Taking Tea With Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem is about to turn 73 years old. And no one seems more astonished than she. "Shocking, isn’t it?" she laughs. Shocking, too, she admits, is that people now read about her in the history books. Just don’t call her an icon. "I just try to get my dry cleaning and my work done," she says. "And besides, being an icon means an iconoclast is just around the corner, so I don’t identify with that."

But it is clear that Steinem — one of the most visible and vocal leaders of the women’s movement — is an icon to the women who packed a ballroom recently at the Sheraton Harbor Island. Steinem was in San Diego for the 8th Annual Tea by the Sea to benefit the Center for Community Solutions, the agency that operates the city’s only Rape Crisis Center, and works to prevent sexual assault and domestic violence. Before speaking to the appreciative crowd, Steinem took time to reflect on her life and the movement with which she is so inextricably linked.

She spent her early years on the road, traveling with her family in a trailer while her father sold antiques. After her parents divorced, the young Steinem lived in Toledo, caring for her mother who suffered from severe depression. She later graduated from Smith College, traveled to India on a scholarship, and began working as a journalist in New York. Steinem gained attention in 1963 for her article, "I was a Playboy Bunny," posing as a waitress to expose the exploitation of women at the Playboy Club.

In 1972, Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine — the first national women’s magazine actually run by women. It gave voice to feminist views and a face to the women’s movement, launching Steinem as one of its symbols. Over the years, she has written extensively for national publications, and has authored several bestsellers including Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, and Moving Beyond Words. Steinem also helped to found the Women’s Action Alliance and the National Women’s Political Caucus. She was the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women where she started "Take Our Daughters to Work Day."

It is now a far different world for daughters than that of their mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers. The feminist movement, which began to take root in the mid-1800s, has been credited with fundamental changes in society that were seen as radical just a century ago, including the right to vote, divorce, or own property. In the 1960s, feminists in Steinem’s day fought for the whole enchilada: social and political equality, pay equity, and reproductive rights — battles that continue to this day.

While it may seem that younger women today take hard-fought gains for granted, Steinem argues they’re still angry about injustice or inequity, but they have a different style. "I do think older women need to recognize the style in which younger women are changing the world and not to expect it to look the same as ours," she says. "And some of it is also a kind of mother-daughter thing. Women of my generation who didn’t get the reward and gratitude they deserved for their courage and pioneering now expect it from the daughters."

While Steinem believes older women are still less valued in society than men, they too have made progress. "I think we have shattered a lot of age barriers because a day in which Marilyn Monroe felt suicidal as she approached 30 is very different even in popular culture and movies from the day we’re living in now, where women are playing sexual roles at 30 and 40 and 50." In fact, she says, there’s "another country" for women after they turn 50, one that is freer. "The country women live in pre-50 is often devoted to others — nurturing others, depending on others for our identities — whether it’s our husbands, our children, our looks, our sexual identity, whatever it may be," she says. "I think after 50 we become who we were at nine or ten before the feminine roles descended down upon us. We knew what we wanted, we knew what we thought."

The main battle facing the women’s movement now, Steinem says, is "getting rid of every remnant of George Bush" — she says the phrase three times for emphasis -who she regards as the most "anti-equality, war-like, destructive president" in history. Steinem says New York Senator Hillary Clinton has a shot at the White House now that surveys show 80 percent of voters say they’d vote for a woman. And she would be happy to see a man become president — Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who Steinem regards as a feminist.

There are personal challenges remaining for Steinem as well. "The biggest mountain is left to climb," she says. "It’s writing. I have much too little time to do it." Steinem continues to travel the country as a lecturer, which she’s done for the past 35 years. It will be the subject of her next book, Road to the Heart: America as if Everyone Mattered, which Steinem says is nine years overdue. It’s a road book and memoir. I hope it will encourage others to become organizers."

That road, at times, has been marked by personal tragedy. Steinem married human rights activist David Bale when she was 66 only to lose him to lymphoma of the brain just three years later. But she doesn’t regret the roads not taken, including having children. "No, I’ve gained enormously in relationships and friends, in love and community, and the quality of my life is great," she says. But then she laughs. "It’s the writing that suffers."

As she looks back on her life, she’s asked, what will her legacy be? "It’s not for me to say," Steinem says. "People ask me things like, ’What is your proudest accomplishment?’ And I always say, ’I haven’t done it yet.’" — Andrea Naversen, photo by Carol Sonstein