My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  I’ve done the best I could with my life.

  This book is for you.

  When a book has taken shape over two decades, there are a lot of people to thank.

  Ann Godoff at Random House was the first to believe in an on-the-road book by a traveling feminist organizer. Then Kate Medina became my editor, and if there were an Olympics for kindness, support, and patience, she would win it.

  Hedgebrook, the women writers’ retreat on Whidbey Island, Washington, gave me solitude, a magical cabin, and time to discover and write the story of my father.

  Because I depended on memory as a curator of stories—the road is way too intense for journal keeping—I turned to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College to supply places and times, and to Google to deliver everything my memory did not.

  I was lucky to have houseguests who volunteered as readers—especially Lenedra Carroll, who read it all, and also Agunda Okeyo. New York friends Kathy Najimy and Debra Winger read chapters. My friend Irene Kubota Neves, a journalist and an age peer, read and commented on every word, and even rescued some from the cutting-room floor.

  Through all of this, Robert Levine, my friend and literary agent, kept his faith that a book would get done, and gave the publishers faith, too.

  As the years stretched on, I could devote time each summer to writing, then I was traveling the rest of the year and starting over again the next summer. Stories were soon creating more than one book.

  Though I was often rescued by my colleague Amy Richards, who read and gave me advice, there was still way too much. Finally, Suzanne Braun Levine, the first editor of Ms. magazine, who knows how to cut like a sculptor, joined Amy. Together, they turned Way Too Much into Just Enough. As they pointed out, I could keep on publishing road stories on a website. (Go to gloriasteinem.com.)

  I’ve also had the pleasure of watching Amy, my co-worker through three books and more than twenty years, become a writer of more books than I, a giver of more lectures than I, and a creative organizer here and in other countries. There is no one who could make me feel better about the present and more hopeful about the future.

  Finally, I thank Robin Morgan for reminding me, even when the road was causing me to write the least, that there is no better moment in life than finding the right word.

  INTRODUCTION: ROAD SIGNS

  1 Marilyn Mercer, “Gloria Steinem: The Unhidden Persuader,” McCall’s, January 1972.

  2 Robin Morgan, The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches, 1968–1992 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), pp. 275–77.

  3 Margaret Atwood, “Headscarves to Die For,” New York Times Book Review, August 15, 2004.

  4 Because only women’s ova pass on mitochondrial DNA and only men’s sperm pass on the Y chromosome, the mix in a current population indicates who came from afar and who didn’t. Natalie Angier, “Man vs. Woman: In History’s Travel Olympics, There’s No Contest,” New York Times, October 27, 1998; she is quoting from a study by the Harvard School of Public Health and Stanford University, reported in Mark T. Seilelstad, Eric Minch, and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “Genetic Evidence for a Higher Female Migration Rate in Humans,” Nature Genetics 20 (November 1998).

  5 Douglas Martin, “Yang Huanyi, the Last User of a Secret Women’s Code,” New York Times, October 7, 2004.

  CHAPTER I: MY FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS

  1 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 161.

  CHAPTER II: TALKING CIRCLES

  1 Besides advertising campaigns and Hollywood movies that romanticized car ownership, Detroit lobbied for legislation against—and sometimes bought up and destroyed—public transportation, from the streetcars of eastern cities to the trains of the California coastline. In a parallel effort, the construction industry sold isolated houses over communal housing. See T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Homes of the Brave (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).

  2 To hear exactly why—in very smart and angry observations of men on the Left that may still ring true—read the classic “Goodbye to All That” by Robin Morgan. Originally written for Rat Subterranean News in 1970, it has since been reprinted in The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches, 1968–1992 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

  3 In checking history, I found that just before the march began, Josephine Baker, dressed in the uniform of the French Resistance, spoke about the racism that caused her move to France. Daisy Bates was the only woman officially listed as a speaker at the march. She was substituting for Myrlie Evers, widow of Medgar Evers, who had been murdered in Mississippi just a month before, but Bates was unable to reach the Lincoln Memorial through the traffic. Male civil rights leaders marched on Pennsylvania Avenue with the press, while female leaders marched on Independence Avenue. Anna Arnold Hedgeman was the only woman on the planning committee for the 1963 march. She consistently demanded that women be speakers on the program. For her inside account, see her 1964 autobiography, A Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). Also see Keli Goff, “The Rampant Sexism at March on Washington,” The Root, August 22, 2013.

  4 Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement, from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010).

  5 Valerie Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad Emmett, Sex and World Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

  6 Vincent Shilling, “8 Myths and Atrocities About Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day,” Indian Country, October 14, 2013. For more about Columbus’s atrocities, see Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005).

