I am an 87-year-old feminist who has been involved in the women’s movement for most of my adult life, and I am very disturbed by the news media coverage of Gloria Steinem after her death and the endless valorizing of her as the voice of feminism. We will probably be subject to more of the same with the death of Robin Morgan only a few days after Steinem’s, but perhaps two women/feminists getting major media coverage in one week is one too many.
My critique is not primarily because I disagreed with Steinem, though I did on many issues, but because of the news media representation of her as the singular feminist voice. Movements are complicated and the trajectory of the women’s movement has taken many different arcs, and to compress it to one or two “leaders” is galling. But this is America, the land of individualism where structural analyses are suspect, at best, maybe even inspired by communism and America hating.
Women’s lives have changed markedly over the last half century and women like Steinem and Morgen helped that to happen. But they were part of a huge effort that was very diverse, had many leaders, and many more who formed the grassroots movement that, like the Civil Rights Movement, powered these changes.
In the 1960s, women barely had legal status. We were often denied bank loans if we did not have a male relative to co-sign. Our inability to control our bodies was complete. Abortion was illegal until 1973. Even birth control was illegal in some places and was not legalized even in the “Bluest of the Blue” Massachusetts until 1966 and then just for married couples and only after a long grass roots campaign. But it would be another six years before unmarried individuals in the state had access to it. Married women who were abused had few options, as police and clergy regularly advised them to do better as wives in classic victim blaming. Husbands could rape their wives with impunity since there was no concept of rape within marriage until the 1970s when some states made it a crime. It would not be illegal for the whole country until 1993, a mere 33 years ago.
Many issues for women were changing for the better beginning in the late 1960s partially because of the lessons we took from Civil Rights Movement which broke into the “back to Normalcy” post-war era with a demand for justice brought by ordinary people who had been disenfranchised for at least 70 years since the end of Reconstruction and the invalidation of the 13th, 14th, and 15th post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution. Some of the women who initiated the more radical wings of the women’s movement were actually on the ground in the South learning firsthand from the Black men and women who fervently believed they could change the world and had the bravery to challenge the violent white supremacy that reigned in the South. Yes, there were amazing leaders of that movement too — and they did not all agree, either on ideology or strategy — but they would have been ineffective without the grass roots which powered the movement.
For some of us even what the movement was called was contentions. I kept calling what I was involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement for many years. For us, calling it feminism, and taking out the word “liberation,” was a step back, a concession to the mainstream part of the movement, to women like Steinem and Morgen. Many of us did not think that Ms. and NOW were radical enough to change the world. And some of my cohorts in the women’s studies movement did not want transformative change either. As someone who was focused on addressing white supremacy in the larger society, in the Movement, and in women’s studies, I was dismayed to read syllabi that included neither Black women nor white supremacy as an issue. And when race was addressed, it was merely by adding a book by a Black woman to the course, usually at the end, rather than making race as central as gender as it must be if we were to be truly inclusive of all women’s lives.
We are clearly in a very difficult time now. Most of the hard-won gains that Black and other people of color and women gained through struggle have either been wiped out or are under threat. In this dangerous climate, there are movements and people who also amaze me by their audacious belief in the future and making what was never possible, actually in the realm of possibility.
But there are encouraging signs. A few weeks ago, I happened on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram. I admire AOC for many things, but what I saw amazed me and my esteem for her is now over the top. I saw the congresswoman pulling her pants down below her waist and lifting up her shirt, squeezing her belly and injecting herself with hormones to stimulate egg production, talking all the time about how it felt and explaining a fairly complicated process in an easily understandable narrative. I had heard that she was going to freeze her eggs and here she was doing that for all to see, day after day, through the entire procedure, making the process accessible to someone who might not think it was a possibility for her. These posts were not an exercise in narcissism, but a radical feminist praxis that asserts that the personal is political, that what she is doing is not a secret and can be accessible to other women as well. She is opening up a process that maybe mystified for many women and saying with her action and her clear and direct narrative while she is jabbing her belly, “you can do this too and here’s how.” This is women’s liberation in the best sense. She is taking control of her reproduction and as the best kind of movement person, she is sharing it with her community.
She is someone who strives for transformation and has shown that is she able and willing to do the work to make that happen. That she is not singular but is participating in the movement to encourage women to take their power gives me hope.
Arlene Avakian lives in Northampton.