Gloria Steinem's Life on the Feminist Frontier

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32927-gloria-steinems-life-on-the-feminist-frontier

One day in the fall of 1997, Gloria Steinem was unpacking a carry-on bag that in the course of a few weeks had seen the inside of more airplane overhead bins than most travellers’ do in a year, and, as she tells the story, that was when she knew it was time to write a book about her life on the road, rallying women to the fight for equal rights. Steinem was sixty-three then. She had been travelling for more than thirty years, speaking, advising, fund-raising, organizing, testifying, demonstrating, educating, campaigning, and, in the process, introducing millions of girls and women to the feminist cause—and during that time she had also founded and presided over the magazine Ms., written books, published and edited collections, and, through the Ms. Foundation, which she and three friends of the magazine established, nurtured the talent of generations of younger feminists. But she had never stopped travelling, and she wasn’t about to now, with a road book planned. “I’ve spent more time on the road than not,” she told me this past summer. “It’s been the most important part of my life—and a big antidote to the idea that there is ‘one’ American people.”

Steinem finished the book in February this year, or, as she puts it, “seventeen deadlines late,” and in March she celebrated her eighty-first birthday, with a small dinner cooked by a group of friends. “A relief!” she told me. “My eightieth birthday had gone on for a year. People were starting to think that the movement began with me and, worse, was going to end with me.” It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Steinem’s decennials, marked by her enduringly beautiful face, have been a source of fascination (and huge spikes in feminist fund-raising) since she turned forty and a clueless reporter remarked, by way of a compliment, “Oh, you don’t look forty”—to which she replied, “This is what forty looks like. We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?” Every ten years since then, that face, with its iconic curtain of long, straight hair falling from a center part, begins to appear on magazine covers, television screens, dorm posters, and even T-shirts: this is what fifty looks like, what sixty looks like, this is seventy. Her eightieth-birthday marathon kicked off with a benefit in Philadelphia, and, while she spent her actual birthday on an elephant in Botswana, she spent the rest of the year “using myself” to promote the cause and the work of other feminists—and to finally finish her book. “I was out of excuses,” she told me. “Embarrassing!”

Toward the end of May, Steinem, her galleys corrected and delivered, boarded a plane to Beijing, where thirty-one peace activists—among them two Nobel laureates—from thirteen countries were gathering to fly to North Korea on a peace mission. Their intention, as Steinem explained it, was to cross the DMZ into South Korea, “standing in” for the Korean women on both sides of a longitudinal line they had been forbidden to cross since the war there ended, in 1953. “We were hoping to walk the entire DMZ, because we were all in white, wearing peace scarves,” she said. “But they put us on a bus instead. While we were still in Beijing, a friend called and asked what I was doing. I said, ‘I’m being a parody of myself.’ True. But I learned an enormous amount—most of all, that those years of isolation and hostility didn’t work. North Korea is the most controlling place I’ve ever been. The day we crossed the DMZ was the longest day of my life. In every way.”