Gloria Steinem was active, vocal and firing until the end. It made me wonder: do feminists ever retire? She died aged 92 but kept speaking up. Is it because she didn’t want to disengage, or because she saw feminism as an unwinnable fight?
We like to pin her to the second-wave feminist revolution, Ms. magazine and reproductive rights. Some of those fights are still being fought. Does that mean the second wave failed to make lasting changes? Did we move to the fourth wave without fully and consummately winning the second wave of the feminist fight?
Gloria Steinem’s most important contribution was giving women the voice and the vocabulary for the fight, it is said. She gave us the tools that are key in every fight, every wave. That’s why the rights the second wave won are less important than the grammar of the fight. The rights can be taken away at any time by hostile governments and courts. The political grammar that women have learned to fight with can’t be taken away by anybody.
That is Gloria Steinem’s true legacy.
A feminist’s factory setting
Gloria Steinem didn’t believe in hanging up her boots. She roared at the anti-Trump Women’s March in 2017, talking about movement building and deep democracy. When the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade judgment in 2022, she said there is no democracy without bodily autonomy.
I wondered at that time what she must have felt. After all, she was back to fighting last century’s battles. It is frustrating to again fight for the freedoms we had taken for granted from the second wave of the feminist fight.
“We know sexism is not inevitable,” Steinem had said in 2016. She sent out an important reminder that reproductive freedoms can be “reversed“. That just forces us to be ever vigilant. And that’s why a feminist’s factory setting is fight mode.
In a 2019 conversation with attorney Gloria Allred, she declared that “Donald Trump has made us woke.” His politics and presidency had galvanised activism and awareness among young women.
She truly was an inter-generational feminist. Unlike many older feminists, she did not demand gratitude from young women for the fight her generation had put up. She kept reinventing herself and kept the allyship going.
She wholeheartedly supported the #MeToo phenomenon as well, a movement that stands contested and exhausted today. This is very different from many older Indian feminists who were clearly uncomfortable with #MeToo because the revelations and allegations were being made outside the purview of the legal system.
Also Read: Gloria Steinem and the feminism that refused to behave
The Gloria Steinem retirement plan
There is a way in which old battles keep resurfacing for women. Every time there is a sense of “we have gotten this far”, there is pushback; there is a conservative turn around the corner. Whether it is questions of body sovereignty or sexual assault or something as basic as hostel timings for men and women or even what women wear and don’t wear. As long as women’s safety is misinterpreted as women’s protection, the feminist fight can’t be over.
In India, I have heard people say that every generation must go through its own Emergency to understand the importance of hard-fought civic freedoms and not get complacent. That’s one way to look at it. But I am not sure that should mean we keep reinventing the wheel. How do we actually expand our freedoms if we keep fighting for the same rights every generation?
Perhaps Gloria Steinem also knew about the famous Zeno’s dichotomy paradox. It is a mathematical rabbit riddle and a classic thought experiment. We can apply it to feminism, too. This is how it goes.
A rabbit stands one meter away from a wall. Its goal is to reach the wall. It jumps halfway toward the wall, and then in its next jump, it travels half of the remaining distance and then the next half again and so on. Will the rabbit ever reach the wall? It’s like asking: Will women ever reach their feminist utopia? No. That is the meaning of constant strife, and feminists know this only too well.
Nothing is weightier than the sigh of an exhausted feminist. Yes, Gloria Steinem must have been tired of fighting the same battles. That’s why she couldn’t retire at a Florida beach house. Feminists don’t retire.
Rama Lakshmi, a museologist and oral historian, is ThePrint’s Opinion and Ground Reports Editor. After working with the Smithsonian Institution and the Missouri History Museum, she set up the ‘Remember Bhopal Museum’ commemorating the Bhopal gas tragedy. She did her graduate program in museum studies and African American civil rights movement at University of Missouri, St Louis. She tweets @RamaNewDelhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)