The woman who defanged feminism

22
CITY PRESS
4 OCTOBER 2009
FEATURES
SHE’S
BRINGING
SEXY BACK . . .
Feminist icon
Gloria Steinem
speaking in
Johannesburg
this week
Picture:
Khaya Ngwenya
The
woman
who
defanged
feminism
Women’s rights icon Gloria Steinem speaks
to GAIL SMITH about women, power and
why Barack Obama is a feminist
F
ifty years after the feminist revolution turned
the world on its head,
Gloria Steinem is proof
of the movement’s capacity to adapt and
remain relevant. And still draw
some big- name audiences.
In Johannesburg this week, she
shared a platform with Reserve
Bank governor-designate Gill Marcus and Human Rights commissioner Pregs Govender at the inaugural
Wendy Appelbaum Foundation lecture. Steinem addressed some of
South Africa’s most powerful women, including publisher Jane Raphaely, businesswoman Precious
Moloi-Motsepe, former first lady
Zanele Mbeki and musician Sibongile Khumalo.
Meeting for an interview with
Steinem the day after, I found her
beautiful, gracious, funny, irreverent and chic in a New York kind of
way. Having spent a lifetime contemplating women’s inequality and
applying her razor-sharp intellect to
dissecting it and exposing how
privilege operates, Steinem’s conversation is peppered with gems of
feminist sound bytes.
Steinem’s looks made a mockery
of the stereotype of the ugly feminist. Her beauty defanged feminism
and made it palatable.
The thinking, says Steinem, was
that if you could get a man, you
wouldn’t be a feminist: “So I became
‘the pretty one’, which was an insult
to all feminists.”
She used her prettiness to infiltrate the Playboy Bunnies club and
expose the appalling working conditions and exploitative wages earned
by the bunnies. But Steinem, who
co-founded the ground-breaking Ms
magazine in 1972, says her looks often stymied her journalism career.
“I remember going into Life magazine and the editor looking up and
saying: ‘We don’t want a pretty girl,
we want a writer.’ He told me to go.”
Back then, says Steinem, beautiful women were remembered but
were not taken seriously.
Steinem says she regretted the
Playboy experience for a long time.
“It was a dumb thing to do as a
writer, because I was just beginning
to get serious assignments. After
Playboy, I was constantly introduced as an ex-Bunny and it was the
end of all serious assignments.”
New York Magazine, which
Steinem co-founded, saw her return
to serious journalism.
Steinem lives in New York and
most of her work takes place in two
organisations: Equality Now and
the Women’s Media Centre. The latter organisation works with progressive women journalists to monitor media coverage and train progressive women journalists to make
strategic interventions in a news
agenda increasingly dictated by a
much stronger right wing.
During the recent American election Steinem wrote several editorials criticising the polarising of the
presidential choice between Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama as one
of sex versus race.
Referring to racism and sexism as
“caste systems”, Steinem argues
that race and sex are inter-dependent and thus they have to be uprooted together.
“Race and sex are so intertwined
and yet they are treated as if they
are two different things. Which
makes [black] women divide themselves up in inhuman ways and
cheats white women of understanding their self-interest in fighting
racism. We become more reliable
allies when we understand our
stake in it. We’re not doing it for
other people; we’re doing it for ourselves. Part of my job for 40 years
as a white feminist has been to talk
to white women and explain what
our textbooks don’t tell us.”
Steinem backed Hillary Clinton
for the Democratic nomination.
“I supported Hillary because she
had much more experience, especially with the ultra-right wing,
which is the greatest danger both
internally and internationally. And
also because she could’ve served
eight years and Obama could’ve
served the next eight years and he
would still be younger than she is
now. And I backed her because she
couldn’t win.”
Steinem backed Clinton, but never, she says, without also immediately saying that she would be happy to vote for Obama, whom she
calls a ‘feminist’.
“Obama supported important
reproductive rights legislation in Illinois and he married an equal,
which seemed like a good sign. He
behaved like a feminist and I think
it’s important to say that men can
and should be feminists.
“Patriarchy rewards weakness in
women,” says Steinem, “so even
working class women who have to
be physically strong for their work
What happens to men
is called ‘political’
and what happens to
women is ‘cultural’.
It’s a way of
preserving injustice
because culture is
regarded as sacred
are made to feel ashamed for being
strong and to envy women who are
tripping around with bound feet. It’s
absurd. That’s why the sports revolution has been important. Women
now excel at sports and are made to
feel proud and less ashamed of their
physically strong bodies.”
When I ask her what she makes
of the Caster Semenya debacle,
Steinhem says: “I think it’s interesting that they don’t gender test men
who run poorly. That no one says:
‘This man is too slow, surely he
must be a woman?’”
At 75 Steinem continues to challenge stereotypes about women.
When she turned 40 a journalist said
to her: “You don’t look 40,” to which
she responded: “This is what 40
looks like.” She has been outing her
age every year since.
Because we don’t know what 75
should look like, women are shuffled off as soon as they no longer
please the collective eye.
Feminists like Steinem, Betty
Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer and Bella Abzug secured considerable victories for
women’s equality almost 50 years
ago. Thanks to them, affirmative action laws were changed to include
women; marital rape was outlawed;
banks were forced to give women
access to credit; military academies
were forced to admit women; and
abortion was legalised.
But listening to Steinem today, it
is clear that despite the progress,
inequality remains rooted in many
ways. Things affecting men, says
Steinem, are still regarded as being
more serious than the things that
affect women. “What happens to
men is called ‘political’ and what
happens to women is called ‘cultural’,” she says.
“It’s a way of preserving injustice,
because culture is regarded as sacred, natural and unchangeable.”