Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem

This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. Gloria Steinem, the writer, activist, and feminist icon, died Wednesday in her New York City home. She was 92 years old. Steinem was the voice, and often the most identifiable face, of women's liberation for more than half a century. She wrote a magazine article in 1963 called A Bunny's Tale, for which she went undercover as a cotton-tailed cocktail waitress at the Playboy Club in New York. Her article about the chauvinism and work conditions there caused a stir and set Gloria Steinem on a path towards both activism and publishing. She was an early contributor to New York Magazine, where she wrote the political column The City Politic. Within a decade, in 1971, she and fellow feminists gathered to launch another publication, Ms. Magazine, the first glossy national magazine to be created, owned, and operated by women, and to be published in the New York Times. Ms. Magazine was the first to be published in the New York Times. Ms. and you when you were pretty young so was there any feminist legacy passed on from her for the no there really wasn't and i feel bad about that because both it because it caused my mother to lead a less strong life than she might have otherwise and because it caused me to waste a lot of time rediscovering the wheel but also because it means that our lessons of today can be forgotten too um my grandmother after the vote was achieved uh stopped being active in the way that that you know many suffragists did out of exhaustion out of a lack of self-respect out of you know i don't know why but but she did so by the time i was born she was not active and since she died when i was very little i never knew really and my family kind of inadvertently concealed what she had been up to i mean they would tell me how she was a wonderful woman because she founded the first vocational high school in toledo um and uh she raised four sons and she kept a kosher table and so on but they didn't tell me that she was this you know kind of raging feminist who marched in the streets and ran for uh the school board on a coalition ticket with the anarchists and the socialists they sort of conveniently forgot that part what were they embarrassed by it i don't know that it wasn't conscious on their parts exactly but it was it was i think it just wasn't socially good to have to have done this so so they just they didn't exactly conceal it but they didn't talk about it so it wasn't until um a a nice feminist in toledo wrote a monograph about my grandmother and sent it to me that i had any idea of the scope of her activities you said that this worried you in a way because it meant that other families or other women can forget what happened before is that what you're afraid is happening in the quote post-feminist period no i i don't think i mean that only began to happen after a century and we're only you know 25 years so into this and it is not post-feminist no matter what the new york times says it's just that young women if the young women have a problem it's only that they think there's no problem and of course they will you know get educated by the world and by by you know what they meet in the labor force and when they have children and so on today we're remembering gloria steinem the writer publisher activist and feminist icon who died wednesday she was 92 years old at this point we'll hear from an interview with terry from 2015 at the time gloria steinem had just published her memoir which was titled my life on the road gloria steinem welcome back to fresh air i want you to start by reading the dedication of your new book so i'm going to start with a book called my life on the road and i'm going to start with a book called my life on the road and i'm going to start with a book called my life on the road and i'm going to start with a book called my life on the road this book is dedicated to dr john sharp of london who in 1957 a decade before physicians in england could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a 22 year old american on her way to india knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate he said you must promise me two things first you will not tell anyone my name second you will do what you want to do with your life dear dr sharp i believe you who knew the law was unjust would not mind if i say this so long after your death i've done the best i could with my life this book is for you thank you for reading that dedication to your new book um when did you first speak about your abortion the amazing thing was that it took me so long uh there was no women's movement it was supposed to be a secret uh women didn't share in the same way so it wasn't until many years later after new york magazine had started and i had gone to cover an abortion speak out held in a in a church downtown in new york city and suddenly i heard other women standing up and talking about what it was like to have to go out and seek an illegal abortion this was actually an alternate hearing to one that the new york state legislature was holding on the liberalization of abortion law in new york state this was before the