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Culture | Feminism The road to liberation Gloria Steinem’s bold feminism inspired a generation of women. What can it tell us about today’s struggles for equality? By Sally Feldman Feminist anger blazes through the pages of Gloria Steinem’s autobiography, My Life on the Road. Here she is, for example, explaining how she came to decide between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate. I was angry because it was okay for two generations of Bush sons to inherit power from a political patriarchy even if they spent no time in the White House, but not okay for one Clinton wife to claim experience and inherit power from a husband whose full political partner she had been for twenty years . . . I was angry about all the women candidates who put their political skills on hold to raise children – and all the male candidates who didn’t. I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one. That unassuagable fury has fuelled her approach to life and politics throughout a career devoted to rousing the same rage in countless women and inspiring them to action. And it worked. For those of us responding to the rallying call of women’s liberation in the 1970s, Steinem was a role model, a cheerleader, a voice of passion and reason, the epitome of how women could behave and feel. But while the last four decades have witnessed what the Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray calls a “genderquake” in the lives of women, how far has that elusive ambition of equal opportunities and equal treatment been achieved? How much remains to be done? Steinem has always managed to couple her anger with an unflinching optimism, kept aflame, she maintains, by the endless campaigning: her visits to university campuses, political meetings, gatherings of women across the United States and beyond. She’s been inspired by meeting women from every background and culture – groups of native Americans, Afro-Americans, writers and poets, activists and organisers, and any number of fellow travellers who have all along shared her vision. In My Life on the Road she extols the virtues of travelling 42 New Humanist | Spring 2016

Culture | Feminism Gloria Steinem, photographed by Annie Leibovitz as the most basic form of liberation. “The road is messy in the way that real life is messy,” she writes. “It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories – in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.” So it’s not surprising that, like so many of us who came of age during that second wave of women’s liberation, Steinem is infuriated by lazy media assumptions that feminism is a middle-class movement of privileged women. This is why the film Suffragette – written, directed, produced by women with a heavily female crew – goes to great lengths to highlight the participation and sacrifices of working-class women. Maud Watts, the central character played by Carey Mulligan, works in a laundry where she and her fellow-workers endure grinding conditions and daily harassment. The film graphically illustrates what she, like so many, had to face when she joined The Cause: loss of job, of husband, of child; the disgusted sneering of those around her; imprisonment, starvation, the indignity and pain of force-feeding. Yet that same accusation, of feminism as a movement of the privileged, has arisen once again with the arrival of the latest attempt to put women’s issues at the forefront of the political agenda. The Women’s Equality Party, founded last year by broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and journalist Catherine Mayer, is planning to field candidates in the next election with an uncompromising manifesto: Equal representation; Equal pay and opportunity; Equal parenting and caregiving; Equal media treatment; End violence against women. No sooner had its intentions been announced than the ridicule began. “I’d go as far as to suggest that ‘feminist political party’ is actually a misnomer,” wrote the journalist Abi Wilkinson in the International Business Times. “The Women’s Equality Party is more accurately described as a middle-class ladies’ campaign group.” Such a dismissal may be unfair. But Wilkinson also suggests, with rather more reason, that what is missing New Humanist | Spring 2016 43

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Culture | Feminism

The road to liberation Gloria Steinem’s bold feminism inspired a generation of women. What can it tell us about today’s struggles for equality?

By Sally Feldman

Feminist anger blazes through the pages of Gloria Steinem’s autobiography, My Life on the Road. Here she is, for example, explaining how she came to decide between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate.

I was angry because it was okay for two generations of Bush sons to inherit power from a political patriarchy even if they spent no time in the White House, but not okay for one Clinton wife to claim experience and inherit power from a husband whose full political partner she had been for twenty years . . . I was angry about all the women candidates who put their political skills on hold to raise children – and all the male candidates who didn’t. I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one. That unassuagable fury has fuelled her approach to life and politics throughout a career devoted to rousing the same rage in countless women and inspiring them to action. And it worked. For those of us responding to the rallying call of women’s liberation in the 1970s, Steinem was a role model, a cheerleader, a voice of passion and reason, the epitome of how women could behave and feel.

But while the last four decades have witnessed what the Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray calls a “genderquake” in the lives of women, how far has that elusive ambition of equal opportunities and equal treatment been achieved? How much remains to be done?

Steinem has always managed to couple her anger with an unflinching optimism, kept aflame, she maintains, by the endless campaigning: her visits to university campuses, political meetings, gatherings of women across the United States and beyond. She’s been inspired by meeting women from every background and culture – groups of native Americans, Afro-Americans, writers and poets, activists and organisers, and any number of fellow travellers who have all along shared her vision.

In My Life on the Road she extols the virtues of travelling

42

New Humanist | Spring 2016

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