This week, I find myself unexpectedly very sad. Gloria Steinem’s death on Wednesday marked the passing of our second-wave feminist generation. There are but a handful of us still standing, and ever fewer of us still working.
I knew Gloria very well back in the day. She originally came to my attention in 1963, soon after Betty Friedan published her legendary book The Feminine Mystique. That year, Gloria went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for a piece published in Show magazine—an exercise intended to expose the way in which women were treated as “sex objects.” I always found this an interesting contradiction. Gloria condemned the objectification, yet she also used it to her own advantage, and to the advantage of liberal feminism.
In early 1971, I attended the very first meeting that led to Gloria’s founding of Ms. magazine. I forget how I came to be there, but Gloria and I had already been meeting and talking for at least three years, maybe a bit more, because I wrote to her after her piece about the Playboy Club was published. Indeed, I never really “joined” the feminist movement. As someone who was very early aligned with its goals, I simply almost instantly, as did so many other radical feminists, became a leader. I attended National Organization for Women (NOW) meetings in New York City, including one in Ti-Grace Atkinson’s home. I remember that Kate Millett wore her hair in a neat little bun and spoke in a slightly British accent. But that was not as important as Kate’s 1970 book, Sexual Politics, or Shulie Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. I remember reading them both while standing up in a bookstore in Greenwich Village.
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