supreme court ruling and you know a group of of early feminists that just say said wait a minute you know in new york in the legislature they asked 14 men and one nun to testify you can't make this up right let's let's hear from women who have actually had this experience so i sat there as a reporter for new york magazine listening to women tell their stories you know that were tragic and ludicrous and every human emotion all wrapped into one and suddenly i thought wait a minute you know i had an abortion and actually one in three american women had needed an abortion at some time in her life so why is this illegal and why is it dangerous and it's the kind of revelation that comes from people just telling the truth and discovering you're not alone so is this book this dedication the first time you mentioned the doctor's name who performed your illegal abortion in england it is the first time i mentioned his name and what was the first time you mentioned his name why you decide why did you decide it was okay now to mention his name well first of all he was quite old at the time so he clearly could no longer be alive no matter what secondly the laws have changed our understanding has has it just seemed to me that it was time to say thank you do you often wonder what your life would have been like had you not had the abortion and had you had a child at that age you know it just uh. you know i don't know what would have happened i had been doing all the foolish things that we then did like riding horseback throwing ourselves downstairs you know the all kinds of things in the hope let me stop you right there did you throw yourself downstairs yeah kind of i did i did and i you know i am the most uh. cowardly person you can imagine so physically speaking but i did i kept thinking that somehow you know i could uh. i don't know what i thought i was desperate i really was desperate because you know i just knew that if i went home and married which i would have had to do uh. it would be to the wrong person it would be to a life that wasn't mine that wasn't mine at all did you hurt yourself throwing yourself down the stairs no you know you're quite resilient at twenty-two right i didn't you spent half of your life on the road you're still on the road a lot you grew up on the road let's talk a little bit about your very atypical childhood your mother was often incapacitated by depression can we call it depression you know i i don't know what to call i think her spirit was broken you know she before i was born uh. had to give up everything she loved and cared about and she was depressed she got addicted to tranquilizers i don't i don't think there was any even when i first wrote about her years ago i was surprised that people would say to me do you fear this was hereditary and i was shocked and i always said only if patriarchy is hereditary because i just think her spirit was broken your father until you were ten during the summer ran a dance pavilion that he created would you describe what your father did summers this was a little lake in southern michigan called clark lake he had built a a kind of long big pier with part of it covered part of it uncovered over the lake and on weekdays there would be uh. sort of canned music and a jukebox and on weekends a band then the big bands of the thirties and forties used to travel the country in the summertime in a bus and so we would get some famous band sometimes wayne king and joe venuti i mean names i don't know if people know anymore and this was this was his dream and he you know he created a kind of magical place so what was it about being there or about being with your father that broke your mother's spirit it just wasn't hers well let me describe what she had been doing before long before i was born as she was a pioneer newspaper reporter and journalist and and actually editor which was extraordinary but it was an era in which she at first had to write under a man's name in order to get published so you know she was a real pioneer and she loved it she adored it at the same time she was married to my father a wonderful kind charming utterly irresponsible man so there were always money troubles and you know lots of difficult called these. She had my sister, who was nine years older than me. And I think, you know, as she later explained, she'd fallen in love with a man at work and had grown up believing that you could not divorce, you could not change. She had a girlfriend who wanted to come to New York with her where she could try her hand at being a journalist. You know, she had all these aspirations. She just couldn't make it work. She had what was then called a nervous breakdown, which meant she was in a sanatorium for a year or two, I'm not sure. And there she got hooked on an early form of tranquilizer. Gloria Steinem speaking to Terry Gross in 2015. The author, columnist, publisher, and women's rights activist died Wednesday at age 92. After a break, we'll hear more of their conversation. And critic at large John Powers reviews Coyote vs. Acme, the comedy film based on the classic Warner Brothers cartoon character. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Today, we're remembering Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon who died Wednesday at age 92. Let's get back to her interview with Terry from 2015, the year Steinem published her memoir, My Life on the Road. So getting back to this life that you had as a child, your mother's spirit was broken. It was hard for her to get out of bed. Your father created this, you know, like wonderful dance pavilion summers. But then when the summer was over, the family would move into a van and drive south and basically live, when I say van, I should say trailer, I suppose. And then the family would live in the trailer for the duration until the following summer. You're right that you never started out with enough money to complete the trip. Your father would buy antiques and then sell them to antique dealers, you know, buy them. At country auctions and then sell them to antique dealers at higher prices to fund your trip south. How did you like being itinerant like that? I suppose the two things happen at once when you're a child. One is that you just accept as normal whatever is around you. And the other is that you go to the movies and you see kids or your classmates, because I would go to school till it got cold, Halloween or something, who are living a different way. And you want to be like them. You want to be like the other kids. It never, for a moment, occurred to me that they might envy me. So I both accepted it and hoped that my real parents would come find me and take me to a house with a picket fence and a pony. I mean, that's the degree of realism and fantasy. So you weren't in school for those years that your family was on the road. How did you learn to read and do basic math? Well, I'm not sure I've ever learned to do basic math, to be frank. But I learned to read just because my family had lots and lots of books, especially my mother, you know, read all the time. My memory is that I learned how to read from ketchup bottles and labels and billboards along the highway. I don't know. I'm not sure. But I don't remember not knowing how to read. Was it legal for you to not be in school? No, I'm sure it was illegal. And my mother always said that if the truant officer showed up, she would use her teaching certificate. The fact that it was for university calculus, which she had been teaching in order to make money to finish college herself. I don't know how impressive it would have been. But anyway, no, but no truant officer ever showed up. How did your father's sense of money that you could start this trip without having enough money to complete it and just kind of buy and sell things? Fund the family. How did that affect your idea of money and the security that you need or don't need from money? It felt insecure. However, I must say that unlike a lot of kids, I always had enough to eat. I always had shelter. I always had parents who loved me. So I had security in a lot of ways. But my father's philosophy was he didn't want to know what was going to happen tomorrow. Because if he didn't know, it might be wonderful, as he said. So I have to say it prepared me very well to be a freelance writer and never to have a real salary. Your parents separated when you were 10 in 1944. And you had to take on a lot of responsibility for your mother at a young age. What were some of the things you had to do for her when you were still a child yourself? Well, it depended on, you know, on the ups and downs of her moods. But I would make her meals or the child's idea of a meal. And I kind of always worried about what I would find when I came home from school, you know, because she might be really depressed or she might have retreated into another world or she might be convinced that a war was happening outside the house and be wandering around in the street. You know, talking to other people whose parents were, say, alcoholics, and who also kind of didn't know what they would find when they came home, has made me realize that it's, it's not, I mean, it's hopefully uncommon, but it's certainly not unique, my experience. She was called the crazy lady of the neighborhood once you had a neighborhood. What was your reaction to that? And did it make you think of her differently than you did before? No, I don't. It didn't make me think of her differently. She was, she was someone, how can I say? I mean, she was a loving, wonderful woman who recited poetry by heart and was, you know, certainly super loving toward me. But sometimes she was just in another world. And I didn't know when that would happen. Are you still convinced that your mother was suffering from patriarchy as opposed to a mental illness of some sort, bipolar, depression? No, I am because later on, after I was in college, and therefore my sister, my older sister was taking care of her and discovered that she just couldn't do it and keep her job. So she found a very good mental hospital where my mother was for a couple of years, which should have happened probably long before. And I asked the doctors, they are the very expert doctors there, what was wrong. And they said she had an anxiety neurosis. And I said, would you say her spirit was broken? And they said, yes, you know, I mean, she, I don't think there was