Gloria Steinem Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Gloria Steinem by Risko

 

Gloria Steinem Answers the Proust Questionnaire

The legendary activist on memory, connection, and a perfect day in New York.

BY VANITY FAIR
SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

What is your idea of perfect happiness? 

I’m walking down a street in New York, the sun is shining, I’m on my way to see friends who are chosen family—and I’ve just written a couple of pages that I like. 

What is your greatest fear? 

Dying just a millisecond before I was about to say something I really wanted the people I love to hear. 

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I would love to have a good memory. I’m at an age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm. 

Which living person do you most despise? 

It’s a tie between Donald Trump and Narendra Modi.

What is your greatest extravagance? 

Not paying attention to my own finances, and taking taxis to save time. 

Where would you like to live? Right where I am—with trips to Africa and India. 

What is your most treasured possession? 

A yellow pad and fine-pointed disposable pens. 

What is your favorite journey? 

In a car, at night, with great music on the radio, and someone I love driving. 

What do you consider the most overrated virtue? 

An ability to make money. 

What is your motto? 

We are linked, not ranked. 

What do you dislike most about your appearance? 

When I’m trying not to cry or get angry, I get stony-faced, and people mistake it for indifference. 

Which words or phrases do you most overuse? 

I’m a hope-aholic. 

Who are your heroes in real life? 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bella Abzug, Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, Ela Bhatt, Bette Midler, Julie Taymor, Amy Richards, Ruchira Gupta, Christiane Taubira, Dr. Gayatri Devi, Meryl Streep, Bryan Stevenson, Elisabeth Sunday, Laura Emrick—and so many more.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction? 

Jo March. 

If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be? 

A woman in a time when patriarchy, racism, and nationalism are myths of the past. 

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? 

In my childhood, I was bitten by a rat while asleep, went to the emergency room, and came home to find spots of blood licked up by the rat.

How would you like to die? 

Sometimes when I’m on a plane, as I often am, the weather is rough and we’re worried about going down. I think: If I hold the hand of the person next to me, I’ll be holding everyone’s hand. Like my dear friend, the late Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, I want to know: I’m going to the other side of the mountain.

VANITY FAIR

This much I know / Gloria Steinem/ ‘Go too far, or you’re not going far enough’

‘I’m so excited by young women now’: Gloria Steinem at her apartment in New York. 
Photograph: Christopher Lane/The Observer

THIS MUCH I KNOW

LIFE AND STYLE

Interview

Gloria Steinem: ‘Go too far, or you’re not going far enough’

The feminist activist, 86, on worldwide sisterhood, Spaceship Earth, sexual harrassment in the 1970s and being bitten by rats

Britt Collins

Saturday 4 July 2020

One of my lowest points was waking up on a summer night with a pool of blood on the floor. My hand had been extended over the bed and I’d been bitten by a rat. My mother got me to a local hospital for a tetanus shot, but when we came home the pool of blood had been licked up. I remember longing for a cage to sleep in. I say this because in cities around the world, there are people living with the same fear right now.

The boys in my neighbourhood dreamed of getting out through sports, but the only place I saw women leading free lives was in the movies. So I had the dream of becoming a dancer and literally dancing my way into a better life and world. In high school, I answered an ad and became a magician’s assistant. Briefly, because he left town with the money he was supposed to pay me and a young couple who sang with his act.

The women’s movement feels like a big chosen family. From New York to New Delhi, I can find women friends I trust as family. We are communal animals, so it’s important to have the support of others: friends, colleagues, lovers for company and laughter, a rescuer if I’m in trouble, a will to help if they need it.

I’m so excited by young women now. Remember, I was a 50s person, so I feel as if I just had to wait for some of my friends to be born. We’ve always been accused of “going too far”. That’s why Robin Morgan wrote a brilliant book with that title. Unless you’re accused of that, you haven’t gone far enough!

