Gloria Steinem: The feminist organiser and her everyday rebellions

On her website, Gloria Steinem describes herself as a “feminist organizer”, a doer, as most women are. Until the end, she hosted Talking Circles, at her New York home, where people gathered do the rough-and-tumble work of activism, but also the gentler work of community building. This “movement building” is what Steinem will always be remembered for.

The practice of gathering in a group, where everyone is heard, was inspired from India, where Steinem spent two years, after she graduated at 22, from Smith College, Massachusetts in the U.S. in 1956. She came to India every few years, and was closely associated with Ruchira Gupta, who founded Apne Aap Women Worldwide, a non-profit working to end sex trafficking. Steinem chaired Apne Aap’s advisory board, and for Ms. Gupta, she was “a third parent”.

Gloria Steinem, a potent voice of U.S. feminism and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, has died

Ms. Gupta says their relationship went back to the 1990s. “She had heard about my work through mutual friends and wanted to see it. I took her in an autorickshaw into the slums of Delhi, where I was organising some women. It began to rain, and I hoped the women would show up,” she says. There, in front of a tumbledown building Steinem spoke to the women about the abortion she had had in her youth. “She spoke in English; I translated, but the women connected with her story. They began to speak about their experiences with abortion.” Later, Steinem told Ms. Gupta something she will always remember: “Honour your sister with the truth.”

With Steinem, she co-edited As if Women Matter: The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader, essays by Steinem, on feminist thought.

Besides this, Steinem wrote nine books, including The Truth Will Set You Free, But First it Will Piss You Off!, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, and her memoir that is slated for release internationally in September this year, called An Unexpected Life. She was also the founder-editor of Ms. magazine, about which the documentary Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print, was made [on JioHotstar, in India].

Gloria Steinem appears in New York on February 17, 1970.
| Photo Credit:
AP

Independent journalist and author, Ammu Joseph, who lives and works out of Bengaluru, remembers spending about a week as a journalism student in the Ms. office in 1976, four years after Ms. began, selling 3 lakh copies of its first issue. “By then Steinem was already a well-known, but until the end, she didn’t let celebrity touch her,” Ms. Joseph says, describing her as easy to be with. “She debunked the whole notion of feminists being humourless and dowdy, and maybe because of her, women are proud to call themselves feminists.” It gave Ms. Joseph the confidence and the idea that things could be different; that a column in Eve’s Weekly’s humour section, which had sexist undertones, could be removed.

In 2007, when Steinem was invited to the annual meet of the Network of Women in Media, India, Ms. Joseph, a founder-member of the community of women journalists, says Steinem didn’t just deliver the keynote address and walk away. “The next day, she came to a session with community media women. She interacted with them, and was engaged and interested,” Ms. Joseph adds.

Ms. magazine’s first issue had an illustration of a blue Kali, with eight arms, each holding an iron, hand mirror, phone, steering wheel, typewriter, frying pan, duster, and clock. It talked about issues of domestic violence, sexual harassment, and the repealing of laws that criminalised abortion. In fact, Steinem, who was a product of the second-wave feminist movement, which articulated that the personal is political, believed women had the right to make decisions on their bodies. She reframed abortion as “reproductive freedom”.

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“She had the audacity to look at women’s issues and at how the world is shaped by men, for men, and how women are subsidiary players in the field,” says Sujata Sriram, a professor at the School of Human Ecology, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. Ms. Sriram notes that Steinem’s influence in the Indian feminist movement is not widespread, but that a great deal of international research sprung from her ideas. “Simple things in design even, like looking at whether the steps in a bus are made for the average heights of women.”

Ms. Gupta, who is an activist, author, and a professor at New York University, remembers a time just before Steinem passed. “We were lying in bed, and she spoke about a woman in the Himalayas who had lived until 105. She joked that she would too, especially to see [U.S. President Donald] Trump out of office.” This time, Ms. Gupta jokes: “I’d like to take that up with her now.” Because humour is one of the pillars of feminism.