Glorious Gloria Steinem’s legacy lives on

By Annie Laurie Gaylor

Gloria Steinem, the world’s most famous feminist, died Sept. 2 at age 92. Even if she was less well known as a freethinking humanist, she was delightfully irreverent.

Gloria Steinem was a compelling, infinitely thoughtful, rational writer and speaker. Her public speaking had no artifice, but somehow she was mesmerizing. Listeners were always rewarded with “aha” moments and gently humorous quips.

Gloria accepted FFRF’s Forward Award, reserved for very special individuals whose lives and achievements are moving society forward, at our 2021 convention in Boston, when she was 87 years old. No one better embodied the concept of moving society forward than Gloria Steinem. She was the face of the women’s movement from the late 1960s until her death last month.

Gloria asked to be interviewed rather than give a speech. We had a terrible moment and a few hours of panic after her staff contacted us the night before her scheduled speech to report she’d taken a fall, was bruised and recovering, but couldn’t fly in from New York City. Our IT director and video director saved the day by scrambling hard to find the right equipment and set up a remote connection in half a day. There, Gloria was live on the big screen — and yet it still felt intimate.

As I told the audience, it was my second time interviewing her. The first had taken place 41 years before, when I’d just launched a feminist newspaper right out of college. I displayed photographs showing us together and told her I wanted to ask her some of the same questions I’d asked back in 1980. (She was already warning about extremists and pointing out that Hitler’s first official act was closing Germany’s abortion clinics.) Gloria even gave me her autograph — on a check — becoming one of my newspaper’s very first subscribers. My mother urged me to frame it, not cash it. I didn’t listen, but I took the precaution of photocopying it and we showed an image of that check too during the presentation. That was the story of her life: seeding activism. I was but one lucky recipient among thousands and thousands she helped and encouraged.

One question I’d asked her in 1980 was: “When are you going to write a book?” She’d laughed then and replied that she had enough material for at least a couple of tomes. Soon she published that first book and didn’t stop. A relatively recent work of hers, “My Life on the Road” (2015), is one of my favorites. At the convention, we had her newest book, an irreverent twist on a biblical phrase: “The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!,” full of her wise, comforting, quotable, outrageous, laugh-out-loud aphorisms. I didn’t know until I started reading her obituaries that she has a just-published memoir, “An Unexpected Life.” I can’t wait to read it.

One line from her book of quotes that got a big laugh at that convention was: “I’m at an age where remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.” Always on the road, she joked that she had been in more hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible.

One of the most famous quotes associated with Gloria — “If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament” — she had to beg off being given credit for. It turned out to be the quip of an Irish-American woman taxi driver she and her sister agitator, the great Florynce Kennedy, had a chance conversation with. I can’t count how many times I’ve penned that aphorism on protest signs I carried at abortion rallies, where it always gets laughs.

As for Gloria’s freethought views, she wrote that when someone asked if she believed in God, she would say, “No, I believe in people.” She said she’d like to do a TED Talk someday about the harm of monotheism.

During the first 1980 interview, she told me, “It’s an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations with all their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.” She also told me back then how touched she once was, to arrive at a Texas site to give a speech and see people holding signs saying: “Gloria Steinem is a humanist.” She only belatedly realized that was supposed to be an insult.

Here are some of Gloria’s other views on religion (most of these found in her book of quotes):

“Nothing is more dangerous than someone who believes life after death is better than life.”

“Religion is just a form of politics you can’t criticize.”

“Use laughter as a guide — stay away from places where you’re not allowed to laugh, even religious ones.” She called laughter “the best resistance.”

I was a teenager when Ms. debuted in 1971. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the magazine she imagined and co-founded changed the trajectory of my life — and of so many others. My mother and I eagerly awaited each new groundbreaking, consciousness-raising issue.

Gloria was there, forwarding and fomenting the movement from the beginning, helping to form the National Women’s Political Caucus, Voters for Choice and many other campaigns. She was on the ground floor as an activist, organizer and spokeswoman, practicing intersectionality before the word was coined. Admirably, she was also an eager political activist, always campaigning for and raising funds for feminist, pro-choice candidates.

In re-interviewing Gloria in 2021, I avoided some of the bleaker parts of her childhood. The public saw not only a dedicated activist but a chic, trendsetting, confident, cosmopolitan woman, with a celebrity social life. So, it came as a shock when I first read an article in which she opened up about being abandoned as a child to take care of her severely mentally ill mother, and how this intrepid youngster would wait til all the dishes were dirty, then wash them in the bathtub! How she planned to tap-dance her way out of Toledo, until her older sister made sure she was rescued and sent to Smith College, where her star quality first shone. Nor did I ask about her self-denial, keeping an apartment where she never unpacked or had much furniture — or even stocked food. How she only started thinking about her financial security until late in her life. The public-facing woman, always there for everyone else in need, poignantly put the cause and others before herself.

But my interview did touch on how she very movingly dedicated her book “My Life on the Road” to a London physician who, in 1957, made it possible for her at age 22 to abort a problem pregnancy. It was the fight for abortion rights that awakened Gloria’s feminist passion. We spoke before Roe was overturned, but we discussed that possibility.

Gloria’s always comforting, always sage advice lives on:

“Voting isn’t the most we can do, it’s the least. . . If you don’t vote, you don’t count.”

When Gloria was asked, “What should I do? What should we do?” her firm reply was: “Don’t worry about what you should do. Just do whatever you can.”

Those are words for the rest of us to live by.

Annie Laurie Gaylor is co-president of FFRF.