What we now call the #MeToo movement started in the early 1970s, when women college students first coined the term “sexual harassment” to describe what happened to them on summer jobs. Then the great legal mind, Catharine MacKinnon, wrote this into sex discrimination law. Several cases were brought, all by black women, and there were the Anita Hill hearings that educated the nation. Recently, women have begun to feel OK about coming forward to say that our bodies belong to ourselves. We have yet to explain that there’s no democracy without power over our own bodies.

Seeing New York shut down is sad and frightening, yet there’s also a new sense of concern and connection between and among us. People hang out of their windows to sing and shout together, and even on television you see news anchors at home with their books and dogs and children. I think we have a chance for positive change.

The virus knows that race, gender, class and national boundaries are all fictions. This could help us realise we are all passengers on Spaceship Earth. I’m hoping that this crisis not only exposes inequalities, but helps us learn what movements have been trying to teach us: we are linked, not ranked.

The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off! Thoughts on Life, Love and Rebellion by Gloria Steinem (Murdoch Books, £9.99) is out now.

THE GUARDIAN

This much I know / Gloria Steinem / ‘Do what you love so much you forget what time it is’

‘I was never considered beautiful until I was a [well-known] feminist.
Then I became aware of the reductionist commentary on “what a feminist looks like”’: Gloria Steinem. 
Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

 

THIS MUCH I KNOW

Interview

Gloria Steinem: ‘Do what you love so much you forget what time it is’

The 81-year-old feminist, writer and activist on having a depressed mother, her fear of public speaking, and Beyoncé

Leah Jewett
Saturday 19 March 2016

The idea of being a feminist wasn’t present in the culture I grew up in. I thought I might be able to escape a female fate as an individual, but I didn’t understand it was possible to change the fate itself. That only became clear to me, thanks to other women, in the late 1960s.

My mother loved words. She knew a lot of poetry by heart. She had been a writer before I was born, though I didn’t know that till I was in my teens. Because she had given up her life [to raise a family] she was very depressed often, and unable to function. In many ways I feel I’m living out her unlived life.

I used to be a “pretty girl”, if I made an effort. But I was never considered beautiful until I was a [well-known] feminist. Then I became aware of the reductionist commentary on “what a feminist looks like”, and this attitude that if you were pretty enough to get a man, why would you want equal pay?

Many things touch me, make me well up with tears. I have to stop talking, or somehow feel it for awhile, before I start again.

With every year of higher education, a woman increasingly studies her own absence from history

When women don’t see themselves represented in culture, their confidence diminishes. Research on young male and female achievers showed that a woman’s intellectual self-esteem diminishes with every year of higher education she undertakes, because she increasingly studies women’s absence from history. If you looked at research isolating race, it would probably be the same.

Anything I can dance to makes me happy. It has to have a danceable rhythm, and I am old-fashioned enough to like understandable lyrics.I hate conflict. It makes my stomach drop still. And I never got over my fear of public speaking.

At least female comics exist now. There were very few until the 60s. They usually had to depend on stereotypes in order to be acceptable in their humour. The power to make people laugh is a power in and of itself. It’s absolutely crucial.

I find it extraordinary that Beyoncé, in her video Formation, managed to accumulate so many profoundly different kinds of images. She didn’t only use sensuous images, or those of poverty, or high fashion.Putting them all into one song was unifying, healing. And so was admitting, not trying to conceal, the painful.

The women’s movement globally is still perceived as separate from other world events. Yet the single biggest indicator of whether a country is violent in itself, or would be violent militarily, is not poverty, access to natural resources, religion or even degree of democracy, it’s violence against females. That’s what normalises other violence.

As a child I escaped into books. My idea of reading was that I started a book and kept going all night until I finished it. Also, there was a lake across the road from our house, and I loved the life of that water, catching turtles, seeing a storm as it approached.

I’m a night person. Definitely.

Here’s what I’d advise a teenage girl: do not listen to me – listen to yourself, the unique voice inside you. Do what you love so much you forget what time it is while you’re doing it. Trust your instincts. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck but you think it’s a pig, it’s a pig. To a teenage boy I’d give the same advice.

THE GUARDIAN