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Gloria Steinem at Brookdale: "The truth will set you free. But first ..."

Women's movement icon encourages young women to continue to embrace the fight for rights.

The matriarch of the Women’s Movement, Gloria Steinem, was born long before the month of March was designated Women’s History Month, but ironically, it is the month of her birth.

The woman who is credited with being one of the guiding lights of the Women’s Movement was born on March 25, 1934. Soon to be 77, she has worked tirelessly on issues that repress women in this country and across the globe. In fact, she has worked so devotedly for equal rights for women that in 1993 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

Steinem spoke before a sellout crowd of over 400 people at Brookdale Community College last week, on March 1. When asked why she chose to speak at Brookdale, she said: “I love community colleges because it is so much more the real world than universities.”

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Looking age defiant, stylish and slim, she sported a black pantsuit and gave her talk before a three-screen backdrop of her famous quotes.

Each quote seemed to set the stage for its own segment of her speaking points …

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“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

For a writer who was never comfortable speaking before crowds, she drew the audience into her world with warmth and humor. Mostly women with a few men sprinkled here and there, she told the crowd that she hoped everyone would leave with a new thought or an aha moment, including herself.

“I want to learn from you,” she said, adding that hierarchy is based on patriarchy and patriarchy doesn’t work any more. “You get to talk about anything.”

Her talk was as far-reaching and as diverse as any one-hour speech allows. She reminisced about the things she learned from others during past discussions and of what she is relearning while working on her new book about the past 30 years as an activist, writer and researcher.

She related her own “aha” moment: when she found out that Mozart had a very talented sister. According to Mozart, she was the talented one, Steinem said. (It seems that Mozart’s sister, Marianne, was prevented from concertizing by her father because she was a woman.)

“We’ve all been punished by issues that don’t really exist,” she said, adding that race and gender are high on the list.

“God is in the details, but the Goddess is in the questions…”

During the question and answer period that followed her talk, many members of the audience took to the microphone and asked pertinent questions. The women’s movement-oriented queries ranged from where the feminist movement stands today to whether she thought the popular series Mad Men was an accurate representation of how women were treated in the 1960s workforce to why she didn’t go into politics.

Perhaps the most poignant was one asked by a young student who wanted to know where the women’s movement stood now. She said the movement seemed to be in a quiet period and asked if that was true. “We are not in a quieter place right now,” Steinem said, adding that it is “moving slower but certainly not silent.”

She explained that when the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) wasn’t approved, the movement was forced to try to change the laws one by one. It takes a long time to do it that way, she said: “I thought it would be wonderful if the Constitution actually supported women.”

The same young woman said she was taking a women’s studies course and when she told her boyfriend that she thought she was a feminist, he said, “feminists are crazy.” The audience groaned at that statement, and Steinem rolled out another one of her quotes …

“You can be a feminist or a masochist.”

Another woman asked Steinem if she ever watched the television series, Mad Men, which takes place in an advertising agency in the early 1960s. Most of the women are typists and most of the men are sexist.

Steinem said that she had seen the first season and thought it was on point in the era reality realm.

In fact, she said, when she graduated from college, she applied for a job in an ad agency, but she didn’t want to be a typist and that was the only job available. She joked that at the time, society thought that women had a special gift for typing that men lacked.  

When asked why she didn’t go into politics, Steinem said that she was a writer and was never comfortable speaking in public. “I never felt tempted to go into politics,” she said. “My job is to make political candidates look reasonable.”

“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.”

As a writer, Steinem has received: the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, National Magazine awards, an Emmy Citation for excellence in television writing, the Women's Sports Journalism Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, and most recently, the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism.

 In 1972, she co-founded Ms. Magazine, and remained one of its editors for fifteen years. According to her official Web site (www.gloriasteinem.com), she continues to serve as a consulting editor for Ms., and was instrumental in the magazine's move to join and be published by the Feminist Majority Foundation. In 1968, she had helped to found New York magazine, where she was a political columnist and wrote feature articles. As a freelance writer, she was published in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and a number of women's magazines as well as publications in other countries. She has produced a documentary on child abuse for HBO, a feature film about the death penalty for Lifetime, and has been the subject of profiles on Lifetime and Showtime.

Her books include the bestsellers Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Moving Beyond Words, and Marilyn: Norma Jean, on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks, and she was an editor of Houghton Mifflin's The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History.

Steinem’s books were on sale in the lobby. Proceeds are to be used to benefit the Displaced Homemaker Scholarship program at Brookdale Community College.

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”

Speaking about the timeline of the feminist movement, Steinem said we are all meeting at a particular moment. The first wave, which included suffragists and abolitionists, lasted about 100 years, until the 1950s. They were working to free women, and black men, from being considered property.

“Now we are in a century of striving for legal equality. We are half way,” she said, explaining that we need to get to the point where no one is defined by race, class or gender. While it seems as though we are still fighting the same figh, for reproductive freedom, equal pay for equal work and violence against women, she said, “We are working on familiar themes in new ways.”

She explained that reproduction freedom is under threat right now because of efforts by ultra-conservatives to repeal Roe v Wade and cut funding for Planned Parenthood. But, she said, “reproduction freedom is a fundamental human right,” she said. “We have annunciated that as a new freedom. It is an enormous victory. But there is a constant backlash to reproductive freedom.”

She reminded the audience that at one time a woman could not get a tubal ligation without her husband’s approval and only if she had two to four children. “It is natural for women to control their own fertility.”

In fact, she said, when she heard Sarah Palin talk about grizzly bears, she did some research on their reproduction process. She found that grizzly bears defer reproduction when they are not strong enough to raise offspring. The fetus gets reabsorbing back into the mother’s body so that she will not reproduce that year.

“We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs.”

She talked about the issue of equal pay for equal work. “We don’t have it yet, that’s why students are selling lollypops for 77 cents for women and one dollar for men.” (Brookdale students were selling the lollypops in the lobby.)

In addition, she said, “Home workers work harder and longer than anyone in the country. We have to value that work. We can. It’s not impossible to attribute an economic value … make it tax deductible or, if poor, tax refundable. It would substitute for the disaster of welfare reform.”

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