In Memoriam
An icon and a complicated figure.
I suspect that, in politics, if you don’t leave a complicated legacy, you don’t leave a legacy. Even Jimmy Carter had issues, and Jimmy Carter spent the last decades of his life practically a living saint. Gloria Steinem was no Jimmy Carter. You can’t talk about Gloria Steinem without discussing racial issues, class issues, and trans issues. A lot of her statements about gay people from the ‘70s are deeply Freudian, and I wonder if she ever changed those stances but I kind of don’t wonder enough to go look it up. Even though that’s kind of my job.
Steinem was the granddaughter of Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, a feminist activist when the word “feminist” was still new. Her mother, Ruth Nuneviller Steinem, was severely mentally ill. She had what was described as a nervous breakdown before Steinem was born. Her parents ended up divorcing over it. Her mother could not hold a job—frankly, she sounds like a prime candidate for being on disability, regardless of gender—and her father didn’t make enough to provide for them, especially after the divorce. Steinem felt this was a demonstration of the importance of women’s being able to hold jobs, and how much the doctors ignored her mother didn’t help.
You can’t talk about feminism without talking about Gloria Steinem. It existed before her—see also her grandmother—but she was one of the voices that brought it screaming back in the ‘60s. The ‘50s had been spent pushing women into a box because the men returning from war needed their jobs back. Steinem was one of the women pushing for women to escape the box. After her famous investigative reporting at the Playboy Club, she found it hard to get work, because she was known for that one story.
Steinem’s brand of feminism was, alas, a very middle class cis het white version. It also tended to assume that everyone was, more or less, the same way she was. She decried pornography so strongly that she compared Larry Flynt to Hitler. Friends we will not be defending Flynt here, but that’s extreme. She said even that male-on-male pornography was based on misogyny, and that’s a lot. She conflated gender-affirming surgery with female genital mutilation, a position she didn’t publicly walk back on until 2013—at which point she said her statements had been misunderstood.
We could go on. Quite a bit. There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad to Steinem. Her defense of women’s reproductive rights is important and valuable; her failure at intersectionality is important to note. One of the things we here at Magpies naturally will note is her push to make DC give Wonder Woman her powers back instead of just making her a collection of stereotypes, but that doesn’t excuse her claiming that young women only supported Bernie Sanders to make boys like them. But of course, we must mention the weirdest thing about her, which is that she was married for three years to David Bale, until his death—which means she is survived by her stepson, Christian Bale.
About the writer
Gillian Nelson
Gillian Nelson is a forty-something bipolar woman living in the Pacific Northwest after growing up in Los Angeles County. She and her boyfriend have one son and one daughter, and she gave a child up for adoption. She fills her days by chasing around her kids, watching a lot of movies, and reading. She particularly enjoys pre-Code films, blaxploitation, and live-action Disney movies of the '60s and '70s. She has a Patreon account.
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Intrusive Thoughts
You don't need a ton of money to make good special effects. Thought it's nice if you have it.
Attention Must Be Paid
Why, yes, there was nepotism in Hollywood eighty or ninety years ago.
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Her role in restoring Wonder Woman to her old self is also complicated:
https://www.cbr.com/gloria-steinem-wonder-woman-return-kanigher/
Yeah, fair enough. I love the bewilderment about why they didn’t hire a woman to write the comic.
They still barely ever do. Though I have a friend who has written comics and says DC offered her the gig and we kind of agreed that it would a trap. The expectations would be unfairly high on any woman who takes the job and she would be forced out quickly. (Thankfully, the current “Absolute” Wonder Woman is a runaway hit and the writer there is in no danger of being fired.)
This is a great article, but I have an issue with one sentence: “Steinem’s brand of feminism was, alas, a very middle class cis het white version.” Except her best friend was Dorothy Pitman Hughes, an African-American woman. This wasn’t a performative friendship. It was a deep and abiding friendship that lasted from 1971 until Ms. Pittman’s death in 2022. I find it impossible to believe that such a friendship could endure if Ms. Steinem’s views were as that sentence characterizes her. Also, from Ms. magazine’s obituary, “She insisted that feminism’s history include the Black women, labor organizers, Indigenous women, lesbians, civil rights leaders and community activists whose work had too often been erased. She frequently credited women such as Florynce Kennedy, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Fannie Lou Hamer, Pauli Murray and Shirley Chisholm with teaching and inspiring her.” In 1977, what she said is problematic, but in 2013, she said, in an article in the Advocate, “I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives,” she said. “Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned. Their health care decisions should be theirs and theirs alone to make. And what I wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.” Either we have documentation of an evolved sensibility, or she was correct that the character of her original essay was misinterpreted. Probably both. In 2019, she signed an open letter (along with many others), published by GLAAD, which said, in part, “We all must fight against the unnecessary and unethical barriers placed on trans women and girls by lawmakers and those who co-opt the feminist label in the name of division and hatred. Our feminism must be unapologetically expansive so that we can leave the door open for future generations.” Her statements in 1977 is therefore belied by her statements in the 21st century. Furthermore, I think the statement “It also tended to assume that everyone was, more or less, the same way she was” is an issue, because it conflates the idea that all women should be treated identically with the idea that all women are the same. Yes, perhaps her statements from 40 years ago were probably coloured by a cisnormativity. But the other adjectives, I feel, are not consistent with from her consistent track record from 1971 to her death.