My Life on the Road (14 page)

·
It’s 1971, and I’m just beginning to talk about the women’s movement—with Dorothy, not yet on my own—when I get an invitation to give the address at the
Harvard Law Review
banquet. This annual event is reserved for top students, and guest speakers tend to be political leaders or prestigious legal scholars—definitely all men. Once I discover this isn’t a practical joke, it’s an easy no. I tell them the woman they should ask is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a brilliant lawyer who was one of the first female students at Harvard Law School, and who has just created the first Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Then I get a call from Brenda Feigen, a friend who also was one of the early women at Harvard Law and who now runs the Women’s Rights Project with Ruth. She says I have to do it—Ruth will never be asked because she left Harvard to go to Columbia Law School—and besides, if I say no, they may go back to men-as-usual. Brenda promises to help with research and to ask current women law students to do the same. I remind her that my fear of public speaking is just as serious as her fear of flying, but she says I can write every word, and it will be more like reading than speaking. This and other arguments finally make me say yes to my worst nightmare.

This is how I find myself on the Harvard campus with Brenda, interviewing women who make up just 7 percent of its law students. I learn that the segregated tradition of “Ladies Day,” the only time when women are called on in class, has only just ended, and that the faculty are still 100 percent white and male. So sure of themselves are the powers-that-be that the sign over the men’s room in the library stacks just says
FACULTY
. I write this all down and become even more nervous. These students are depending on me.

Ultimately, I find myself standing at a podium in Boston’s Sheraton Plaza Hotel. The Harvard Club of Boston, where the banquet is usually held, makes women enter through a side door. I look down at the long 1930s dress I’ve found in a thrift shop and see its velvet skirt vibrating slightly due to my shaking knees. I’m not sure how much this nervousness is audible in my voice—Brenda is pretending I’m fine; this is a piece of cake—but twenty-seven years later, Ira Lupu, then a third-year Harvard law student in the audience, will write his remembrance: “Her delivery was rhetorically unimpressive; she seemed nervous, and spoke quietly and without sharp effect or physical punctuation.”
4

He didn’t know the half of it.

My speech is called “Why Harvard Law School Needs Women More Than Women Need It.” I manage to get through the main part, arguing that only equality creates respect for the law, and that only democratic families create democracy. Yet I know that the audience knows that women law students have provided ammunition—interviewing them has already created resentful rumblings among the faculty—and I launch into their testimony at the end:

I’m so relieved to be finished that I can’t tell whether the applause is approving, disapproving, or just polite. But then something happens that, I will later learn, is unprecedented. A portly man in a tuxedo rises from his table, his face flushed with anger, and protests not the content of what I have said but the very idea that I dare to judge Harvard Law School at all. I don’t know who he is, but I definitely know he’s outraged. When he finally sits down, there is silence in the ballroom—then talk gradually resumes, like an ocean covering a volcano.

Later Brenda tells me this was Vernon Countryman, a Harvard Law professor of debtor-creditor relations. I’m unsure whether to be scared or proud of his response, yet something tells me it’s more the latter. He has embodied what women at Harvard Law School are dealing with.

Only decades later will that law student in the audience confirm my feeling in the moment. “I remember being shocked that a Harvard Law professor could publicly appear so incoherent and out of control,” Ira Lupu wrote. “His remarks seemed designed to put Steinem in her place as a young woman untutored in the facts and values of the Harvard Law School, rather than to rebut her comments in any rigorous way. The banquet ended with the quietly held yet widespread sense that Countryman had underlined Steinem’s theme of male boorishness and disrespect for women in a way that her words alone could not do.”
5

Finally, Lupu solved the mystery of why I was invited in the first place. His belated essay explains that his then wife, Jana Sax, had felt “profound alienation from the principles and methods reflected in her spouse’s legal education.” She suggested me as a speaker, and the president of the
Harvard Law Review
said yes. We each played a role: a wife, women law students, Brenda, me, even the angry professor.

In this way, Harvard Law School gives me a big gift: I worry less about hostile responses. Ultimately, they educate an audience. As the great Flo Kennedy will suggest later when we begin to speak together, “Just pause, let the audience absorb the hostility, then say, ‘I didn’t pay him to say that.’ ”

·
It’s 1972, and Margaret Sloan and I are traveling to Texas campuses. One is East Texas State University, where future farmers study agriculture, and another is Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where future leaders study whatever they please. Yet as different as they are, a pair of women students approach us afterward with the same passionate message in each place:
If you think this is bad, you should come to Texas Women’s University.
Each pair is also one white woman and one black woman, unusual in itself.

