No, Gloria Steinem does not sleep in a bed with a canopy. Yes, her oven works.
In the barrage of stories and interviews that have accompanied the publication of her new book, ”Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem” (Little Brown, $22.95), reporters have seemed inordinately interested in Steinem`s statement that her apartment reflected a childhood she had tried to wall away from her adult life.
”I remembered longing to escape the littered, depressing, rat-infested house where I lived alone with my mother; yet I had re-created an upscale, less dramatic version of it in my own apartment with cardboard boxes, stacks of papers and long absences (from it),” writes Steinem, founder of Ms. magazine and a prominent figure in the women`s movement.
Her admission in a recent Vanity Fair magazine interview that she lived in her apartment for almost five years before finding out the oven didn`t work has been repeated in any number of recent stories. So has the fact that with the advance money she got from the book she bought the apartment downstairs to use as an office and gradually began to redecorate her living space. She made herself a ”real” bedroom for the first time, complete with a bed with draped material hanging from the ceiling.
Seeing the interest that people have taken in that aspect of her life, Steinem, 57, said in a recent interview at her apartment that she believes she should have written more about how a person makes a home for herself because it is an area with which many women can identify.
”There is still something in us that says we don`t have the right to make a home for ourselves. We can only make a home for our husbands. I think there are many women living in a temporary state, even though they are leading a different kind of life. That is something we still haven`t changed.”
It is hard to picture Steinem`s apartment, in a brownstone on a New York street of similarly graceful, turn-of-the-century homes, in its former state. Rich, draped materials, ample sofas, collections of shells, marble eggs and kaleidoscopic paperweights give an Oriental, sensuous feeling to the rooms.
Yet in her book Steinem admits that her home once reflected a past she thought she had put behind her.
”Why couldn`t I give myself security and a pleasant place to live?”
she writes. ”Because they hadn`t been given me as a child. . . . It may be obvious that we continue to treat ourselves the way we were treated as children, but I had lived a diverse and seemingly aware life for more than 40 years without figuring it out.”
Steinem`s latest book, her third, is about figuring things out, about journeying to painful parts of one`s life to confront emotions and memories that unknowingly had been shaping her life.
She says that the impulse to write the book ”came out of traveling about this country for 20 years and seeing so many women who are amazing, smart and doing things of great courage, who just don`t believe in themselves in a very deep sense. I meant it to be a book for other people.”
The first version of the book, which she started in the mid-`80s, was definitely for the people: 230 calm and learned pages of philosophy is how she describes it. But when she showed it to a friend, Carmen Robinson, a family therapist from Montreal, Steinem learned that the book she was writing for other people was something she desperately needed.
What Robinson explained was that Steinem, herself, had a self-esteem problem: She had forgotten to put herself in the book.
”All the time I was writing it, I had a sensation of having started out on a platform-a sheet of glass above the terrain I was writing about-and not able to get off it,” Steinem admits.
How could someone so involved with issues of equality and value not value herself? Even more puzzling, how could someone involved in a movement that encourages looking inward for strength not have made that inward journey herself?
Steinem explains that exploring the inner life was not entirely new to her, but that the problem was one of depth.
”There are two parts (of the women`s movement) that have needed deepening. One is the assumption that once the external barriers are removed, the internal reflection of those barriers could just organically diminish. The other is that there is a great life-giving emphasis on our problems as women, but less on our particular problems as particular women in our childhood. So it`s not a question of going inward or not, but a question of (to) what depth you go inward.”
She began the book again, having started to understand that ”we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.”
She admits that in rewriting the book, which took three years to complete, she was exploring one area of her life for the first time: her childhood.
”I really had built a wall between me and my childhood,” she says. ”It took a fairly enormous accumulation of crises to make me realize that.”
Her parents, Leo and Ruth Nunevillier, divorced when she was 10, and with her father gone and a sister, Susanne, 9 years older away from home, Steinem became the caretaker of a mother who had had a nervous breakdown and suffered spells of depression.
Worrying about money, paying bills and being a caretaker at an age when most children are being taken care of had affected her life in ways that Steinem says she was not aware of until she began to write the book.
Because Steinem has made her livinb as free-lance journalist and started the feminist magazine Ms. in the early 1970s, it is surprising to hear her admit that when she was in Smith College she believed it was impossible to be a writer.
”I wanted to be a writer; I depended on my writing ability to get me through exams I hadn`t really studied for. But I didn`t think it was a possibility. I almost had never seen a woman journalist. I knew of a couple of (women) war correspondents. But nothing in my life, no person in my life led me to believe that you could make a living from writing.”
Yet Steinem interviewed for writing jobs just before graduation from Smith in the late 1950s. At Time magazine she was told that women could only be researchers, not writers. At an advertising agency she was told that women could work in the background but could not be account executives.
Instead, Steinem opted for a one-year fellowship in India through Smith College, which she extended another year and where she wrote pieces from a foreigner`s perspective for local Indian newspapers.
Steinem says she fell in love with India and returned home with ”an enormous sense of urgency” about the problems confronting the Third World, about the extremes of wealth and poverty.
