My Life on the Road (29 page)
Read My Life on the Road Online
Authors: Gloria Steinem
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Feminism, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail
W
hen a book has taken shape over two decades, there are a lot of people to thank.
Ann Godoff at Random House was the first to believe in an on-the-road book by a traveling feminist organizer. Then Kate Medina became my editor, and if there were an Olympics for kindness, support, and patience, she would win it.
Hedgebrook, the women writers’ retreat on Whidbey Island, Washington, gave me solitude, a magical cabin, and time to discover and write the story of my father.
Because I depended on memory as a curator of stories—the road is way too intense for journal keeping—I turned to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College to supply places and times, and to Google to deliver everything my memory did not.
I was lucky to have houseguests who volunteered as readers—especially Lenedra Carroll, who read it all, and also Agunda Okeyo. New York friends Kathy Najimy and Debra Winger read chapters. My friend Irene Kubota Neves, a journalist and an age peer, read and commented on every word, and even rescued some from the cutting-room floor.
Through all of this, Robert Levine, my friend and literary agent, kept his faith that a book would get done, and gave the publishers faith, too.
As the years stretched on, I could devote time each summer to writing, then I was traveling the rest of the year and starting over again the next summer. Stories were soon creating more than one book.
Though I was often rescued by my colleague Amy Richards, who read and gave me advice, there was still way too much. Finally, Suzanne Braun Levine, the first editor of
Ms.
magazine, who knows how to cut like a sculptor, joined Amy. Together, they turned Way Too Much into Just Enough. As they pointed out, I could keep on publishing road stories on a website. (Go to
gloriasteinem.com
.)
I’ve also had the pleasure of watching Amy, my co-worker through three books and more than twenty years, become a writer of more books than I, a giver of more lectures than I, and a creative organizer here and in other countries. There is no one who could make me feel better about the present and more hopeful about the future.
Finally, I thank Robin Morgan for reminding me, even when the road was causing me to write the least, that there is no better moment in life than finding the right word.
1
Marilyn Mercer, “Gloria Steinem: The Unhidden Persuader,”
McCall’s,
January 1972.
2
Robin Morgan,
The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches, 1968
–
1992
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), pp. 275–77.
3
Margaret Atwood, “Headscarves to Die For,”
New York Times Book Review,
August 15, 2004.
4
Because only women’s ova pass on mitochondrial DNA and only men’s sperm pass on the Y chromosome, the mix in a current population indicates who came from afar and who didn’t. Natalie Angier, “Man vs. Woman: In History’s Travel Olympics, There’s No Contest,”
New York Times,
October 27, 1998; she is quoting from a study by the Harvard School of Public Health and Stanford University, reported in Mark T. Seilelstad, Eric Minch, and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “Genetic Evidence for a Higher Female Migration Rate in Humans,”
Nature Genetics
20 (November 1998).
5
Douglas Martin, “Yang Huanyi, the Last User of a Secret Women’s Code,”
New York Times,
October 7, 2004.
1
Bruce Chatwin,
The Songlines
(New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 161.
1
Besides advertising campaigns and Hollywood movies that romanticized car ownership, Detroit lobbied for legislation against—and sometimes bought up and destroyed—public transportation, from the streetcars of eastern cities to the trains of the California coastline. In a parallel effort, the construction industry sold isolated houses over communal housing. See T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings,
Homes of the Brave
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).
2
To hear exactly why—in very smart and angry observations of men on the Left that may still ring true—read the classic “Goodbye to All That” by Robin Morgan. Originally written for
Rat Subterranean News
in 1970, it has since been reprinted in
The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches, 1968
–
1992
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
3
In checking history, I found that just before the march began, Josephine Baker, dressed in the uniform of the French Resistance, spoke about the racism that caused her move to France. Daisy Bates was the only woman officially listed as a speaker at the march. She was substituting for Myrlie Evers, widow of Medgar Evers, who had been murdered in Mississippi just a month before, but Bates was unable to reach the Lincoln Memorial through the traffic. Male civil rights leaders marched on Pennsylvania Avenue with the press, while female leaders marched on Independence Avenue. Anna Arnold Hedgeman was the only woman on the planning committee for the 1963 march. She consistently demanded that women be speakers on the program. For her inside account, see her 1964 autobiography,
A Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). Also see Keli Goff, “The Rampant Sexism at March on Washington,”
The Root,
August 22, 2013.
4
Danielle McGuire,
At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement, from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
(New York: Knopf, 2010).
5
Valerie Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad Emmett,
Sex and World Peace
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
6
Vincent Shilling, “8 Myths and Atrocities About Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day,”
Indian Country,
October 14, 2013. For more about Columbus’s atrocities, see Howard Zinn,
A People’s History of the United States
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2005).
7
Gloria Steinem, “The City Politic: A Racial Walking Tour,”
New York,
February 24, 1969.
8
Gloria Steinem, “Why Women Voters Can’t Be Trusted,”
Ms.,
1972. Virginia Slims sponsored the American Women’s poll by Louis Harris Associates, the first national survey of women’s opinions on women’s issues.
9
Ron Speer, “Gloria’s Beauty Belies Her Purpose,”
St. Petersburg Times,
December 3, 1971.
10
As If Women Matter:
The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader,
ed. Ruchira Gupta (New Delhi: Rupa Publications India, 2014).
11
The Equal Rights Amendment states: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
12
At a 1979 American Psychological Association conference, Sonia Johnson, a leading Mormon feminist, gave a speech titled “Patriarchal Panic: Sexual Politics in the Mormon Church,” charging the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints with ignoring the separation of church and state by opposing the ERA with an illegal use of church money and power. She was excommunicated.
13
Once we were in Houston, it turned out that other states had slightly overrepresented African Americans, so the national body still reflected the nation. Instead of a time-consuming process of challenging the seating of Mississippi, which was reportedly what the Klan had in mind, the Black Women’s Caucus organized a floor demonstration to let delegates know that Mississippi wasn’t properly represented—and then moved on. Klan delegates were left with nothing to do but echo Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton’s vow “to protect our women from all the militant lesbians.” See Caroline Bird and the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year,
What Women Want: From the Official Report to the President, the Congress and the People of the United States
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).
14
National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year,
The Spirit of Houston: An Official Report to the President, the Congress and the People of the United States
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 157.
15
Ibid. The Houston Women’s Conference and the fifty-six conferences that led up to it gave birth to a majority national agenda and to state and national organizations. See also Bird,
What Women Want.
16
Bird,
What Women Want,
p. 37.
1
Pete Hamill, “Curb Job,” a review of
Taxi!
by Graham Russell Gao Hodges,
New York Times Book Review,
June 17, 2007, p. 19.
2
Gail Collins,
When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009).
3
Christine Doudna, “Vicki Frankovich,”
Ms.,
January 1987.
1
Gerda Lerner,
The Creation of Patriarchy
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 225.
2
Caroline Heldman and Danielle Dirks, “Blowing the Whistle on Campus Rape,”
Ms.,
February 2014.
3
As far as I know, no one ever burned a bra. At the 1968 Miss America Contest in Atlantic City, several hundred feminists protested on the boardwalk by putting girdles, steno pads, aprons, dust mops, and other symbols of the “feminine” role into a trash can and threatening to burn them; it was an echo of Vietnam draft resisters burning draft cards. However, they couldn’t get a fire permit and never burned anything.
4
Ira C. Lupu, “Gloria Steinem at the
Harvard Law Review
Banquet,”
Green Bag,
Autumn 1998.
5
Ibid., pp. 22–23.