Back home in New York, we keep hearing from more TWU students. It’s a campaign to get us there, without a speakers’ program to pay expenses—at least, without one willing to invite us. Who can resist?

Denton turns out to be a small town known for its rodeos and hot summers. Students take us around the campus of low buildings, plus one tower that is topped by the president’s office—like a warden’s aerie overlooking a prison, as the students point out. The good news about this state-supported women’s university is that its low cost invites women who might never otherwise be able to go to college, including black and Latina students. The not-so-good news is that TWU is known for two specialties. One is domestic science, which was originally a way of elevating women’s work in the home but has become a field that students feel is training them for marriage or domestic service jobs. The other is nursing, the most organized of the professions that are mostly female, but it is still paid less than such similar but mostly male professions as pharmacy. The worst news is that the many sexual assaults on campus have been met with fences, curfews, and male guards that restrict the victims, but not the victimizers. In fact, students suspect that a couple of the guards
are
the rapists.

Margaret and I find ourselves in TWU’s main auditorium. It is packed with students and exploding with new feminism, combined with civil rights and black power, plus the newly founded La Raza Unida, a national party created by Mexican American leaders in Texas. Already, La Raza has confounded expectations by becoming the first national political party to support reproductive freedom, including abortion.

Many of these students have experienced the double discrimination of sex and race—not only in the mainstream but also by race in the women’s movement, and by sex in the black power movement. They applaud when Margaret says, “I still have scars on my head and dust between my toes from marching across that bridge in Selma. Once I was left for dead. But when the organizing began, they asked me to make coffee.” They laugh with relief when she says, “I want to make sure that when the revolution comes, I’m not cooking grits for it.” As she sums up, “I’m not black on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and a woman on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.”

Since many have also been raised with traditional southern ideas of womanhood, they also cheer when I talk about women feeling like a half-person without a man standing next to them, whether on Saturday night or throughout life. This would surprise men, too, I explain, if they realized how little it matters
which
man is standing there. More laughter, and cries of “Tell it!” They’re glad to hear what a black woman once said to her white southern sisters: “A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.”

Though some in the audience yell out objections to Margaret’s sprinkling of four-letter words—after all, she is a poet from the South Side of Chicago—she gets applause when she says that if critics don’t like the way she talks, they can leave. When someone asks me if I believe in God and I say no—I believe in people—I get a hushed silence. So I go on: If, in monotheism, God is man, man is God. Why does God look suspiciously like the ruling class? Why is Jesus, a Jewish guy from the Middle East, blond and blue-eyed? There is a relieved response of laughter, and even a few shouts of “Tell it!”

At the end, the student organizers give us the highest praise: the result has been worth the year they spent persuading us to come. We have made them look reasonable by comparison.

Home in New York, we read newspaper clippings from Denton that sum up our subject matter as “sexism, racism, job discrimination, children, welfare, abortion, homosexuality, bisexuality,” in a discussion described as “emotional, controversial, thought provoking, relevant.” There are also quotes from audience members who call this lecture and discussion “embarrassing” and “the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” It seems that people went away either angry or inspired. For Margaret, it’s a proof of need that helps her decide to cofound the National Black Feminist Organization—together with Eleanor Holmes Norton from the EEOC, Jane Galvin Lewis of the Women’s Action Alliance, artist Faith Ringgold, author Michele Wallace, and many others.

After Margaret moves to Oakland, she keeps organizing and working in women’s centers there. When I visit her, we reminisce about the two dozen campuses we visited together in less than one year—but our conversation always comes back to TWU.

Thirty-five years pass before I’m back on that campus again. This time I’m campaigning for Hillary Clinton in her 2008 primary race for the presidency, and speaking together with Jehmu Greene, a young African American woman who, like me, has decided, after much soul-searching, to campaign for Clinton—because of her longer experience in battling the ultra-right wing—and to support Obama in the future. Now this campus is offering a master’s degree in women’s studies, though many others still don’t offer even a women’s studies major. Rarer still, TWU will soon offer a Ph.D. It also encourages men as well as women to enter its nursing program. Most unusual, a student cannot graduate without taking a course in multicultural women’s studies. No wonder Oprah Winfrey has spoken here—twice. Except for a library still famous for its cookbook collection, the campus bears little resemblance to the past.

After our brief talks and a lively discussion about getting out the vote, one woman comes up to tell me that she was on campus when Margaret and I were here decades ago. She calls our visit “shock therapy” that began a year of organizing. The TWU human rights movement forced the administration to deal with student grievances, took on sexism and racism together, and is now working with undocumented immigrants in North Texas.

