Gloria Steinem died this week. And I, a feminist living in Iowa, a state where my rights are swiftly eroding, feel like I lost something so vital. We all did.
I grew up in a home where feminism was an ugly word. My parents homeschooled eight children in Texas
in the Eighties and Nineties, reading us the Bible every morning at breakfast and at night before bed. All five of us girls were taught to cook, clean, care for babies, and sew, trying to keep us safe from what they saw as the evils of a liberal world. Feminists, my mom told us, looked down on women like her — stay-at-home moms who dedicated their lives to their children.
I didn’t know who Gloria Steinem was until I got to college. And college was something I had to claw and scratch my way into. Enduring weeks of fights about how I was abandoning family and faith. My parents told me I could attend college only if I participated in a camp called Worldview Academy, which is designed to teach a “biblical worldview.” I went to the camp, where I was taught that the Brontes hated men and all my professors would be atheist. Two things that proved to be completely untrue, much to my disappointment.
In college, I spent hours in the library reading books like Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, Cathi Hanauer’s Bitch in the House, and copies of Ms. Magazine. In those magazines, I read Steinem’s essay “In Praise of Women’s Bodies,” a treatise that combines the personal and political and serves as a reminder that our bodies are not ever the problem, it’s the culture that makes them the problem. And her classic, “If Men Could Menstruate” which, with humor, flips the world upside down, and shows just how absolutely absurd the lived reality of every woman’s life was and still is. It’s funny. It’s intimate. It’s enough to radicalize even the most jean jumpered homeschooler. But even more, in “Patricia Nixon Flying” I saw a portrayal of a woman who was spoken of and admired in the home I grew up in. And she was not being mocked and dismissed, as I had been assured feminists would, but she was being probed and understood, held up to a gentle light and seen, with an empathy, that Nixon herself hadn’t given to all Americans.
In those essays, I found a forbidden knowledge. And there, like Eve in that cursed garden, I found what I needed: A language for an anger that would consume me when I learned about my sister’s sexual assault and a knowledge that would help me survive my own at 21. I found a framework for survival through the articulation of what had been done to me and what would be done to me. And with it, I would write my own narrative.
With my illicit information the world began to break open, and me along with it. I know why that knowledge was kept from me, because when I got it, I got mad. Very mad. Mad at the opportunities that had been withheld. The dreams I’d been told not to dream. And with that anger, I turned into a feminist. I am now a 43-year-old single woman who owns her own home. I have benefitted from no-fault divorce and the right to take out a mortgage without a male co-signer and have my own line of credit. I have an IUD. I stock Plan B in my home and hand it out at festivals and have some on-hand for my daughter and her friends should it become necessary. And for three years, after the fall of Roe, I ran my local abortion fund in Iowa, helping to pay for abortions in a state where access is severely restricted. Did I mention, I make my own money?
Each one of those things is something that Steinem and so many others fought for and each one is a right that this administration is fiercely trying to roll back. Often at the forefront of these fights are women themselves, who have benefitted from feminism themselves and are now not only pulling up the ladder behind them, but breaking it into pieces, fashioning it into shanks and trying to stab anyone who comes behind them.
For Steinem to die at this moment, when women’s rights are being rolled back and people in power are talking about revoking the 19th Amendment feels particularly dire.
Everything that saved my life, access to abortion care, birth control, and a job that supports myself and my children are under threat. These things saved Steinem’s life too and so many others. The voices of the women we have today are because Steinem and Second Wave feminists fought for those rights.
Everything I know about feminism, I’ve fought to learn myself. Reading books by Betty Friedan, Susan Flaudi, Ellen Willis, bell hooks, and so many more. A few years ago, I even signed up for an online graduate course on feminist writing and literature, just so I could know what I didn’t know. And the more I learn, the angrier I become. Because I see how every news cycle we are in now, every fight for liberation, every argument for autonomy, isn’t new — it’s a recycled chew toy that keeps us always chasing our tail, never getting anywhere.
Even now, the women’s movement is hardly taught in schools. In Iowa schools, my children have learned the basics of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, Civil Rights, and the Bay of Pigs in school, but have yet to learn about Second Wave feminism. When feminism is taught, the curriculum often focuses on the in-fighting and the factionism, as if it was more contentious than any other movement. Even Gloria Steinem’sobituary in the New York Times had more on the controversies of her life than Dick Cheney’s did, and she was never accused of war crimes.
Steinem, many of the tributes to her caveat, was not perfect. A true statement, but one that pisses me off, because no one is perfect. So why is it a caveat that we hold for feminist leaders?
Feminism isn’t more contentious or flawed than any other movement or political party. It’s just that women are more scrutinized, criticized, mocked and derided as a way to cut down the power of their voices and the movement. As feminist writer Moira Donegan observed on X, “feminism, as a movement for women’s liberation, is subjected to the same kind of moral standards that women themselves are — which is to say, often unreasonable and unattainable ones.”
Women, especially feminists, are mocked and derided for the same reason that the knowledge about feminism is withheld. Because it keeps our freedom out of our reach.
It’s been decades since Second Wave feminists began consciousness-raising groups that sought to help women discuss their lives together, so they could see that they were not alone. That what they faced wasn’t their fault, but a product of a system that was designed to oppress them. So much has changed, and yet, so much is the same.
Steinem often said she should not have been the face of the movement. The movement needed many faces and the work of her life proved that. She worked to lift up the voices of each successive generation, mentoring younger women, encouraging them in their work. She knew it would take so many voices to scream in succession and to keep screaming in varied ways to shore up these rights, so hard won, and still yet endangered
With Steinem dying as women are being forced out of the workforce, states roll back the right to an abortion, and the Heritage Foundation proposes ways to force women to have children, it does feel as though an old world is passing. As the false, but much-attributed Antonio Gramsci quote laments, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”
Usually, with this quote, people point out that the monsters are coming and that is something to fear. But feminists are often depicted as monsters. Steinem was always the exception, because she was thin and pretty — a fact even her Times obit pointed out. But if in this era of backlash we are to be depicted as monsters once again, perhaps in this new world it is time to become monstrous in pursuit of our rights and freedom.
After all, I’ve been where they’re telling us to go. I was born in that place they call an Eden and I am telling you, out here, it is way better. We cannot go back.
And we need all of our voices, discordant and imperfect and monstrous as they are, to make sure it cannot happen.
Click here to read the full article.
