Gloria Steinem Gave It All
It is Wednesday, August 12th, almost four weeks after my last visit with Gloria Steinem in New York. I am in Formentera, a small, windswept island off the eastern coast of Spain, revered for its lack of machinery, to watch the solar eclipse. At half past eight in the evening, there is still daylight, in what will turn out to be the hottest August recorded here since 1961. A crowd is starting to form at the beach. Sweat is running down the backs of my legs, and beside me, a small child is digging a hole in the sand—something pointless and therefore extremely important, in the way things done by children often are.
A cloud has stationed itself precisely where the eclipse is meant to be, but the light changes anyway, not quite into night but into something stranger, as though somebody has reached for the dimmer switch on the world, turned it down, and then slowly turned it back up again. A hush passes from person to person until hundreds of us are standing together, looking upward.
The day before, I received a message from Amy, Gloria’s longtime friend, explaining that Gloria had been mostly in bed since I last saw her. I go back and listen to the first interview that Gloria and I did together, at the Emmanuel Centre, in London, almost ten years ago, not long after we first met. We spoke about her memoir “My Life on the Road,” erotica, the political scientist Valerie Hudson, and the problem of gender inequality—its unnerving invisibility, and its enormous scale. Maddeningly, almost everything we talked about is even more relevant today than it was then.
Listening to the interview through my car speaker, I can hear myself trying to figure out, in real time, how the hell she does it: how she is so at ease with herself, so grounded in her opinions without ever becoming rigid, how someone can possess convictions that strong and yet wear them that lightly. Most of all, I am in awe of her authenticity; there appeared to be almost no gap between the woman and what she believed.
The last time I saw her, on July 15th, I had gone to her brownstone, which has served as an organizing and gathering space for activists, writers, and political figures for more than fifty years. The whole place says “history.” The walls are the color of mustard; fabrics and tapestries are everywhere—it is a space that has accumulated rather than acquired its beauty. In the living room, a pair of sirens sits on the wooden mantelpiece. Around the fireplace is a deep-green club fender. Picture frames, plants, and talismans cover all available wall and table space. (For someone who has lived a life of such import, fragments of memory seem surprisingly precious to her.) A small kitchen sits off to one side, and the low ceiling makes the ground floor feel less like a formal living room and more like a club or meeting space. The domestic and the political don’t seem, here, to have been assigned separate rooms.
I remember noticing Gloria’s hands the first time we met, the way her fingernails were carefully shaped and slightly long, a detail of herself she consistently attended to. There was a femininity and a fragility to them that I hadn’t picked up on in photographs. They were always like this when I saw her. Her hair was always in its bob. She was always in black, with a concha belt slung around her waist. That day, she sat in the middle of her low sofa, surrounded by papers and undrunk cups of liquid, looking thinner than she did when I last saw her.
Gloria and I had always talked about marriage and its symbolism—what the institution has meant for women, what we inherit from it, what might be reclaimed or reinvented. Halfway through our conversation, I showed Gloria my own hands, and the ring on my left ring finger, which is meant to represent a different kind of union: a marriage to life itself. I found myself crouched on the floor in front of her, my bare knees on the carpet, explaining the concept, and I felt, very strongly, the sense of something having been passed and shared between us, and I was proud—proud to show her something I had made from ideas we had spent years turning over together.
Eventually, Gloria had to go upstairs for another appointment. Before she disappeared up the spiral staircase, I asked if I could hug her goodbye. As I pressed my body to hers, trying to wrap my arms around her carefully, I knew, with a peculiar certainty, that this would be the last time I saw her.
I have always felt a strange protectiveness toward Gloria, which is absurd when you consider that Gloria Steinem has spent her life protecting the rest of us. She is one of the greatest heroines of the twentieth century.
After the 2016 election, I cried, because I realized that Gloria might die without seeing a woman become President of the United States. There was something unbearable about watching her give almost the whole span of her adult life to democracy, to women, to the stubborn proposition that human beings might organize themselves more fairly, and still never see that particular threshold crossed. I also feared the coming assault on the rights that Gloria had worked so hard to protect.
I remember a male friend telling me that I was overreacting, and that it wasn’t going to be that big of a deal. I stared at the television and said, “They’ll go after Roe v. Wade.” The threat had been stated plainly for years; perhaps what was required was simply the willingness to believe people when they told you what they intended to do.
Gloria somehow held the urgency of it all without ever losing her lightness. When I first began getting to know her, I was anxious: Was I feminist enough, had I read enough, would I pass some imagined female purity test? Gloria gently dismantled the premise. People, she explained, are where they are in their journey of discovery and learning, and feminism had to meet them there. I didn’t have to arrive already knowing everything in order to belong.
Gloria was radical in the original sense of the word, which is derived from the Latin radix, meaning “root”—going to the system underneath the problem rather than attempting to remedy its surface effects—and she somehow held that radicalism alongside an almost unreasonable kindness. I have tried to carry that forward—to hold myself to account while understanding that patriarchy is not something women stand conveniently outside of. We were born inside it; it lives inside us. It has shaped our ideas of beauty, love, goodness, success, and safety, and we cannot simply announce ourselves liberated and be done with it. We can only begin to rectify something after we recognize it; we can only shed a skin once we have outgrown it.
Before leaving Gloria’s brownstone, I had given her a card I had bought in New York, made by the artist Olga Prinku, depicting a glittery silver snake. On the day of the eclipse, I look up what the snake means: transformation, rebirth, healing, knowledge—and feminine power. What a complicated creature we chose for this symbol. I think of the lion, that familiar emblem of masculine power, with his soft, beige fur and magnificent mane, made harmless enough in miniature that little boys sleep with him tucked under their arms. Women get the snake: close to the ground, frightening, blamed for the fall of man, and periodically required to split its own skin open in order to grow.
Gloria seemed to know the same thing about people, that change involves a certain kind of splitting. She could be radical without requiring everyone to arrive at the same revelation at the same moment, and held that generosity alongside an increasingly radical article of faith—her belief in democracy, even as so many of its believers began to wonder whether the whole experiment had failed.
Her papers at Smith College now occupy a hundred and six feet of shelf space. There are very few people I have met about whom I can say, with certainty, that they gave the whole thing, not merely the public bit but the private Tuesdays, too—the days when nobody was watching, when the work was fashionable and when it wasn’t, when there was hope and when hope itself must have required considerable imagination.
When I try to think of the small, funny details that could cut the sadness of writing this—the sorts of things these pieces need—I come up strangely empty-handed. I never ate a burrito with Gloria. We worked together. We talked politics. We talked about books; she gave me books, so many that I sheepishly had to ask her for a tote bag, too, in order to carry them all.
As the eclipse passes, I think about how quiet I have been for quite some time now, and I realize that something about that has to change, because if Gloria is leaving us, then some of us are going to have to get louder. It feels less like a decision than like a law of physics: I think of gravity, of black holes, of the way one body continues to exert a force on another across apparently empty space. I feel Gloria’s gravity still, pulling me toward the horizon and toward a world she could already envision.
She did not get to see it.
Perhaps I won’t either. But this may be the difficult truth about progress that Gloria understood better than most of us: you may spend your whole life walking toward a world you will never enter, but that does not relieve you of the obligation to walk.
The snake does not repair its old skin. The snake outgrows it, pressing itself against the earth, against rock, against whatever will give it enough resistance to begin the challenging work of leaving one form behind. In Formentera, I watch the moon move through shadow and back toward the light, and, for a moment, it seems as if the whole world is changing its skin. ♦