To preteen girls of my 1970s junior high, there was no other way to be. Hiphuggers, short skirts, aviators, long swingy hair. A lot of sass. And for many of us, the first post “Women’s Lib” generation, the expectation of an adventure-filled, self-reliant future with marriage and motherhood as options not imminent requirements.
To her peers in the adult public square at the time, she had threaded the needle of sexy and smart in a way that made male detractors look like idiots. The record of their blustering scorn and contumely and the open ridicule heaped on her, and the women she led, is part of history.
Feminazi. Furry Legged fanatic. C-word. B-word. And the perennial favorite: Man-hater.
They couldn’t take it. Her wit and panache drew out their scorn the way certain salves drain boils. The casual insolence and open diminishment toward her and her peers was part of the cultural wallpaper of the era. Among the men engaged in it, the psychological temperature ranged from lightly snide to psychotic.
Reporting on the creation of Ms. Magazine, ABC news anchor Harry Reasoner said on national television, “I give it six months before they run out of things to say.”
By the 1980s, the Viagran Centurions of the media had mobilized. The shock jocks - Limbaugh, Imus Stern - can’t you take a joke? - and their spiritual grandsons the fight club rape propagandist Tate bros and their herd of manosphere sheep. The disappointed entitled, the preternaturally insecure, the incels, and their insidious cousins, the fascist tiki-torch carrying “You Will Not Replace Us” troops.
Gay Talese, revered chronicler of the famously misogyinistic Italian Mafia, sharing a taxi with Steinem and another great 20th Century phallocrat the author Saul Bellow - once famously said: “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”
To her face.
Can’t you take a joke?
Charles Manson, weighing in from prison in a 1970 interview uttered a phrase that decades later is close to an actual slogan dripped from the mouths of men from JD Vance to the Tate brothers: “Gloria Steinem and all those girls’ libbers, they’re taking the manliness out of the man. They want to be the men, but they don’t want to carry the weight.”
Replacement was always the underlying fear.
Millions of men now share the views of a psychotic mass murdering cult leader.: Taking the manliness out of the man.
Steinem saw this coming back in 1972: “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” In later speeches she would add to that: “But too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry.”
She could name the core issues like no one else. Cut to the chase. “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon.”
And: “She will need her sisterhood.”
Where is that sisterhood half a century later?
It boggles the mind that successful right wing American female leaders like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Karoline Leavitt, Nancy Mace, Erika Kirk and the millionaire influencers and online trad wives and their followers do not revere this woman who demanded their equal humanity and enabled their rise from second class citizenship. Among other things they enjoy, they owe their professional status, credit cards and bank accounts and freedom to divorce to this woman’s leadership.
Instead of insisting that their men change to accommodate the new reality, they have decided to solve the problem of reactionary Tate-ish, manosphere incel-hate and preacherman misogyny disguised as the Lord’s word, by cheerleading for it, by promoting a retreat to primordial female roles. And taking that to the bank — from which they hire the nannies to watch the children they like to claim progressive women hate to care for.
Everything old is new again. For now.
Gloria has sailed into her rest. As Yeats wrote in his epitaph for Jonathan Swift, savage indignation there cannot lacerate her breast.
But in the era of state-regulated forced childbirth, wormy so-called Christian pastors calling for the return of god-given, man-only voting, and the resurgence of Trump style transactional sugar-daddy relationships between bloated, insecure Viagrans and surgically disfigured foot-bound younger women who have given up the fight, indignation is now ours to nurture and maintain.
Excellent. I was one who was expected to be a trad wife. A Doctor’ s wife of all things.
But I ended up as de facto single mom going back to school and getting my masters while taking care of the car pooling and other parenting tasks
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If it wasnt the co-operation with other women and the consciousness raising happening in the culture I wouldn’t have survived
The fact that so many of today’s younger generation of women don’t know about or don’t appreciate Steinhem’s incredible work or, even worse, argue for the “pre-feminism” world has long been one of my greatest frustrations as a woman.