I have to tell her that Margaret, who moved with her daughter to California about a year after we were at TWU, died after a long illness at only fifty-seven. Her daughter held a memorial in California, and together, we organized one in New York. It’s hard to believe that Margaret isn’t here on this campus where she was once so alive.

“You know the hospital shows on television?” this woman asks. “When someone’s heart stops and has to be restarted with electric paddles? That’s what you and Margaret did for us. Please tell her daughter our hearts have been going ever since.”

·
We learn most where we know the least. For me, this means Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the only institution of higher learning in the world that is designed for students who are deaf. It’s a revelation.

I arrive there in 1983 to spend a day meeting students, then giving a lecture in the evening. Aside from the fact that I need an interpreter, this campus seems like any other. Students ask me how we started
Ms.
magazine, since they’re thinking of starting a magazine on campus. I ask them about the courses they love. There is a controversy about the presidency. Students want a role in choosing the next one, so they at last will have a leader who is also deaf and understands their world. We talk about tactics for making that happen, from petitions to tuition strikes. I see that it’s harder to take risks when there is no other campus like the one you’re on, yet they’re determined. Like more than 80 percent of the students here, those I meet come from hearing families, and they value this short time of being with people who share their experience and culture.

I know enough to look at the person speaking to me, not at the interpreter who is making sign language audible for my benefit. I have the feeling of understanding and being understood.

But the more time I spend with the Gallaudet students, the more I enter into a world where liveliness of expression is a universal art form. Because their words are kinetic and their faces expressive, I feel as if I’m fully present in conversation in a rare way. I know how much I would be missing without a signer as the bridge, but an effort is being made to include me. Young women tell me how misinterpreted they feel in, say, a room full of hearing men, given the stereotype of deaf women as doubly helpless, no matter how strong they really are. I learn how much less likely a deaf woman is, statistically speaking, to be employed or married or in a long-term relationship—even less than her male counterparts—given this double standard. Yet both the men and women are so fast, subtle, and nuanced in talking to me and to each other that I feel as if my audible words are like bricks, and their visual ones are sea shells and feathers.

Ever since Judy Heumann and other disability activists made the point of inclusion in Houston in 1977, feminist speakers have been better about asking that a meeting provide signing and be wheelchair accessible, although it doesn’t always happen. At Gallaudet, however, there is not just one signer where the audience can see him or her and I cannot, but one on each side of the stage, and also on each of a dozen or so special platforms around the audience. This means I can see a chorus of motion while I’m speaking. There is also the signing of lyrics and poetry. It’s like watching a ballet—a democratic ballet that everyone could learn if we tried.

By the time I leave the signing world for the world of the hearing, I’m not quite the same person. I’ve seen an expressive, visual world that isn’t like the one I’ve been walking around in. Coming home, I feel let down. Where are all those expressive people?

Five years later, I read that the student movement there, with the wonderfully direct name
Deaf President Now
, has succeeded. In 1988 Gallaudet University finally hires its first deaf president and even appoints a first deaf chair of its board of trustees. This is a long overdue victory on a campus where Abraham Lincoln authorized the first degrees. I also see that on other campuses, activists are framing deafness and disability as a civil rights issue, not as a medical problem that needs fixing. They are developing a whole new field called disability studies. Like black studies and women’s studies, these programs begun by a social justice movement are about changing the system to fit people, not the other way around. Since disability may be a state that people both enter and leave—from skiing accidents to combat injuries, from giving birth to aging and crutches—ramps instead of steps turn out to be important to most people at some time in their lives. A few are even citing the 360 million deaf people in the world—or the million in this country—and studying sign language as a language requirement.

Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine? Thanks to those Gallaudet students, I can imagine it.

·
On campuses that offer courses in hospitality training or hotel management, visitors often stay in a hotel that is the practice lab for students. I’m having coffee in the lobby of one in the Midwest when a tall, rangy, fair-haired young man in cowboy boots asks if he can sit down. Because he seems so shy—and because he says he has long admired both me and a particular professional baseball player—I’m surprised. Never before have I been so paired.

As we talk about his hopes of starting a country inn, I have the odd and overwhelming feeling that I’m talking to another woman. He is a cowboy, very taciturn and masculine, yet I can’t shake the feeling. When I finally get up the courage to say so, he says, “Of course, that’s because I was raised as a girl.”

Then he tells me this story. I tell you from memory. It isn’t the kind of story that you can forget.