the balance of the Me Too movement, of the feminist wave that started in 2017, four years later?
A. When it happened, I thought: finally! I felt very happy. Harassment is something that we had already denounced in the magazine Ms in the 70’s. I was especially grateful that the group that took the lead with this cause was people in the media, first in California; and that at the same time the women farmers wrote a letter saying that they felt the same way. That touched me a lot. I think that today there is a general consensus that women’s bodies belong to them, I think that today women feel more empowered to call harassment by name, complain about it, stop it.
Q. That new awareness about feminism, and the one that has come later about racism, has also aroused some complaints from intellectuals who see excesses. You, for example, are one of the 150 people who in July 2020, in the midst of a popular outburst against racism, signed the letter at Harper’s warning about “intolerance” on the part of American progressive activism towards dissenting ideas. Do you think cancellation culture is a real problem?
R. I think it has lessened, that letter is from a while ago. I don’t see relevant examples, although it’s hard to judge because things come to me randomly and I don’t know how representative it is, but I don’t see great examples. Even the concept of cancellation culture has waned.
Q. Have you changed your mind, then?
R. No, I think the situation has changed. I think that letter had an impact.
Q. What advice would you give young feminist activists?
A. I would not give them advice, I would ask them what they want to do and ask them to let me help.