My Life on the Road (30 page)
Read My Life on the Road Online
Authors: Gloria Steinem
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Feminism, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail
1
Actually, this was old journalism. Before the advent of the telegraph, writers used the essay and other literary forms to let the reader see through the eyes of the writer. The many books by the young Winston Churchill were collections of his journalistic essays reported from Cuba, India, and Africa. Then the telegraph required facts first—who, what, why, when, where—then elaborating on them with each paragraph in pyramid form. But simultaneous electronic transmission allows writers freedom again. Facts should be checked, but stories can again be told.
2
Gloria Steinem, “Trying to Love Eugene,”
New York,
August 5, 1968.
3
For an account of exactly how the Republican Party gradually ejected women who supported equality, see Tanya Melich,
The Republican War Against Women: An Insider’s Report from Behind the Lines
(New York: Bantam Dell, 1998).
4
As I was writing this, I turned on the radio, and there was Barry Farber, who is now a digital talk radio host and a “birther,” that is, someone who believes President Obama was not born in Hawaii and therefore took office illegally.
5
Betty Friedan, “Up from the Kitchen Floor,”
New York Times Magazine,
March 4, 1973.
6
Chisholm was the first African American, male or female, to run for the presidency in a major party. It is instructive that she claimed to have experienced sex as an even bigger barrier than race in politics.
7
This would be proven later when Republican presidential candidate John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate. Her support came more from male than from female voters—overwhelmingly white in both cases.
8
Renamed “Right Candidates, Wrong Question,”
New York Times,
February 7, 2007.
9
MSNBC’s
Morning Joe,
January 9, 2008, appearance.
10
Conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago for
The New York Times,
Associated Press,
The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal,
CNN,
St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post,
Tribune Company,
Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel,
and
The Baltimore Sun.
11
More from the Parable of the Nail: If Gore had been elected instead of Bush, we wouldn’t have had a second, optional war in Iraq; or abstinence-only sex education enforced by federal funding for public schools; or the highest unwanted pregnancy rate in the developed world; or an executive order giving billions in tax dollars to “faith-based” centers of right-wing political power; or the global gag rule that deprives poor countries of all U.S. aid if they even offer information about abortion, even with their own funds; or corporate profiteering on privatized wars abroad as well as privatized prisons at home; or a higher percentage of the U.S. population in prison than in any other country in the world; or corporate CEOs whose salaries rose from thirty times that of the average worker before the right-wing backlash took over Washington to an average of 475 times; or an unregulated financial industry that led to a worldwide economic meltdown—and so much more.
1
In 2013 three thousand truckers—angered by low wages, high fuel prices, and a government shutdown in Washington—planned to stage a slowdown on the highways around D.C., plus a peaceful rally within it. Though it’s mostly misdirected at President Obama, and rain masks the slowdown’s effectiveness, it’s a flexing of political muscle that sobers police and makes protesters with no trucks envious.
2
As I write this almost a half-century later, employers have to pay servers only $2.10 an hour if they do or might get tipped, according to federal law. Groups of such workers, almost totally women, are organizing for coverage by minimum wage laws. U.S. Department of Labor, “Minimum Wages for Tipped Employees,” January 1, 2015,
http://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped.htm
.
3
Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,”
Ms.,
April 1976.
4
Rachel K. Jones, Jacqueline E. Darroch, and Stanley K. Henshaw, “Patterns in the Socioeconomic Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortions in 2000–2001,” Alan Guttmacher Institute,
Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health
34, no. 5 (September–October 2002).
5
It never did get published. I didn’t yet understand that dividing news into “hard” and “soft” was one more idea that gender is a reality instead of a political creation.
6
Gloria Steinem, “Ho Chi Minh in New York,”
New York,
April 8, 1968.
7
“Gloria Steinem’s Sermon Protested,”
Lodi News-Sentinel,
September 21, 1978.
8
The church regulated abortion until 1860 or so. For instance, a female fetus could be aborted for up to eighty days, and a male fetus for up to forty days, because it was thought that the male, being superior, quickened earlier. The question of ensoulment or when life begins was restricted to when to baptize. John T. Noonan, ed.,
The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
1
Alice Kohn,
No Contest: The Case Against Competition
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).
2
William Loren Katz,
Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage
(New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 2.