anything organically wrong. She did get hooked on tranquilizers. And that became part of the problem, not the solution. What was it like when you started school after you were 10, having not been in school before, whereas all the other kids in school had been in school? I had been somewhat in school because I would go till it got cold. So I'd been every year, I'd been a couple of months in school. I kind of knew what school was. But when I went for my first year, I discovered, A, I didn't know how to do long division. I didn't know the multiplication tables. Although I'd been in many states, I had no idea what the map looked like. It was a big deficit I'm not sure I've ever made up for. But I had a huge vocabulary because I'd been reading all the time, grown-up books, kids' books, everything. And I soon learned two things. One, that that could compensate in a lot of ways and get me through school. And the other was that I shouldn't indulge in this enormous vocabulary too much because it seemed strange to the other kids. More after a break. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to Terry's interview from 2015 with Gloria Steinem. The writer, publisher, activist, and feminist icon died Wednesday. Do you remember the moment when you first realized women's rights was a legitimate issue, along with all the other rights that you were interested in fighting for? You know, the amazing thing is how long it took me, actually. I mean, there was no at least to me, there was no visible women's movement. So I thought I just had to function within the system as it was. And I identified with everybody else who was having a hard time. I think women often do that without knowing that it applied to us too. But I owe it to the women who held that hearing on abortion, for instance. Or, you know, who had been inside the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam movement. And even in those movements that we utterly loved, still were not treated equally. And so had understood that there needed to be an additional women's movement. How did it redefine you to know that as somebody at the forefront of the women's movement, you were going to be an example? Of what you were fighting for. And that the choices that you made were going to be public choices. I didn't really think about that because it seemed to me was the whole idea was the ability to make our own choices. So I never felt that I had to behave in a certain way that was subject to outside dictates. I thought the whole point was that we were able to use our own talents and do what we wanted. So I didn't feel inhibited by it in any way. Because you spent half of your life on the road, you've had a very ambivalent relationship to home. You write that it took you a really long time to create a comfortable home for yourself, in part because you were on the road all the time and you grew up on the road until you were 10. At what point in your life did you create a home that was truly a comfortable place, more of a nest that was a good place to return to? Really only after 50. I had buried in my head this idea that I was going to make a home for my husband and children. I didn't see a lot of women making a permanent home for themselves. I didn't think that way. And also, I was on the road, so I was always living out of suitcases and cardboard boxes when I was at home. And even though I now to this day live in the same apartment that I did then, it was more like a storage place than an apartment. It was only after I was 50 that I was able to make a home for myself. And I think that's a very important part of me, that thanks to dear friends who came and helped me to unpack my cardboard boxes, and another friend who explained to me how to make beautiful colors on the wall and took me around to auction places to buy things that I love. She said, only buy what you fall in love with, because if the same person falls in love with all these things, they'll fit together. Don't worry about it. I remember going out with her to buy, you know, antique sheets. It was orgasmic, practically, the pleasure of buying antique sheets. And so I began to make a home, a nest for myself. And I take such pleasure in it. I think in general, as a culture, we tend to think there are two choices, settling down or traveling, and actually you need both. You need a nest, birds need a nest, and they still fly. So it took me a it was both. I interviewed you several times on Fresh Air in the past, and I want to play an excerpt of our interview from 1992. So this was 23 years ago. Oh, that's shocking. Right? And one of the things you talked about was you were looking back on having had a lumpectomy, breast cancer, and how that affected you. So I want to play what you said about that. So again, this is from 1992, Gloria Steinem, looking back on having that lumpectomy and how it affected her life. It made me realize several things. One was, this may sound strange if I try to say it short, but that actually I wasn't, I was less afraid of dying than of aging. Or not of aging exactly. I didn't know how to enter the last third of life because there were so few role models. Because when I first heard this diagnosis, first