  7 Gloria Steinem, “The City Politic: A Racial Walking Tour,” New York, February 24, 1969.

  8 Gloria Steinem, “Why Women Voters Can’t Be Trusted,” Ms., 1972. Virginia Slims sponsored the American Women’s poll by Louis Harris Associates, the first national survey of women’s opinions on women’s issues.

  9 Ron Speer, “Gloria’s Beauty Belies Her Purpose,” St. Petersburg Times, December 3, 1971.

  10 As If Women Matter: The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader, ed. Ruchira Gupta (New Delhi: Rupa Publications India, 2014).

  11 The Equal Rights Amendment states: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

  12 At a 1979 American Psychological Association conference, Sonia Johnson, a leading Mormon feminist, gave a speech titled “Patriarchal Panic: Sexual Politics in the Mormon Church,” charging the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints with ignoring the separation of church and state by opposing the ERA with an illegal use of church money and power. She was excommunicated.

  13 Once we were in Houston, it turned out that other states had slightly overrepresented African Americans, so the national body still reflected the nation. Instead of a time-consuming process of challenging the seating of Mississippi, which was reportedly what the Klan had in mind, the Black Women’s Caucus organized a floor demonstration to let delegates know that Mississippi wasn’t properly represented—and then moved on. Klan delegates were left with nothing to do but echo Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton’s vow “to protect our women from all the militant lesbians.” See Caroline Bird and the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, What Women Want: From the Official Report to the President, the Congress and the People of the United States (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).

  14 National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, The Spirit of Houston: An Official Report to the President, the Congress and the People of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 157.

  15 Ibid. The Houston Women’s Conference and the fifty-six conferences that led up to it gave birth to a majority national agenda and to state and national organizations. See also Bird, What Women Want.

  16 Bird, What Women Want, p. 37.

  CHAPTER III: WHY I D
ON’T DRIVE

  1 Pete Hamill, “Curb Job,” a review of Taxi! by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, New York Times Book Review, June 17, 2007, p. 19.

  2 Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009).

  3 Christine Doudna, “Vicki Frankovich,” Ms., January 1987.

  CHAPTER IV: ONE BIG CAMPUS

  1 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 225.

  2 Caroline Heldman and Danielle Dirks, “Blowing the Whistle on Campus Rape,” Ms., February 2014.

  3 As far as I know, no one ever burned a bra. At the 1968 Miss America Contest in Atlantic City, several hundred feminists protested on the boardwalk by putting girdles, steno pads, aprons, dust mops, and other symbols of the “feminine” role into a trash can and threatening to burn them; it was an echo of Vietnam draft resisters burning draft cards. However, they couldn’t get a fire permit and never burned anything.

  4 Ira C. Lupu, “Gloria Steinem at the Harvard Law Review Banquet,” Green Bag, Autumn 1998.

  5 Ibid., pp. 22–23.

  CHAPTER V: WHEN THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL

  1 Actually, this was old journalism. Before the advent of the telegraph, writers used the essay and other literary forms to let the reader see through the eyes of the writer. The many books by the young Winston Churchill were collections of his journalistic essays reported from Cuba, India, and Africa. Then the telegraph required facts first—who, what, why, when, where—then elaborating on them with each paragraph in pyramid form. But simultaneous electronic transmission allows writers freedom again. Facts should be checked, but stories can again be told.

  2 Gloria Steinem, “Trying to Love Eugene,” New York, August 5, 1968.

  3 For an account of exactly how the Republican Party gradually ejected women who supported equality, see Tanya Melich, The Republican War Against Women: An Insider’s Report from Behind the Lines (New York: Bantam Dell, 1998).

  4 As I was writing this, I turned on the radio, and there was Barry Farber, who is now a digital talk radio host and a “birther,” that is, someone who believes President Obama was not born in Hawaii and therefore took office illegally.

  5 Betty Friedan, “Up from the Kitchen Floor,” New York Times Magazine, March 4, 1973.

  6 Chisholm was the first African American, male or female, to run for the presidency in a major party. It is instructive that she claimed to have experienced sex as an even bigger barrier than race in politics.

  7 This would be proven later when Republican presidential candidate John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate. Her support came more from male than from female voters—overwhelmingly white in both cases.

  8 Renamed “Right Candidates, Wrong Question,” New York Times, February 7, 2007.

  9 MSNBC’s Morning Joe, January 9, 2008, appearance.

  10 Conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago for The New York Times, Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post, Tribune Company, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, and The Baltimore Sun.

  11 More from the Parable of the Nail: If Gore had been elected instead of Bush, we wouldn’t have had a second, optional war in Iraq; or abstinence-only sex education enforced by federal funding for public schools; or the highest unwanted pregnancy rate in the developed world; or an executive order giving billions in tax dollars to “faith-based” centers of right-wing political power; or the global gag rule that deprives poor countries of all U.S. aid if they even offer information about abortion, even with their own funds; or corporate profiteering on privatized wars abroad as well as privatized prisons at home; or a higher percentage of the U.S. population in prison than in any other country in the world; or corporate CEOs whose salaries rose from thirty times that of the average worker before the right-wing backlash took over Washington to an average of 475 times; or an unregulated financial industry that led to a worldwide economic meltdown—and so much more.

