Many women across the U.S. mourn the passing of feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who died in her New York City apartment at age 92. She lived a very long life, but the 1970s was perhaps her most popular era. She was always attractive with long hair styled by teasing and spraying, aviator glasses and then rimless frames, light eye makeup, and most envious by American women her forever slim physique. Enough to make most gals jealous. Yet her fight for women’s rights and clever quips pointing out our still sexist society meant a lot to us, young and younger.
I was 11 when abortion became law of the land. For years, many women old and young fought hard for that right—Gloria often depicted on the front lines protesting for abortion on demand.
And as soon as abortion was legalized in the U.S., the backlash to return to yesteryear was loud and strong but not necessarily covered by the media like the ‘sexy’ feminist movement.
I admire Gloria Steinem very much. We have a lot in common. I’ve tried to emulate the hairstyle as a teen and young woman but could never get mine to settle just right around my face and scalp. To this day, I wear similar glasses and for a period wore contacts just like her. I was a professional journalist and sometimes wrote about women’s causes like equal pay for equal work and allowing women to apply and get jobs employers thought only men could do. I also had no children. Like Gloria Steinem, I along with many girls growing up in the 1970s determined to be a career woman. Whether news reporter or teacher, my career was the most important thing in my life.
The only time Gloria kinda let me down was her reaction to the news that abortion rights were overturned by the current U.S. Supreme Court, allowing about half the states to automatically revoke a female citizen’s right to choose, her doctor’s opinion also removed from consideration.
Upon hearing 50 years of abortion rights were overturned, Gloria Steinem said she just had to laugh.
THIS IS NOT FUNNY, I thought. It’s damn serious, a face-slap sudden change in our society, while countries like Mexico legalized abortion, but in the U.S. females must go through pregnancies regardless of individual circumstances whether financial, rape, health of baby and/or mother, and even age.
Notably, Gloria had a great sense of humor and often smiled and laughed about a number of silly ongoing sexisms in our country. Still after 250 years, no female U.S. president for some very peculiar reason, one a feminist like me cannot comprehend? Yet Gloria did. She understood men completely. Had their number, so to speak. Men control women. Look at our current president, and you’ll agree.
The abortion page
Gloria’s premiere feminist magazine Ms. included in the first edition a list of women who allowed their names to be printed under the title “We Have Had Abortions.” Wow. Gloria’s name was first. She wrote a lot about the circumstances as a young woman with a former boyfriend finding herself pregnant when she had other plans to study abroad. She knew if she told him she was pregnant, he would want them to get married. And she knew their marriage would not be good for either of them.
The rest of Gloria’s backstory is growing up homeless and poor in the 1930s-40s with a very large father, a mother who aspired to be a journalist but succumbed to debilitating alcoholism, and a younger sister. Recalling her childhood, Gloria said she raised herself, her mother and sister. Mom was mostly bedridden and weak. So when Gloria came of age, she left for college, later lived in India for a year, returned to the U.S. as a journalist, and published an excellent undercover investigative piece on being a Bunny waitress at the Playboy Club. Her career took off, and she got involved with the women’s movement full throttle, making friends with Betty Friedan (whose book The Feminine Mystique was a smash hit among American homemakers in the 1960s) and Bella Abzug, NYC’s brazen feminist lawyer and political icon. The Hulu series Mrs. America features these feminists during the 1970s.
Since the early 1970s when women broke polite societal silence on their own abortion experiences, here’s how much society has changed: No woman will ever say she had an abortion. Why? Fear of being shot. That’s our America today. Anti-choice groups grew militant during the 1980s and 1990s: protesting daily at women’s healthcare clinics, blowing up women’s healthcare clinics, shooting physicians who performed abortions, harassing families of physicians who performed abortions including nowadays online, and scorning in every wicked way all girls and women who approached women’s healthcare clinics whether inquiring into an abortion or other health concern including contraception.
The anti-choice crowd protested so vehemently because they believed life begins at conception. It doesn’t matter what anyone else believes.
And today women in our ultra technological 21st century society, in contrast with our older sisters of the 1970s, don’t have the … strength—political, emotional, physical—to war with the ultra conservatives who make the laws. We will be followed, harassed, shamed online, and obviously attacked for marching in protests to Make Abortion Legal Again.
Gloria’s candor was what made her a great spokesperson for women’s equality and women’s rights. She wasn’t brassy or bossy. She remained single, marrying late in life until widowhood, and was mostly on the road. Her home fridge had few food items which may explain her litheness. But Gloria wanted us to know she was a product of her upbringing: a Depression-era kid growing up riding in a car, reading books when her family could not find a livable dwelling and school, performing dances at stores for food. She had been groomed from childhood to live on the road, stopping in big cities and college towns to talk to large crowds who wanted to see and hear her. Always the reporter, she listened to what people had to say to her as well. Maybe that explains her laugh and soft smiling acceptance that a woman’s right as controversial as abortion would be a brief victory, empowering half the country at least but for only a couple of generations.