I was only in my 20s, a kid really, when I first heard Gloria Steinem speak to a small gathering in a church in Little Falls, Minnesota. I don’t remember a word she said. I only know that that day she changed my life forever. I left that meeting knowing that that was what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to become like her -- an activist, a mover and shaker for the feminist movement. I was already writing my PhD thesis on 19th century feminism – the First Wave of feminism in the US, but here was the Second Wave right in front of me and I wanted to dive in. I’d found my passion.
A month or two later, I left Little Falls for Duluth, Minnesota. Little did I know that I was moving to one of the most significant hubs of feminist activism in the country at just the right time.[i] Within my first week here I connected with a group of women at the university who were in the process of trying to start a Women’s Studies minor and was quickly recruited to join them in their efforts. I spent the next year very involved in what would be a successful effort and was honored to teach the first Intro to Women’s Studies ever offered at UMD a year later.
In the interim, I had been able to secure an adjunct position in the Political Science department, teaching a new course, “Women and Politics.” One of my students, Joyce Benson, was the president of the Duluth chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and soon I was engaged in the organization. One of NOW’s organizing efforts was to send a busload of us from the Twin Ports to Chicago, Illinois for the ERA rally there. Illinois was one of the few states left necessary to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Several of my “Women and Politics” students joined us. Dressed in white in honor of the suffragists, we marched with tens of thousands along Columbus Avenue in downtown Chicago to Grant Park, where we rallied and sang and listened to speakers, among them Bella Abzug, Jean Stapleton, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem. Illinois was the home of Phyllis Schafly, one of the ERA’s main opponents. As Ms. Steinem was speaking, some in the crowd began booing at the mention of Phyllis Schafly’s name. Ms. Steinem quieted the crowd, and quite memorably for me, urged the crowd not to turn on another woman, suggesting to us that given different circumstances, any one of us might have become a Phyllis Schafly. In a gracious gesture of sisterhood, she reminded us all, in Sally Miller Gearhart’s famous words, that “What we are not, we each could be, and every woman is myself.’”[ii]
A little over a year later, NOW and some other feminist groups brought Gloria to Duluth where she spoke about the dangers of the New Right not only to women’s rights but all human rights. What a prescient speech that was. At one point her speech was interrupted by a baby crying in the back of the lecture hall. Some of those gathered wanted the woman with the baby to step out. Gloria instead said that that was one of the sweetest sounds in the world – reminding us that we tolerate the sounds of manmade machines – lawnmowers, jets flying overhead, air conditioners – yet when a baby cries we immediately think we need to quiet it. Instead, she welcomed it. I would later learn from one of my Women’s Studies students that she had heard that story often because she also had been a baby in the audience that day and was there with her mom and her mom’s friend — the woman with the crying baby. The story of Gloria’s compassion undoubtedly inspired her early feminism.
I had the privilege that day of picking up Ms. Steinem at the airport where her small private plane had landed. She had been barnstorming around small towns in Minnesota and had just come from a rally on the Iron Range where she’d been booed and harassed by angry right-wing protestors. She was pretty drained by the time she arrived in Duluth. She later wrote in a Ms. article about her speaking tour that the young woman who had picked her up in Duluth had helped to calm her. I hope that was true. Our drive to the event venue gave me the opportunity to thank her for the way she had influenced my life’s work and direction. She humbly told me just to pay it forward. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since – teaching Women’s Studies for forty years; writing and lecturing about feminism; working with feminist, environmental, indigenous, and peace and justice organizations; and marching on the streets. For igniting in me the passion that has been feminism in my life, I thank her.
Though she wrote prolifically about feminism, it was not so much her words as how she practiced feminism that early on taught me lessons about how to be a feminist in the world, lessons that have stayed with me throughout my life. She believed in the power of connection and the importance of listening. She was committed to an inclusive feminism. She taught me to speak my truth, no matter how uncomfortable. But mostly she taught me the importance of solidarity – of not engaging in the sexism that bell hooks’ called “trashing” another woman[iii], of treating everyone with dignity, and of the centrality to feminism of compassion. As bell hooks, who had a warm relationship with Steinem, wrote, “Leaders . . . should have the ability show love and compassion, show this love through their actions, . . . .”[iv] And as I would write many years later, “ . . . the prime spirit among feminists I know and the feminism I embrace is this feminism that is the work of love. It may be fueled by anger and rage, or by deep suffering, but anger moves us to love, rage moves us to act against injustice, and sorrow waters the connection of compassion.”[v] I will be forever grateful to Gloria Steinem for helping me to understand, teach, and practice a feminism that places compassion at its center.
Sources
Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. Making Waves: Grassroots Feminism in Duluth and Superior. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016
______. Rebellious Feminism: Camus’s Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Gearhart, Sally Miller. The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women. Watertown, Mass., Persephone Press, 1979.
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
How Gloria Steinem and bell hooks created the feminism that shaped my life | News From The States
Photo Credit for photo of Gloria Steinem: Wikimedia Commons, Jewish Women’s Archive, Share Alike 2.0.
[i] See my Making Waves: Grassroots Feminism in Duluth and Superior.
[ii] Gearhart, 53.
[iii] hooks, 46, 48. To quote her, “Women’s legacy of woman-hating. . . is unlearned when women accept that we are different, that we will necessarily disagree, but that we can disagree and argue with one another without acting as if we are fighting for our lives, without feeling that we stand to lose all self-esteem by verbally trashing someone else. . . . and move beyond the hostility to understanding.” 63.
[iv] Ibid., 161.
[v] Bartlett, 104.