  CHAPTER VI: SURREALISM IN EVERYDAY LIFE

  1 In 2013 three thousand truckers—angered by low wages, high fuel prices, and a government shutdown in Washington—planned to stage a slowdown on the highways around D.C., plus a peaceful rally within it. Though it’s mostly misdirected at President Obama, and rain masks the slowdown’s effectiveness, it’s a flexing of political muscle that sobers police and makes protesters with no trucks envious.

  2 As I write this almost a half-century later, employers have to pay servers only $2.10 an hour if they do or might get tipped, according to federal law. Groups of such workers, almost totally women, are organizing for coverage by minimum wage laws. U.S. Department of Labor, “Minimum Wages for Tipped Employees,” January 1, 2015, http://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped.htm.

  3 Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” Ms., April 1976.

  4 Rachel K. Jones, Jacqueline E. Darroch, and Stanley K. Henshaw, “Patterns in the Socioeconomic Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortions in 2000–2001,” Alan Guttmacher Institute, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 34, no. 5 (September–October 2002).

  5 It never did get published. I didn’t yet understand that dividing news into “hard” and “soft” was one more idea that gender is a reality instead of a political creation.

  6 Gloria Steinem, “Ho Chi Minh in New York,” New York, April 8, 1968.

  7 “Gloria Steinem’s Sermon Protested,” Lodi News-Sentinel, September 21, 1978.

  8 The church regulated abortion until 1860 or so. For instance, a female fetus could be aborted for up to eighty days, and a male fetus for up to forty days, because it was thought that the male, being superior, quickened earlier. The question of ensoulment or when life begins was restricted to when to baptize. John T. Noonan, ed., The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

  CHAPTER VII: WHAT ONCE WAS CAN BE AGAIN

  1 Alice Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against Competition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

  2 William Loren Katz, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage (New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 2.

  3 Pope Nicholas V, Papal Bull Dum Diversas, June 18, 1452.

  4 Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), pp. 13–15.

  5 Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 238; and Robert Silverberg, The Mound Builders (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 280–89.

  6 Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988), pp. 59–97.

  7 Quoted by John Mohawk et al., Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations and the U.S. Constitution (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light, 1992), p. 69.

  8 For a documentary about the life and work of LaDonna Harris, see Indian 101, a film by Julianna Brannum; http://www.indian101themovie.com.

  9 Here is one example of many: “Walter Ashby was the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, which recorded births, marriages and deaths. He accepted the job in 1912. For the next thirty-four years, he led efforts to purify the white race in Virginia by forcing Indians and other nonwhites to classify themselves as blacks. It amounted to bureaucratic suicide.” Warren Fiske, “The Black-and-White World of Walter Ashby Plecker,” Virginian Pilot, August 18, 2004.

  10 Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann International Literature and Textbooks, 1979).

  11 Quoted by J. N. B. Hewitt, “Status of Women in Iroquois Polity before 1784,” Annual Report to the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1932 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933), p. 483.

  12 For an overview of Native American cultures as the main source of democracy and democratic stru
ctures, see Weatherford, Indian Givers, pp. 133–50.

  13 “Native Women Send Message,” Wassaja 4, no. 8 (August 1976), p. 7.

  14 In the Yoruba culture of Africa, there is a Trickster called Eshu, and in India, the always-playful Krishna—and many more. To focus on Native American mythology and also find these parallels, see Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

  15 Allen, The Sacred Hoop.

  16 Wilma would ultimately help in breaking the cycle of dependence to bring indoor running water to Bell, an isolated community of three hundred or so mostly Cherokee families in the backwoods of Oklahoma. Filmmaker Kristina Kiehl’s The Cherokee Word for Water (2013) is a dramatization of the story of Bell and a testament to Wilma’s leadership and sense of community.

  17 Europeans didn’t believe that the inhabitants they killed and conquered could be descendants of those who developed agriculture, pharmacology, the world’s largest system of earthworks, and democracy itself. Some said the Egyptians must have come here, then left again. In my lifetime, estimates of the length of time since migratory cultures settled this land have increased from 9,000 to 12,000 to 30,000 years. “The Untold Saga of Early Man in America,” Time, March 13, 2006.

  18 Wilma Mankiller, Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2004).

  19 Weatherford, Indian Givers, pp. 82–84.

  20 Ibid.; see chapter 7, “Liberty, Anarchism, and the Noble Savage.”

  21 Robin Morgan, The Burning Time (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2012).