3
Pope Nicholas V, Papal Bull
Dum Diversas,
June 18, 1452.
4
Paula Gunn Allen,
The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), pp. 13–15.
5
Stuart J. Fiedel,
Prehistory of the Americas
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 238; and Robert Silverberg,
The Mound Builders
(Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 280–89.
6
Jack Weatherford,
Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World
(New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988), pp. 59–97.
7
Quoted by John Mohawk et al.,
Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations and the U.S. Constitution
(Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light, 1992), p. 69.
8
For a documentary about the life and work of LaDonna Harris, see
Indian 101,
a film by Julianna Brannum;
http://www.indian101themovie.com
.
9
Here is one example of many: “Walter Ashby was the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, which recorded births, marriages and deaths. He accepted the job in 1912. For the next thirty-four years, he led efforts to purify the white race in Virginia by forcing Indians and other nonwhites to classify themselves as blacks. It amounted to bureaucratic suicide.” Warren Fiske, “The Black-and-White World of Walter Ashby Plecker,”
Virginian Pilot,
August 18, 2004.
10
Ayi Kwei Armah,
Two Thousand Seasons
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann International Literature and Textbooks, 1979).
11
Quoted by J. N. B. Hewitt, “Status of Women in Iroquois Polity before 1784,”
Annual Report to the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1932
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933), p. 483.
12
For an overview of Native American cultures as the main source of democracy and democratic structures, see Weatherford,
Indian Givers,
pp. 133–50.
13
“Native Women Send Message,”
Wassaja
4, no. 8 (August 1976), p. 7.
14
In the Yoruba culture of Africa, there is a Trickster called Eshu, and in India, the always-playful Krishna—and many more. To focus on Native American mythology and also find these parallels, see Lewis Hyde,
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
15
Allen,
The Sacred Hoop
.
16
Wilma would ultimately help in breaking the cycle of dependence to bring indoor running water to Bell, an isolated community of three hundred or so mostly Cherokee families in the backwoods of Oklahoma. Filmmaker Kristina Kiehl’s
The Cherokee Word for Water
(2013) is a dramatization of the story of Bell and a testament to Wilma’s leadership and sense of community.
17
Europeans didn’t believe that the inhabitants they killed and conquered could be descendants of those who developed agriculture, pharmacology, the world’s largest system of earthworks, and democracy itself. Some said the Egyptians must have come here, then left again. In my lifetime, estimates of the length of time since migratory cultures settled this land have increased from 9,000 to 12,000 to 30,000 years. “The Untold Saga of Early Man in America,”
Time,
March 13, 2006.
18
Wilma Mankiller,
Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women
(Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2004).
19
Weatherford,
Indian Givers,
pp. 82–84.
20
Ibid.; see chapter 7, “Liberty, Anarchism, and the Noble Savage.”
21
Robin Morgan,
The Burning Time
(Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2012).
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
Marilyn: Norma Jeane
Revolution from Within
Moving Beyond Words
As If Women Matter
(India)
My Life on the Road
G
LORIA
S
TEINEM
is a writer, lecturer, political activist, and feminist organizer. She was a founder of
New York
and
Ms.
magazines. She is the author of
Moving Beyond Words, Revolution from Within,
and
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,
all published in the United States, and, in India,
As If Women Matter.
Her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks. She co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Free to Be Foundation, and the Women’s Media Center in this country. As links to other countries, she helped found Equality Now, Donor Direct Action, and Direct Impact Africa. For her writing, Steinem has received the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, the National Magazine Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, and the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism. In 1993, her concern with child abuse led her to co-produce an Emmy Award–winning TV documentary for HBO,
Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories.
She is currently working with the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College on documenting the grassroots origins of the U.S. women’s movement, and on a Center for Organizers in tribute to Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. Steinem has been the subject of three television documentaries, including HBO’s
Gloria: In Her Own Words,
and she is among the subjects of the 2013 PBS documentary
Makers,
a continuing project to record the women who made America. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956, she spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship, and was influenced by Gandhian organizing. She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, including the first doctorate of human justice awarded by Simmons College, the Bill of Rights Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Gay Rights Advocates Award, and the Ceres Medal from the United Nations. In 2013, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. Rutgers University is now creating the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies. Steinem lives in New York City and spends about half her time traveling in this and other countries.
