Photo by Bruce Silcox Photography
Gloria Steinem and Kerri Miller at Northrop
Gloria Steinem and Kerri Miller at Northrop
At a place like the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium, in a crowd of college students, 80-year-old women, and everyone in between, Gloria Steinem needs no introduction. (She got two anyway, from the U’s president, Joan Gabel, and her interviewer, MPR’s Kerri Miller). For many, Steinem is an icon. She cofounded Ms. magazine and was an early New York Magazine columnist, she’s written countless works on feminism and equality in our culture and beyond, and now, at 85, she’s still speaking across the country about her life’s work and what’s next for the U.S. (in killer leather pants, no less). Here are a few of our favorite takeaways from the event.
She wishes she would have gotten into activism earlier—and it’s not too late for anyone to start standing up for what they believe in. Steinem didn’t get involved in the feminist movement until her late 30s, after she covered an event about illegal abortions for New York Magazine. She was so inspired by hearing women who had experienced illegal abortions actually speak about it in public, a rarity at the time despite their cultural prevalence (Steinem herself had an illegal abortion in her 20s), that something inside her woke up—and changed the feminist dialogue forever.
Equality starts at home. Steinem believes the U.S. can never be fully equal until we have truly democratic households, in which men and women (that is, if both live in a home) share responsibility, power, and child-raising duties equally. “It’s not just that we live in the patriarchy, but the patriarchy lives in us,” she said at Northrop, eliciting thunderous claps. Since home can be the first place children see inequality or some form of violence, she continued, they carry that view with them into adulthood, which can influence the structure of the country.
No one gets here alone. From the abortion doctor who made Steinem promise to do what she wanted with her life, to her close friend Wilma Mankiller—and even the 8-year-old who once stood up during a speech and said, “I am becoming a person who takes no shit!”—Steinem knows she’s indebted to those who helped her pave the way to where she is today.
She angered the pope after giving an, um, edgy homily at a Minneapolis Catholic church. “Well, it was fine when we were all there,” she said of her 1978 appearance at St. Joan of Arc Church, during which she—never one to dilute her message—spoke about the historical oppression of women’s bodies. But soon after, the priest, Father Harvey Egan, got in trouble with Minneapolis/St. Paul Archbishop John R. Roach—and the Vatican even got involved. She's told the story countless times since then (full of humor and fire), but in a place like Minneapolis, it never gets old.
We still have a long way to go. When Steinem and her feminist counterparts started trying to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, they thought it would be easy—or, at least, possible. (“Well, it would be nice to be part of the Constitution, wouldn’t it?” she said.) And though she acknowledges the power of the Me Too movement, she also says it hasn’t gone far enough. Steinem has seen and felt the power and progress of her decades-long career, but she knows it’s not done yet. And neither is she.
This event was part of the Distinguished Carlson Lecture series, which is presented by the Humphrey School of Public Affairs with support from Carlson and the Carlson Family Foundation.
