Gloria Steinem’s Final Essay
I always say I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to talk. But, once I started writing about my own personal experiences, I was surprised to receive invitations to speak on campuses or to women’s groups. I knew it was important to do, so I started travelling regularly with speaking partners in America and other countries to help spread the word of a global women’s movement.
Eventually, after covering lots of territory and many issues, I realized I had become an itinerant organizer. It’s an unlikely profession, but really it is quite simple. Organizers observe the world, see what it could be, and help make it real. As I look back on my own life, I see those experiences that set me on my own course.
I learned about feminism greatly from living in India for a couple of years after I had graduated from college in the nineteen-fifties. My time in that newly independent nation made me realize that most of the world did not live as we did in the United States. I realized there was a terrible monochromatic quality to the people in my life, and that white people were a small minority in the world. In India, I got accustomed to, and began to value, racial diversity.
The people I met in India who were social activists were almost all Gandhians. I worked with them, went to school with them, and walked through villages with them. I found I was very drawn to them as human beings because they were kind, open, nonviolent, and not nationalistic at all. I think culturally women are drawn to nonviolence. Probably because we are the major victims of violence, we become the major movers of peace.
Only later in my life did I realize how much those years had influenced what I now see as my feminism. But maybe we should not call it “feminism.” Others have preferred “womanist” or “mujerista” or “women’s liberationist.” Whatever the name, words that stand for equality are demonized by those who benefit from inequality. Opposition will always come from people whose power rests on the group they were born into—whether that is sex, race, class, or ethnicity—rather than on what they do as individuals. This persists because they believe in hierarchy and they fear what might happen if they have no built-in advantage. And this is sad because they may never find out who they really are, and what they would really want to do in life.
For me, saying that I am a feminist has always meant that I believe in the social, economic, and political equality of all males and females of all races and groups. I know this sounds too simple to need a word, but equality is still the exception, not the rule.
Maybe we should call it egalitarianism, or even humanism. The problem with humanism is that it is often interpreted as being anti-religion, so I don’t think it’s inclusive enough. Regardless of what we call it, it just means treating each of us as uniquely human. The experiences of race and gender and class are very real and important, but they are also constructed and changeable. Our humanity is consistent and sacred.
Still, for some, it remains a mystery why women need a movement to distinguish our efforts toward equality. For me, it seems quite obvious. For starters, females do the majority of work in the world when you account for paid and unpaid labor, yet only receive about a third of total labor income globally, and own less than twenty per cent of land worldwide. Females are also far more likely than males to be illiterate, go hungry, be victims of human trafficking, or be murdered by a family member. And, unlike most of its democratic counterparts, the United States has never had a female head of state.
As I write this, the world seems in a tailspin. Many feel that all the progress we’ve made is being reversed. When you’re lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come.
In my own life, women were invisibilized, in public and even by language itself. I remember times when thoughtful male journalists would look at a roomful of women and report, “There’s no one here.” Or, when I and other women had an idea, the only way we could express it was by having the man next to us state it.
People often ask me: What should we do? No one person could answer that for everyone. I will say that we must work together to make sure that equal laws and customs become normalized. While there are many external gestures, the biggest leaps are those that we make within ourselves. Standing up for your own full humanity is an example you can give to others. Bring equality into your workplace and home—and follow the sense you probably had as a child, before gender roles took shape, about fairness.
We have seen leaps of progress already, thanks to the millions of women and girls—and many men and boys, too—who have stood up for equality. Because of this movement, most people in the world have now seen women who are astronauts, union organizers and farmers, liberators and peacemakers. Thanks to women who gathered to tell the truth at the kitchen table or village well, who acted in local elections or at the United Nations, feminism—or any other word for human equality—is widely recognized as a precondition of democracy, economic development, spirituality, and peace.
So treat every woman as a full human being, an equal human being, whether that means encouraging your mother to do what she’s always dreamed of doing, or not expecting your girlfriend to cook you dinner. Only with actions from each of us will we see equality as a true fact of life. ♦