I thought, ironically, oh, so that's how it's going to end, you know? And then I thought to myself, as if it was welling up from the deepest part of me, I've had a wonderful life. And I treasure that moment. You know, it meant a lot to me. But on the other hand, it also made me realize that in this culture, women, we know how. We know how to be in the central plateau of life. And I'd been there a terrifically long time because I'd become a grown-up too early because my mother being an invalid. So from about 10 to 52 or so, I'd been in this central plateau. Now I was entering a whole new place. It was like falling off a cliff because I couldn't see enough people ahead of me. You know, in the last two or three years of really, how shall I say, of kind of paying more attention to my own inner life, I've. Realized that this aging in the last third of life or whatever is a new country. I now actually feel excited about it because you, as Carolyn Heilbrunn has pointed out so brilliantly in writing A Woman's Life, women become ourselves after 50. You know, we leave behind this female impersonator role and drop a lot of baggage and really become much more our true selves. You know what I find particularly interesting about hearing you thinking about that? Well, I think one of the things that I've learned about the latter part of your life is that I think for a lot of women, it's the end of your life where you're supposed to be punished for the freedoms that you've taken during the first parts of your life. You know, like if you've decided to be independent or, you know, not be married or not have children or something, you're punished for that in the end because you're supposed to look forward to an old age where you're lonely, you're alone, there's no one to be with, no one to take care of you. I mean, I think that's been really instilled in all of us. Yes, it's sort of the secular version of. It's the secular version of hell, I think. And like the religious version of hell, it has nothing to do with real life. Okay, that was Gloria Steinem on Fresh Air in 1992. And I just did the math, and I think you were 58 when that was recorded. So. Thank you for playing that because it's fascinating to listen to your earlier self. Yeah, so does what you said then still ring true? I realize more now that I'm past that stage, that 50 was a very difficult birthday because it was the end of the central years of life. But 60, which I was just entering when I was speaking then, was like entering, as I was saying, a new country. And that means that all the demands of gender that spread from something like 12 to something like 50 and are something of a prison sometimes. are gone, and suddenly you're free. Here's my comparison now. Remember when you were 9 or 10 and you were this independent little girl climbing trees and saying, I know what I want, I know what I think, and so on? That was before gender descended for most of us, as Carol Gilligan has pointed out in her work. After 50, you've theoretically, according to society, had kids, raised them. So your gender role is over. And ironically, I found by 60, you're free again. So you're the same person you were at 9 or 10, only now you have your own apartment, you can reach the light switch, you know. You hopefully have a little money so that you can, you know, do what you want. There is, as I was saying then, a whole different country after 60. But you were never tied to those gender roles anyways. You didn't need to be. Well, we're all tied to those gender roles. I mean, I don't think they're. But it's not like you had the children who are now out of the house, so now, like, you have more independence. That's true. No, that's true. It wasn't tied to the life cycle of a child, but it was tied to hormones and sexuality and affairs and how you looked. And none of us escapes this completely, nor should we escape it necessarily. What does being. Being in your 80s symbolize to you now? You told us a little bit about what 50 and 60 symbolize. Yeah. Shock in what sense? I stop people on the street and tell them how old I am because I'm trying to make myself believe it. I mean, 81 is an age that I think is someone else's age, you know. It's quite bizarre. And part of it is, I think, because we don't have role models of people going ahead of us. I don't have. I have very few. Role models of women my age who are doing what I'm doing. And in fact, the people I work with every day and love and, you know, are my current chosen family in terms of numbers are probably, I don't know, at least 40 years younger than I am. And even my friends from Ms. and so on are at least 10 years younger than I am. Gloria Steinem, it has been great to talk with you again. