Ten years ago, I had the honour of meeting Gloria Steinem. It was International Women’s Day 2016: Donald Trump was a joke that would supposedly never happen and #MeToo was still two years away. Yet, the clouds were gathering.
Being in the presence of Steinem, one of our greatest witnesses to a feminist revolution, was a stark reminder of how far we had come but also how far we still had to go.
How, then, to encapsulate the legacy of someone who, according to the New York Times, was “the personification of the women’s movement”? Well, the American women’s movement at least.
Why, despite her influence, do I specify the United States? Because, as a chronicler of Canada’s distinct women’s movement, I want to reflect on everything Steinem gave us but also on the ways she may have overshadowed the lives and legacies of other feminists.
(AP/John Minchillo)
Second-wave feminism
It is difficult to differentiate Steinem from second-wave feminism, a period that extends roughly from the early 60s to the 90s. It was a transnational, multivaried movement born out of the ruins of the Second World War to not only re-assert women’s rights but also to permanently alter cultural attitudes and behaviours about women.
As a journalist, Steinem wrote about second-wave feminist issues but didn’t emerge as one of its activist leaders until near the end of the ‘60s, when it was better known as the women’s movement.
She was at her zenith throughout the 1970s, thanks in part to her role in founding Ms. Magazine and her efforts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. (which failed).
Despite the movement’s complexity, obituaries call her the face of or “leader” of the women’s movement — usually with minimal contextualization. This oversimplification has consequences for how feminism is defined, practiced and measured, especially in light of the reactionary politics in the U.S. today.
(AP/Dennis Cook)
A fractured women’s movement
A political movement based upon one country’s definition of “rights,” and one national culture risks becoming an imperialist imposition on other cultures and societies. Furthermore, assigning all the messiness of the women’s movement to one woman is antithetical to the movement itself.
Small wonder then that the women’s movement began to fracture, culminating in Time Magazine’s notorious 1998 cover feature, “Is feminism dead?”
Surprisingly, leading up to this era, Steinem seemed to retreat from the front lines. In 1992, she published a kind of self-help memoir that offered only a “revolution from within.”
As new forms of feminist politics ebbed and flowed throughout the 21st century, Steinem’s stature as a feminist icon never wavered but her status as a political leader certainly declined.
As I’ve argued before, the 20th-century women’s movement was undone by two critically neglected issues: racism and sexuality.
Steinem always recognized the importance of African American feminism, raising her fist alongside Dorothy Pitman Hughes and working for Angela Davis’ defense campaign.
Yet, in 2008, she was accused by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who originated the concept of intersectionality, of fostering an “either/or feminism” for her dogged support of Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama during the Democratic primaries.
(Scott Roth/Invision/AP)
Again, in 2016, her support for Clinton in the primaries led her to imply that women supporters of Bernie Sanders were being cajoled by their boyfriends to abandon their feminist politics.
Steinem seemed to want sisterhood at all costs, and it cost her much of her political influence.
Feminism is changing: Gender and sexuality matters
21st-century feminism has decentred binary gender and better integrated sexuality. It has also necessarily divested itself from American-centric frameworks.
Decolonial, Indigenous and Global South feminism, to name three of the more influential frameworks, are rewriting our vocabulary. Queer, trans, and sex worker rights are, I would argue, the most urgent form of feminist politics as governments around the world have become emboldened to violently erase members of these communities.
Despite her evolving activism throughout the first quarter of this century, Steinem was not a leader of these changes and, when it came to sex work and alternative sexualities, she was actually steadfast in her opposition.
It is at this juncture that Steinem erupts into a little piece of Canadian feminist history.
Me and Gloria: ‘Not a Love Story’
NFB, Studio D
In June 1982, Steinem arranged a glitzy New York premiere for Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography., a documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada’s women’s unit, Studio D.
Steinem had invited the film’s director, Bonnie Sherr Klein, and subject of the film, Lindalee Tracey, to join her and her featured guest, Linda Lovelace, the actress from the pornographic film Deep Throat.
Some film critics confused Tracey with Lovelace and the documentary was vilified during the American sex wars. Even those who recognized that there were two different Lindas merged their backgrounds to fit a “latter-day Mary Magdalene” thesis.
The confusion undercut Lindalee Tracey’s identity and experiences and contributed to her bitterly repudiating the film 15 years later. The film struggled to find its feminist audience beyond the sex wars. Detractors of Studio D pounced on the film’s negative reception as proof that the women’s unit was out of touch with both Canadians and women.
Steinem in Calgary
As a feminist scholar and activist in the fields of pornography and sex worker rights, I was always frustrated by Steinem’s persistent conflation of “sex trafficking, prostitution and the demand for unequal sex.”
(University of Toronto Press)
In my book on the film, I viewed that New York premiere as a sort of hostile takeover of Canada’s own messy but unique sex crisis.
So, when Steinem was invited to speak at the University of Calgary in 2016 and I was selected to be part of a small group to meet with her privately, I decided to take a stand for both Canadian feminism and sexual rights.
To be clear, I was as gushing a feminist fan girl as anyone in the audience. Meeting Gloria Steinem was a highlight of my career. She was eloquent, passionate, gracious, generous and as charismatic in person as in all her famous photographs. Yet, every time I tried to introduce sexual politics into the conversation, she expertly deflected my question.
I couldn’t help myself, though, and at the end of the meeting, pressed a copy of my book on Not a Love Story into her hands. Maybe, I thought, she’d be interested in a history of a film which had been a big part of her own story.
She was not.
She accepted the book with polite diffidence, but it probably ended up in a hotel dustbin that night. So much for me challenging her American-centric mindset.
But I still get to say that I met Gloria Steinem, a feminist whose work matters a lot to me.
