“We’re doing it. Pressing send does not allow us to empathize with other people. If you hold a baby you’re flooded with empathy. If you see somebody in an accident you want to help them. I love books, but empathy doesn’t happen from a book. It doesn’t happen from a screen. It only happens when we’re together.”
Gloria Steinem, an American feminist, journalist, and social political activist, had also been a traveller for more than thirty years, speaking, advising, fund-raising, organizing, educating, campaigning, and, in the process, introducing millions of girls and women to the feminist cause.
Co-founding Ms .
Steinem was a columnist for New York magazine, and in 1972, co-foundedthe feminist-themed magazineMs.with American feminist Dorothy Pitman Hughes.
As reported in msmagazine.com, the magazine was sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation, a nonprofit organization in the US, in 2001 and Steinem remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors and serves on the advisory board. She once stated: “I think the fact that I’ve become a symbol for the women’s movement is somewhat accidental. I suppose I could be referred to as a journalist, but because Ms. is part of a movement and not just a typical magazine, I’m more likely to be identified with the movement. There’s no other slot to put me in.”
Activism
Among numerous endeavors, in 2005, Steinem co-founded the Women’s Media Center, a nonprofit women’s organization in the U.S. which works “to make women visible and powerful in the media.”
Steinem helped to found the Women’s Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children’s education in the United States, and the National Women’s Political Caucus, a group that continues to work to advance the numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office at a national and state level in the US.
In 1992, Steinem co-founded Choice USA, a non-profit organization that mobilizes and provides ongoing support to a younger generation that lobbies for reproductive choice.
As reported in web.archive.org, in 1993, Steinem’s concern with child abuse led her to co-produce and narrate an Emmy Award winning TV documentary for HBO, “Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories.” With American film producer Rosilyn Heller, she also co-produced an original 1993 TV movie for Lifetime, “Better Off Dead,” which examined the parallel forces that both oppose abortion and support the death penalty.
In 2015, she joined the thirty leading international women peacemakers and became an honorary co-chairwoman of 2015 Women’s Walk For Peace In Korea with Irish peace activist Mairead Maguire.
Publications, awards and honors
Her books include the bestsellers ‘My Life on the Road,’ ‘Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem,’‘Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,’‘Moving Beyond Words,’ and ‘Marilyn: Norma Jean’, on the life of Marilyn Monroe.
She wrote for Indian publications, and was influenced by Gandhian activism.
She also received the first Doctorate of Human Justice awarded by Simmons College, the Bill of Rights Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Gay Rights Advocates Award, the Liberty award of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Ceres Medal from the United Nations, and a number of honorary degrees.
Early life
Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, United States as the daughter of Ruth (née Nuneviller) and Leo Steinem. Before Steinem was born, her mother Ruth, then aged 34, had a “nervous breakdown” which left her an invalid, trapped in delusional fantasies that occasionally turned violent.Ruth spent long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally ill. Steinem was ten years old when her parents finally separated in 1944.Her father went to California to find work, while she and her mother continued to live together in Toledo.
Steinem once described her mother’s experiences – her inability to hold a job and encounters with apathetic doctors – as having been pivotal to her understanding of social injustices. These perspectives convinced Steinem that women lacked social and political equality.
Steinem attended Waite High School in Toledo and Western High School in Washington, D.C.She then graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956 (The Phi Beta Kappa Society is the oldest honour society for the liberal arts and sciences in the United States).
Feminist positions
Steinem has repeatedly characterized herself as a radical feminist and has rejected categorization within feminism as “nonconstructive to specific problems.”“I’ve turned up in every category. So it makes it harder for me to take the divisions with great seriousness,” she once said in an interview with motherjones.com. Nevertheless, on concrete issues, Steinem has staked several firm positions.
“Nobody cares about feminist academic writing.
That’s careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted but I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness—and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability,” she told motherjones, voicing her disapproval of obscurantism some claim to be prevalent in feminism.
Steinem has criticized pornography. Writing for Ms.,she explained,“Blatant or subtle, pornography involves no equal power or mutuality. In fact, much of the tension and drama comes from the clear idea that one person is dominating the other.”
Steinem expressed support for same-sex marriage in the early 2000s, stating in 2004 in an interview with Time magazine that “The idea that sexuality is only okay if it ends in reproduction, oppresses women—whose health depends on separating sexuality from reproduction—as well as gay men and lesbians.” Steinem is also a signatory of the 2008 manifesto, “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families and Relationships”, which advocates extending legal rights and privileges to a wide range of relationships, households, and families.
“Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it,” Steinem once said, converging a vast ideology into a single sentence. At 83, she is still an active fighter for equality.
Her task is an ongoing process that would not rest until accomplished. And the race is not about “passing the torch,” for, the torch that lights the path to quality belongs to everyone.
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