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's true hero is not, of course, that smug, bee-beeping bird. It's his perpetually thwarted pursuer, Wile E. Coyote, who alone. in the most stripped-down of deserts endures the endless futility of a Beckett character. In fact, the character was created at the same time as Waiting for Godot. Scheming it inept, Wiley's so hell-bent on catching the roadrunner that he keeps buying shoddy contraptions —rocket skates, self-guiding bombs, earthquake pills— from a corporation called Acme. Their misfires inevitably blow him up, clobber him with anvils, or send him plummeting off a cliff. The unreliability of these products inspired a witty 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier, Coyote v. Acme, in which Wiley Coyote sues Acme for damages. In turn, that piece inspired the terrifically entertaining new movie Coyote vs. Acme, which has finally turned up in theaters after Warner Bros., in a controversial Acme-esque move, tried to shelve the finished film in order to clean up the mess. Blending live action with animation, Coyote vs. Acme takes Frazier's piece and transforms it into a spoofing riff on the classic legal thriller —think The Verdict or Aaron Brockovich— but one steeped in the surreal anarchy of loony tunes. The story begins when the fed-up Wiley decides to take legal action and hires an Albuquerque lawyer, Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte. Alas, the scruffy actor, Avery proves to be a hangdog soul who fears failure so much that he only takes on small cases and settles them for a pittance. Luckily, Avery's intern, Paige, that's Lana Condor, is an idealist. She pushes him into filing a massive suit against Acme, the world's most powerful company. Acme's run by the strutting tune Foghorn Leghorn and represented by killer lawyer Buddy Crane, that's John Cena, whose bodyguard, seems to be bursting from his suit. Soon, Avery, Paige, and Wiley go out looking for evidence and encounter numerous other Warner Bros. tunes. Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Pantsless Porky Pig, and, of course, the incomparable Bugs. Along the way, Team Coyote unearths a sinister Acme project named after Sisyphus, the mythic stone pusher whose story anticipates the coyote's own futility. Over and over, Avery wants to throw in the towel. You understand why on the first day in court. After Buddy Crane's confident opening remarks, Avery struggles to find a response, as Wiley Coyote goes nuts beside him. Now, uh, now, what did the defense say we're gonna argue? Huh? I mean, I know the answer to it. I know the answer. I'm not asking you a question. I mean, it is a question, but it's a question that I'm asking you. I'm asking to me. Let me start over. Let me start over. Objection. To my start. So the defense said that we were gonna argue that, uh, the products are dangerous and that Acme is negligent in, uh, selling them. I-I do really agree with all that. I mean, it's not fancy, but it's true. Of course, one of the pleasures of Warner Bros. cartoons was their imaginative delight in shattering the laws of nature, often violently. Wiley Coyote can get, smushed by a steamroller, pick himself up, dust himself off, and inflate himself back to normal size. Coyote vs. Acme serves up a slew of delirious gags like this, several of them terrific, in which the flesh-and-blood characters face the same crazy universe as the Toons. Still, what works in a six-minute cartoon is exhausting in a feature film, which is why writer Sammy Birch and director Dave Green do something the old roadrunner cartoonist never did. They give their story a plot and a meaning, and even some feeling. We watch Avery develop a spine. We see Wiley's wistful longing beneath his Ahab-like obsession with the roadrunner. And we recognize the existential bond between the coyote and the roadrunner, the chaser and chasee, whose lives depend for their meaning on the presence of the other. And needless to say, Coyote vs. Acme delivers a message about roadrunners, which may explain why viewers are enjoying it so much. Acme is the very archetype of today's megacorporations that outsource jobs to cheaper countries, manufacture goods designed to last only until their warranties lapse, force you to wait on hold to talk to an AI bot, and find it cost-efficient to pay off occasional lawsuits like Wiley's rather than change corporate practices. When the movie suggests that the courts and Congress kowtow to Acme's power, it's just saying what everybody knows. Now, what was always great about old Warner Bros. cartoons was their gleeful irresponsibility. They were never sentimental or improving like Disney. And in this respect, anyway, Coyote vs. Acme violates the tradition. The movie celebrates Wiley Coyote's willingness to fight on, even in the face of constant failure. I don't know about you, but I have to love any movie that's clever enough to turn Wiley Coyote into a role model. John Powers reviewed the film Coyote vs. Acme, which is now in theaters. On Monday's show, for Labor Day, singer and songwriter Roseanne Cash. When she was 18, her father, Johnny Cash, gave her a list of 100 essential country songs. Years later, she returned to it and released an album featuring 12 songs from that list. Okay. You can join us. Heartache number one was when you left me I never knew Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Hertzfeld and Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thay, Sophia Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.D. Nesbitt. Our social media video producer is Hilary Kissinger. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B. Kuhlman.