GLORIA STEINEM ITW
The new documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words, which airs this month on HBO, is ostensibly a celebration of the life and work of feminist icon Gloria Steinem. The film, though, also offers a healthy dose of perspective on the Women’s Movement of the 1960s, what it accomplished, and what it all meant on a personal level to one particular woman, Steinem, who was already in her mid-thirties when she made the leap from journalism to activism. Steinem, though, quickly proved an influential, if polarizing, figure in the movement, and found herself not only wrestling with the long-entrenched ideas and political systems that were conspiring to deprive women of their rights and freedoms, but also with the media (which placed an undue emphasis on her physical appearance), her own ambivalence about stepping into the spotlight, and even, at times, with other feminists. Charting Steinem’s journey from growing up in a middle-class section of East Toledo, Ohio, through her work as a writer, reporter, and editor-which includes her now- infamous 1963 undercover exposé for Show magazine on the working conditions of Playboy Bunnies; “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” her treatise for New York magazine inspired by a 1969 abortion hearing and the speak-out that followed; and her founding of Ms. magazine in 1971-and, later, as a political orga- nizer and social-justice advocate, Gloria: In Her Own Words brings into stark relief both how far the Wom- en’s Movement has come over the last four decades and how far there still is to go.
For her part, the 77-year-old Steinem continues to fight the fight, having recently returned from a trip to South Korea, where she had delivered speeches at Ewha Womans University and the Seoul Broadcasting System Global Digital Forum in Seoul. Back home in her apartment in New York City, she spoke by phone with fellow journalist and activist Maria Shriver.
MARIA SHRIVER: So how did you feel watching this documentary for the first time?
GLORIA STEINEM: Well … [laughs] Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it’s amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects. I mean, at one point they show a photograph of my mother taken at Oberlin, where she had gone to college for one year before her family ran out of money. Later, she went back with me when I spoke there. I look at that photograph and remember how much that meant to her-and to me. So it’s one thing to find the public moments, but they also found the private moments.
SHRIVER: You talk in the film about your mother trying to be a writer, a wife, and a parent, and becoming really unglued by all of that.
STEINEM: Before I was born, she had what was then called a nervous breakdown. So the truth is, I don’t quite know what happened. Decades later, when I was in college, she was in a mental hospital for a couple of years, and she finally got some help. I asked one of the doctors there … He said the closest he could come was that it was an anxiety neurosis. I asked him if he would say her spirit was broken, and he said yes. It was only then that I began to understand she had given up being a pioneer reporter, given up on her friends, and everything she loved.
SHRIVER: As you worked to become a writer and have your own life, did you ever worry that what hap- pened to your mother would happen to you?
STEINEM: No, I never thought for a millisecond that would happen. Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother—so I wouldn’t be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally. I wasn’t as close to her then as I now, in retrospect, wish I had been.
SHRIVER: Did you try to run away from associating with her?
STEINEM: No. I took care of her and I loved her, but I couldn’t let myself realize while she was alive how alike we were. I couldn’t afford to realize how alike we were. But now I have her books, and I see from what she was reading that we were more alike than I was able to admit. When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was—and that my real parents were going to come get me. I was just too different from the rest of the family, so I lived in books and in my imagination.
SHRIVER: You talk in the film about feeling depressed at points in your life.
STEINEM: I probably have no right to use that word, because some people really are depressed. I wasn’t ever unable to function, but I did realize at some point that I had built a wall between myself and my childhood by saying, “I’m so glad that’s over. Nothing can ever be as bad again,” without understanding that my childhood was still very much with me.
SHRIVER: Was there ever a moment where you said, “I’ve built this wall. Now I’ve got to rip it down”?
STEINEM: There were many such moments. But I think that whatever kind of depression I might have encountered had to do with exhaustion when I reached 50 or so—because I was just so tired. What was pushing me was the need to be useful. Why did I need to be useful in order to think I was real? The answer really was because I had been neglected as a child. Not because my parents weren’t wonderful people—they were wonderful people—but they themselves were having a tough time. I didn’t go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.
SHRIVER: You always seem to have guarded the more private aspects of your life. Why did you agree to do this documentary now?
STEINEM: As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I’ve always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing—for instance, in Revolution From Within [1992]. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other’s lives are our best textbooks. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences. And since we’re each unique, if we’ve shared many experiences, then it probably has some- thing to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change. Revolutions that last don’t happen from the top down. They hap- pen from the bottom up. So whatever use my story might be to other people, whether it’s because we have something in common or because there’s a cautionary tale in there to not do something that I did …
SHRIVER: Is there some part of your life that you think represents a cautionary tale?
STEINEM: I think the biggest thing is probably that I wasted time.
SHRIVER: You feel like you wasted time? In what way?
STEINEM: I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do, or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn’t get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.
Extracted from www.interviewmagazine.com
