INTRODUCTION
CHILDHOOD CAN MAKE a destiny, and most of us believe that it does. But it is also possible, if childhood trauma has not imprisoned us in a cycle of unconscious repetition, that the early years, or memories of them, serve mainly to reveal a pattern only discernible when the life is considered as a whole. In adulthood we can, if we look, find in childhood the seeds of the life we have lived. Whether that life was made inevitable by the childhood, or whether we remember only that part of childhood that explains what we have become, may be less important to the biographer than to the therapist or the suffering individual requiring therapy.
Autobiography is not the story of a life; it is the recreation or the discovery of one. In writing of experience, we discover what it was, and in the writing create the pattern we seem to have lived. Often, of course, autobiography is merely a collection of well-rehearsed anecdotes; but, intelligently written, it is the revelation, to the reader and the writer, of the writer’s conception of the life he or she has lived. Simply put, autobiography is a reckoning.
Biography is another matter. A two-person dialogue, biography is the imposition of the biographer’s perception upon the life of the subject. There is no truth; there are, indeed, remarkably few facts. Biographers differ in their objectivity, but those who consider themselves most objective are probably those who fail to see their own biases and assumptions. I, as the biographer of a feminist, begin from the desire to write the life of a woman who became, simultaneously, the epitome of female beauty and the quintessence of female revolution. I see as valiant her questioning of the powerful on behalf of the dispossessed; others might see it as deleterious. That is why there need to be many biographies of a complex subject—at least one every generation—if an individual life is to hold meaning for readers born in a different time and place from the subject, if a life is to be usefully interpreted for an ever-changing audience.
Gloria Steinem’s life offers testimony to the power of contradictory behavior. Equipped with the attributes necessary for success on a conventionally established path, she turned another way, early on becoming a creature of contrasts, a complex woman.
Until recently, it has been difficult to accept complexity in a woman; some find it impossible: the conventions circumscribing female behavior have been both narrower and stricter than those relating to men. Yet to understand Steinem’s apparent anomalies is to reckon profoundly with the possibilities of female destiny. The seeming incongruities of her life, even in the early days when they were not of her own making, offer clues to the creation of a feminist. There are the obvious contradictions of the expected: a feminist in a miniskirt; a woman frequently offered marriage who did not marry; a successful journalist who eschewed opportunities to write stories hurtful to women; a woman of courage who avoided direct personal conflict, but who confronted all the shibboleths of a patriarchal culture.
These contradictions are superficial. Far more challenging to consider is the disjunction between the deprived child and the accomplished, generous adult; between her father’s obesity and her own eternal slimness; between her high intelligence and her irreverence toward academic intellectuals and the male theorists like Freud and Marx they so relentlessly honor; between the autonomy of a woman owning her own life and that same woman’s relish of the uninterrupted companionship of desirable men; between her blatant attractiveness and her habit of underplaying it, if not denying it outright.
In only one aspect of Steinem’s life was ambiguity in fact absent. Rare is the woman of accomplishment who has not revealed at some point, in childhood or later, her awareness of the great advantage in being born male. Other American women writers of Steinem’s generation have been explicit. Anne Sexton said that she wished for a destiny that had nothing to do with gender; Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal: “I am at odds, I dislike being a girl, because as such I must come to realize that I cannot be a man.… I am part man.… Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.” Steinem, on the other hand, had no ambivalence on the question of gender and, unusual among achieving women, never for a moment wished to be other than female.
Perhaps Steinem is one of the women Robert Bly had in mind when he wrote Iron John, his otherwise less than compelling book about men. In attempting not to confront feminists head-on, he noted, perhaps with a touch of envy: “Women in the 1970s needed to develop what is known in the Indian tradition as Kali energy—the ability really to say what they want, to dance with skulls around their neck, to cut relationships when they need to.” [27]
Steinem was glad to be a woman, and lived that role with no longing glances either toward the clearer, more open male destiny, or toward its opposite: devotion to men as a sex. She happily searched within her own gender for a destiny unconstrained and unprescribed—for herself, and for other women less unambiguously at home in their bodies. Katie Roiphe, writing as one of the younger generation of feminists in the early 1990s, found those of Steinem’s generation to be antiman and antisex. Steinem’s life indicates that this is youth ignorant of its predecessors, whose history is just beginning to be written.
