My Life on the Road
By Gloria Steinem
I was in a meeting with a group of women from Greece, Turkey, Brazil and the United States. I began telling a story from this book, and paused when I said the author’s name. “You know who Gloria Steinem is, right?” I asked. “No,” they all said in unison. They had not heard of her. Wow. I was brought to my ethnocentric knees. I realized that the icon of my emerging feminist philosophies was a stranger to these women in other parts of the world. Then my grown-up self said, Christine, there are probably a lot of women in the United States who don’t know who Gloria Steinem is either.
Noooooooooooo!!
In an age of the #metoo movement, movies like Bombshell and the new TV Series Morning Show, the feminism of Gloria Steinem’s hey day may seem antiquated. But her pioneering work around the United States engaged and catalyzed a movement that launched women into freedoms thought unimaginable just a generation ahead of hers.
For me, Steinem’s book stripped her of the celebrity I associated her with, and showed me the stepping stones she took which made her a voice for the women’s movement. She gave us a bit of her personal history, but then showed, in detail, how interactions with ordinary people, whether a conversation with a cab driver, or a discussion with college students sponsoring her at a rally, were really the building blocks of her influence.
She talked about how her experience as a journalist taught her how to get past the surface conversations and probe more deeply into people’s experiences. She talked about how as a campaign volunteer she learned the excitement of collective action and also the disappointment of failure in the face of political power.
The part of her work that hit me most strongly wasn’t how she cofounded MS Magazine, kept it running, or cofounded the National Women’s Political Caucus. It was her work as a grassroots organizer, participating in women’s circles around the country. She spoke of planning “healing meetings” after Hillary lost her first presidential bid to Obama. She wrote “There were heartbroken older women who now knew they would never live to see a woman in the White House. There were younger ones who had grown up being told they could be anything, then been shocked by Hillary’s treatment and defeat. African American women and men who had supported Hillary also worried that some would punish them for working across racial lines.”
Before I read this book I saw Steinem as an icon for feminism in the United States. But reading the book showed me that she is also a staunch supporter of democracy. “Voting,” she says isn’t the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.”
And, then she demonstrates for us how this looks. “Remember: For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost. This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn’t count.
If Harriett Woods hadn’t been defeated by less than 2 percent of the votes in Missouri, Danforth wouldn’t have been a US senator.
If Danforth hadn’t been senator, Clarence Thomas wouldn’t have gone with him to Washington as a staff member.
If Thomas hadn’t been visible in Washington as a rare African American who opposed his community’s majority views he wouldn’t have been appointed by the first President Bush to head - and to disempower - the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and then to sit on the D.C. Court of Appeals.
If Thomas hadn’t been given such credentials he couldn’t have been nominated by the same President Bush to succeed the great civil rights advocate Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.
If Thomas hadn’t been on the Supreme Court, he couldn’t have supplied the one-vote margin that halted the Florida court-ordered recount.
If there had been a recount, Al Gore, not George W. Bush, would have been president - as was concluded by a post-election examination of all uncounted ballots commissioned by twelve major news organizations.
If George W. Bush had not been president, the United States would have been less likely to lose the world’s sympathy after 9/11 by launching the longest war in U.S. history, with more bombs dropped on Afghanistan during fourteen years than in all of World War II, plus billions in tax dollars given to twenty thousand private contractors and thousands killed and wounded on both sides.
If Al Gore, not George W. Bush, had been president, global warming would have been taken seriously. Also, the united States would not have falsified evidence to justify invading oil-rich Iraq, thus starting an eight-year war, and, together with Afghanistan, convincing some in Islamic countries that the United States is waging war against Islam.
Without George W. Bush, there would not be the biggest transfer of wealth into private hands in the history of this nation; a pay ratio in which the average CEO earns 475 times more than the average worker (in Canada, it’s 20 times); an executive order giving an estimated $40 billion in tax dollars to Catholic, evangelical, and other religious groups, without congressional approval, often with the appearance of turning churches into a vote delivery system.
With out Clarence Thomas to supply the one-vote majority, the Supreme Court might not have ruled that corporations are people, with a right to unlimited political spending in order to continue all the above.”
“Well,” she says “you get the idea. The list goes on.”
But now, because of democracy, because women got out the vote, now we have a woman of color as Vice President of the United States. Progress is a strange phenomenon, in its circuitous rather than linear movement. And yet. I believe Gloria Steinem is one of the reasons we have Kamala Harris.