The Education of a Woman
By Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Dial Press, 448 pages, $24.95
To embody a belief might seem almost a passive role. After all, the ideas of a movement are usually simple ones: that black people are entitled to the same rights as white ones, for example, or that women deserve the same rights as men. The physical demands of standing for something are often few. Anyone, for example, can sit at a lunch counter, can’t they? The answer, of course, is that few people can, when the act must be done in the withering glare of society’s disapproval.
The issue aries in connection with Gloria Steinem, the subject of Carolyn Heilbrun’s “The Education of a Woman,” because there has been much debate–most of it foolish and ill-natured–about whether Steinem deserves to be regarded as the embodiment of feminism. Was she not singled out by the media simply on the basis of frankly sexy good looks? Weren’t there theorists, notably Betty Freidan and Kate Millett, who forged a theory of sexism more cogent or profound? Weren’t there better speakers in favor of reproductive rights? Better magazines than Ms?
Heilbrun certainly discusses these issues, and in doing so makes an excellent case for the extent of Steinem’s contributions not only as a popularizer but also as a theorist who broadened feminism beyond the white middle class. But Heilbrun also makes clear that Steinem’s character and persona–her courage and commitment–have been extraordinary.
Her most valuable gift to the cause of feminism has been her ability to withstand public scrutiny, maintaining dignity and good humor in the face of ridicule and the distortion of her views. An attractive woman who has enjoyed a number of relationships with men, including director Mike Nichols and Olympic athlete Rafer Johnson, she has also served as an antidote to “the notion that,” in Heilbrun’s words, “all feminists are homely or fat and certainly frustrated.”
Presenting a woman in whom contradictions are plausibly united, Heilbrun portrays Steinem as both flexible and steadfast, anxious to secure consensus and willing to make enemies. For example, she yielded point after point to appease a contentious colleague at Ms. magazine. But when it is not a matter of personalities but of principle, Steinem has been firm. She delivered a homily at a liberal Catholic church in Minneapolis in 1978, that caused a national furor.
“There are political motivations for the fact that God has been a man–usually a white man,” she told the congregation. “. . .the function of the great religions of the world has very often been to support, enshrine, and make sacred this concept and system.”
The Pope soon after decreed that homilies could no longer be delivered by lay persons–a considerable tribute to Steinem’s powers of rhetoric.
It hasn’t hurt that Steinem possesses charm and fluency as a public speaker and a journalist, but just as valuable has been her ability to live apart from a family, enduring turmoil and constant travel. In short, she seems to have had no expectation of what most of us would think of as a normal home life. As Heilbrun points out, this is probably because Steinem grew up without ever experiencing such a thing. It was not until she arrived at Smith College, we are told, that she learned that “other people, rather than standing around the refrigerator, regularly sat down to eat.”
The reality of Steinem’s childhood in a working class neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio, was so peculiar, so grim and so much at odds with normalcy, that for years she concealed the pain of her growing up with humorous anecdotes, or when humor was impossible, with silence. In the plainest terms, Steinem’s mother Ruth was crazy, too unstable to care for Gloria or her older sister Susanne. Her father was an enormous man, weighing 300 pounds, kind and gallant and hopelessly impractical, who dreamed of striking it lucky with odd inventions. One was a “cabin with retracting roof to enable the occupants to get a suntan.” His business stationery read, “It’s Steinemite”–a note of optimism echoed whenever he and Gloria retured from an outing cheerily announcing, “Here we are, a jolly pair.”
After her parents separated, Gloria, her mother and sister lived in one basement room behind a furnace. In high school, she earned money dancing in nightclubs and working as a salesgirl. Nor was misery in Toledo limited to home life. Steinem describes dancing in places where the stage was fronted with chicken wire, “otherwise, when the guys out front had a fight . . . someone would be thrown through the bass drum.”
Women were exploited, but men were too, Steinem points out, by creditors who lent at a ruinous interest rate. “. . .the people became human conduits, never getting out of debt.”
And yet, Heilbrun says eloquently, “Somehow the world into which Gloria Steinem was born allowed her, despite a damaged and sometimes crazy mother and an often absent father, to construct a sustaining sense of pleasure and the chance for consoling fantasy.” Certainly, her experiences both made her sympathetic to the underdog and inured to negative opinion.
Oddly, since Steinem’s youth was vivid and full of pathos–great material for narrative–this is the weakest portion of the book. Heilbrun tells us too much in her own voice. When Steinem is quoted, the past comes alive–but we hear her own words infrequently. Few other witnesses to this time are quoted directly.
There are worse problems. In a decidedly arbitrary passage of analysis, Heilbrun raises the issue: “What, in fact, is a functional family?” She continues, “One woman, a `survivor’ of a childhood with a truly dysfunctional family, faced the question: A functional family, she said, is one is which the children are believed and feel, as children, wanted.” Since the “woman” is never identified further and the context in which children are to be believed is never defined, we can hardly decide what these conclusions are worth.
Heilbrun then alludes to an assertion of Bertrand Russell, hardly an acknowledged expert on the family, that “outstanding” people are produced by unhappy families. Heilbrun reasonably acknowledges that we can’t make children wretched for the sake of their subsequent accomplishments. But she then plunges over a cliff of illogic by adding, “What we can do, but probably will not, is learn that the nuclear family, functioning in the `proper’ way, may well be designed to cause the maximum amount of misery to the most people.”
It is impossible to say how, exactly, she arrives at this trendily fatuous conclusion, but surely there will be many readers, raised properly and happily by their fathers and mothers, to dispute it.
Having cleared such obstacles in the early chapters, we eventually arrive where Heilbrun does much better–New York, with the slash and parry of literary life and the thunk of adjectives striking inflated reputations. Heilbrun zestfully describes Betty Friedan as a spiteful publicity seeker who grudges Steinem the attention of the media and blackens her name with innuendo.
Heilbrun is magnificent in her scorn, here and in describing the unhesitating sexism once displayed everywhere: from Harvard Law School, where Dean Irwin Griswold told women in the class of 1966 that they “were taking the place of men who would be breadwinners,” to Playboy Magazine, where Hugh Hefner memo-ed, “These chicks are our natural enemies . . . what we want is a devastating piece, a real expert, personal, demolition job.”
A tritely macho David Susskind, looks equally Neolithic, calling Steinem “boring and ridiculous” and adding, “I feel like hitting or kissing her–I can’t decide which.” All of which vividly reminds us that some progress has been made. This biography, by turns admirable and exasperating, lets us know how much of that progress was made by Steinem.