Steinem’s love affairs have been called minimarriages, and in a sense they were that. But if marriage, mini or maxi, may be defined as an association in which the other partner must always be taken into account, must always be considered in all major decisions, hers were not marriages at all. They were passionate associations between lovers who were not partners in any legal sense, sharing neither ownership of property nor dependents nor finances. Steinem was committed only as long as she and her lover chose; most often, it was she who ended the love relationship, prepared to welcome friendship, which for the most part was readily and enduringly offered.
In many ways unique, Steinem’s journey toward feminism is markedly distinguishable from the lives of other feminists of her time. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, was rightly viewed as a revolutionary text, inciting women weary of their suburban, dependent life to something more rewarding. But Steinem had never lived in the suburbs, had never married, and was already a professional journalist; Friedan’s book did not speak to her. If she noticed anything about The Feminine Mystique, it was that the book failed to encompass the lives of nonwhite women. On the other hand, younger feminists, formed in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, also experienced their fate as women differently than did Steinem. Though she was intensely committed to both causes, she did not reach feminism through them, as did younger women.
Gloria Steinem’s life is not only a study in contrasts; it is the embodiment of contrasts never before so sharply exemplified. She differs even from her most famous antecedents. Victoria Woodhull, for example, was both feminist and sexy, “a flamboyant advocate of free love,” as one modern feminist historian describes her. In addition to this, however, Woodhull saw visions and held séances, traveled with her sister as a healer and clairvoyant, published a reformist journal, publicly charged the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with having seduced one of his parishioners, and was established as a stockbroker by Cornelius Vanderbilt. As early as 1871 she maintained that women were already enfranchised by the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, and in 1872 she ran for president. She was married three times, and retired to England with her third husband twenty-six years before her death in 1927. Described by the Encyclopedia Americana as “beautiful, quick-witted, and magnetic,” Woodhull was, before Steinem, the only American feminist who confounded the media with what was perceived as a contrast between her politics and her looks.
Had Steinem, like Woodhull, fit more readily into the pattern of a woman using men to get ahead, and had she spoken not of the dispossessed and of subjects as unsexy as economic empowerment but of spirituality and the adulterous habits of famous men, she might have found her life less brutally assailed by the media. The most distinct contrasts of Steinem’s life were perceived by the media, or by her detractors, not as contrasts but as evidence on the one hand of female ambition and on the other of sinister radicalism. A living contradiction, she worried the pigeonholers.
But it is in comparing Steinem to Victoria Woodhull’s contemporary Susan B. Anthony that the inevitable discomfort produced by feminists, of whatever mien, is most evident. In 1979, when the Susan B. Anthony coin was minted, a cartoonist named Beattie produced a drawing that encapsulates the issue: From a dollar bill, George Washington says, “They should have used Gloria Steinem, she’s better looking.” And Anthony is drawn on her dollar as she was always caricatured: with bun, hooked nose, and downward-turning mouth. As Kathleen Barry observes in her biography of Anthony, although a Maine newspaper had written of her that “minus her gold spectacles [she] might generally be deemed good-looking,” the antifeminist press always characterized Anthony as a “strident spinster” with a “lean and cadaverous look.” Barry notes: “It has been the caricatures promoted by the enemies of women’s rights that have formed our contemporary image of her.” Barry recognizes this as the problem faced by the “self-determined feminist of any age” whose appearance is caricatured “as a way to discredit her ideas and politics.” [102]
Since she could not easily be caricatured as ugly, the press and many of her detractors trivialized Steinem as glamorous and sexy. But unlike Anthony, caught in the mores of her own time, and more like Victoria Woodhull, Steinem could simultaneously evoke indisputable sexuality and feminist courage. The notion that all feminists are homely or fat and certainly frustrated could hardly hold firm in the face of that evidence.
Copyright © 2011 by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
