Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 18, 1992 TAG: 9202180228
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GERALDINE BAUM
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
GLORIA STEINEM DIDN'T INTEND HER BOOK TO BE A CATHARSIS, BUT A LOT OF PEOPLE
So, it is possible to gossip about Gloria Steinem even more than before.If people prattled on about her when she was merely the smart provocateur of equality between women and men, they are at it again after her confession that her inner and outer lives have not been symmetrical all these years.
In fact, like a lot of women, Steinem once fell for the wrong guy. She was insecure. She did not feel pretty, though she was "the pretty one" in the feminist movement. She had a traumatic childhood that left a destructive imprint.
And, of all things, she is not and never has been perfect.
That should not surprise anyone who heard her lecture in a college auditorium or maybe caught her on "Donahue" or read her work in Ms. magazine.
"Every time I lectured or spoke, I revealed my life wasn't all perfect," she says. "I talked about myself at the beginning of every lecture because that's what consciousness-raising is: It's truth about our lives."
Maybe some people did not understand her.
When feminists declared "the personal is political," they expected Steinem - who looked as if she had her single-woman life in order - to be politically perfect. Now, her latest admissions of human frailty, made in her new book called "Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem," have been greeted with a nasty glee that begs the question:
So what if Gloria Steinem the person was not as perfect as Gloria Steinem the media dazzler? Why are some who have benefited from her tireless public commitment lapping up her private-image problems in a frenzy that seems almost anthropological, the way some cultures killed their kings when they got old or vulnerable?
One British female interviewer trotted into her Manhattan apartment and declared bluntly: "I don't like you; You make me feel bad about myself."
Another columnist wrote of Steinem: "I read this book by the woman who now truly has everything: fame, fortune, and peace of mind, and in the process of the introduction to her self-esteem, my own dripped slowly away."
And Washington author Sally Quinn recently characterized Steinem and others who spoke for the movement as "hypocritical," suggesting also that "feminism is dead." In a newspaper opinion column Quinn wrote, "Not surprisingly, when Steinem used to say, `A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,' the women who believed her felt ashamed and guilty."
That business about the fish and bicycle, Steinem retorts, was a throwaway line coined by someone else.
"I never, ever, ever said it wasn't important to have men in our lives," she insists, sounding annoyed. "In fact, in my first decade of lecturing, I always said, far from dividing women and men, feminism will make love possible for the first time. That economic dependency may look like love, but it feels very different."
Still, Steinem seems perplexed by the spiteful undertone of these reactions. While in Cleveland the other day facing about the 50th interview for the new book, she called back to New York to report that despite feeling "happier, stronger, better, more likely to be out on the ramparts than ever before, people perceive me as feeling weak because I talk about pain in my life."
Suddenly, she has new empathy for former Democratic presidential hopeful Edmund Muskie, once blasted by the media for publicly crying.
"It's amazing to me that he was regarded as being less strong for being able to express sadness," Steinem says.
Similarly, among Quinn's evidence to support her theory that feminism is dead is Steinem's admission in her book that she fell in love with someone who, Quinn says, "treated her badly. [Steinem] had seduced him, she says, by playing down the person she was and playing up the person he wanted her to be. . . . "
Steinem cannot imagine how Quinn got the idea she was treated badly.
"If she read the book, she'd see I was treated wonderfully," she says of her two-year relationship with a man who, though not named in the book, East Coast gossip columns suggest is real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman.
But Steinem disagrees that the so-called death of feminism is evidenced by misfires in her and other feminist leaders' personal lives. After all, her celebrity, at bottom, has more to do with the way women live than with some dolled-up fantasy image on a TV screen.
"It's impossible to be a role model if you don't admit your mistakes," she says. "All you do is convince other people that they can't do it. And that's another thing that people don't get: Everything is not solved in one generation."
Author Susan Faludi, who, in her early 30s, is a generation younger than the feminist leader, understood her message as well as some others did not.
"Gloria Steinem has always been this voice of reason and wit," says Faludi, author of "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women." "One reason there's such eagerness to attack her is that she in fact belies tiresome stereotypes. She's attractive, has a personal life. She's funny, which makes her a constant irritation to those who would dismiss feminism as a gathering of sour-faced, bonneted suffragettes."
And by the way, Faludi adds, the message she picked up from Steinem is "we live in an unequal society where women are denied basic rights for reproductive choice, equal pay, equal access to institutions of higher learning and political power.
"Her version of feminism was that a woman shouldn't be judged by whether she marries or falls for Mort Zuckerman," Faludi says. "If you look at Steinem's political focus for the last 20 years, she hasn't been going around the country passing herself off as a marriage counselor."
Gloria Steinem, almost 58, is in her fabulously redecorated Manhattan apartment talking about a sorrowfully impoverished childhood.
For this interview, she sits in an overstuffed chair, her bare feet tucked under her. Her trademark streaked hair, no longer a veil over the edges of aviator glasses, is shorter and pulled back. She is still thin and trendy in a crushed-velvet blouse and leggings, but a whole-grain diet and exercise seem to have added sturdiness to a wiry frame.
From the age of 10, after her parents' divorce, Steinem was left to care for her mentally ill mother in a tumbledown house in Toledo, Ohio.
That experience, she explains, led her as an adult to mother a movement - and ultimately ignore her own emotional needs. In relearning those needs, Steinem believes that she can be more effective. But nowhere in the book does she say establishing self-worth should take precedence over social accent. At heart, this book is about their co-dependence.
"If someone had given me this book before I wrote it, I don't think I would have understood it," she says. "I probably would have gotten the political part first - structures outside us undermine our self-authority in order to get us to obey their authority. But whether I would have been ready to go back to my own past. . . . I think you need to feel ready."