Unable to get a job in which she believed she could educate people about these issues, she turned her attention to working with student groups in Cambridge, Mass.
In 1960 she moved to New York and got a part-time job as the assistant to Harvey Kurtzman, creator of Mad magazine and publisher of Help, a political satire magazine.
Soon Steinem left Help and began writing unsigned pieces for Esquire magazine with such titles as ”Cooking for Bachelors.” Her first bylined, piece, ”The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed,” about the contraceptive pill, also appeared in Esquire in 1962.
She began free-lancing for Glamour, the Sunday New York Times and other publications.
While writing a political column for New York magazine, a new publication founded by Clay Felker in the late 1960s, Steinem discovered the women`s movement.
”It was 1968 or so, and I was 34 years old. All my empathy and sense of identity had always gone to movements, whether Third World or civil rights. I identified with the underdog or any discriminated-again st group. Which I think happens to women all the time. But we don`t realize that we are one. At the same time I couldn`t get an apartment (as a single woman), wasn`t being paid equally for a job, all these things,” she says.
In 1969, when the U.S. Supreme Court had not yet ruled on abortion, the New York state legislature was considering liberalizing the state`s restrictive abortion law.
”A (closed) hearing was called in Albany,” Steinem says, ”so an early group of feminists held a hearing of their own in the city in a church basement to listen to women who had had these experiences (with abortions).” She went to cover this hearing and was deeply moved by what she heard.
”These women stood up and told what it was like having abortions, all the things that people have now forgotten. That there was incredible sexual harrassment involved in it. You could only get an abortion if you slept with the abortionist first. All the physical danger, all the bargaining on the part of the few hospitals that did legal abortions-(such as) you could only have an abortion if you agreed to be sterilized. Women in the audience stood up, tears streaming, to tell their stories.”
Steinem says that she had had an abortion after she graduated from college, while living and working in London, but never told anyone. (Later, in the premiere issue of Ms. in 1972, Steinem`s name appeared on a manifesto signed by well-known women declaring that they had had abortions.)
She went back to the magazine and wrote her piece. She explains that while she did not at that time have the courage to write about her personal experience, she did end the article by saying that if ”this new, small radical feminist movement could coalesce with the larger (more mainstream movement represented by the National Organization for Women), . . . there would be an important national movement.”
Interested in the issues of the feminist movement-”they made such sense of my own life experience”-Steinem searched for outlets for her stories without much success.
This search started her on the lecture circuit and, a few years later, led to the founding of Ms. magazine, which consumed her time, energy and interest for the next 15 or so years.
Writing the book also forced Steinem to recognize the depths of her anger at having to sell the magazine in the mid-1980s, at ”the unfairness at seeing a magazine that had such an influence on the country, yet on the one hand couldn`t be supported by advertisers and on the other hand people blamed us
(for failure to interest our audience), as if the readers didn`t want it,”
she says. ”Whatever its faults, the readers wanted it.”
About the time the magazine was sold, Steinem learned she had breast cancer.
”I always hesitate to mention it,” she says, explaining that she believes her experience was tame compared to what many women have gone through.
”Thanks to the impact of the women`s health movement on at least some of the health-care system,” she writes in her book, ”my treatment consisted of a Novocain shot and a biopsy at a women`s clinic, while I watched an infinitesimal lump being removed in what turned out to be its entirety. …” The lump was malignant. After a lymph-node sampling, Steinem says, the rest of the procedure involved six weeks of radiation treatments. She says her ”self-treatment”-a change in diet, reducing stress and increasing sleep-has helped her remain cancer-free for five years.
However, Steinem says that when she began the book, her feelings about the experience were still ”unassimilated.”
What she eventually realized was that she was less afraid of death than of aging.
”Of course I am afraid of death, but when you first hear this diagnosis of cancer you don`t know what it is going to mean. I was in an ending place:
The magazine was lost; a lot of things were coming to an end. So it seemed sort of logical.
”The other thing I thought of was that I have had a wonderful life. Which made me realize that our feelings about death have to do with our feelings about life, our lives up to then. People who are very depressed and wiped out about dying are people who haven`t yet done what they wanted to do.”
In her 57 years Steinem has done a lot. Yet she says there is still plenty more to do. Besides her continuing work with the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national, multi-issue women`s fund that focuses on grass-roots projects that bring women together, there is another book to write, recently auctioned off to Simon & Schuster, about what happens to women in families of inherited wealth and power.
Then there is a whole new territory to explore, the territory of aging. Steinem discovered that her fear of aging was not a fear of the physical process, such as wrinkles. Being an older woman, says Steinem, was ”a way I didn`t know how to be and didn`t have any role models to show me how to be.” While admitting that ”a process is still going on here,” Steinem says she now realizes that aging is ”another country.”
”And it`s an interesting country,” she says. ”It`s full of new things, not just a winding down.”
Perhaps there will be another book about her explorations of this ”new” country. Steinem says that before feminism she had wanted to write a book in which no publisher was interested, ”The Old Lady Book,” filled with portraits of older women doing wonderful things.
If she writes the book it probably will be honest and revealing. If someone else writes it a few decades from now, Steinem no doubt will be included.
