Remembering Gloria Steinem

It was a privilege to have one of my all-time heroes, the feminist activist, writer and icon Gloria Steinem on How to Fail back in 2020 and we are heartbroken to hear of her passing at the age of 92. To celebrate her life, we’re re-releasing this very special episode. We talked about her failure to understand her mother, her failure to be at her father's deathbed and her failure to learn lessons quickly enough - yes, we go deep... She also talked to me about how (then) at the age of 86, she is joyfully outliving society's expectations of her; of how fear can often be a sign of growth (let that sink in), about how 'anger is an energy cell', about how we are 'linked not ranked', about not having children, about spending a lifetime combatting misogyny and racism and sexism and injustice, and about the counteracting forces of love and compassion and friendship which keep her going. Whoever said never meet your heroes clearly never met Gloria Steinem. We love you Gloria Steinem, rest in power. How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Guest bookings for How To Fail only come from official @sonymusic.com emails Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

  I, along with so many of you, will be heartbroken to learn of the death of Gloria Steinem, feminist icon who passed away at the age of 92. We owe her so much and I was unbelievably thrilled when I got to interview her on How to Fail a few years ago. She was one of those rare heroes who lived up to every sky-high expectation I had of her. It's one of my favourite episodes. It taught me so much and it is our honour to re-release it and to remember with fondness

• 0:36Elizabeth Day?

  and with appreciation and gratitude, the legendary Gloria Steinem. Just a note before we start, this season of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day was recorded remotely under lockdown. It is one of the immense privileges of what I do that very occasionally I get the chance to meet one of my heroes. Today is one such day because my guest is none other than the feminist icon, organiser, activist and journalist Gloria Steinem. A woman I have quoted so much in my own life and work that it feels almost creepy to be

• 1:21Elizabeth Day?

  introducing her, but introduce her I will because there is so much to say. National Geographic has referred to her as the world's most famous feminist, a woman who has been actively fighting for gender equality and reproductive justice since the early 1960s. She was born in Ohio in 1934 and had an itinerant childhood with her mother Ruth and father Leo, a roaming antiques dealer. Although her youthful ambitions were to be either a horse rancher or a dancer, she became a journalist after graduating from Smith College. One of her first articles was about contraception and how women were forced to choose between a career and marriage.

• 2:04Elizabeth Day?

  It appeared in Esquire in 1962, a whole year before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Steinem went on to report on politics and social issues for New York Magazine before co-founding the feminist publication Miss in 1972. Since then, she has travelled the world, speaking at rallies, protesting everything from the Vietnam War to female genital mutilation, and organising activist pressure to change the world we live in for the better. Women my age are quite simply indebted to what Steinem and her peers did and continue so tirelessly to do. An award-winning and prolific writer, Steinem has authored several books, including a biography

• 2:48Elizabeth Day?

  of Marilyn Monroe and the bestselling My Life on the Road. In 2013, Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in America. Her latest book, The Truth Will Set You Free But First It Will Piss You Off, is an inspiring collection of her greatest quotes, introduced with a selection of new essays from Steinem herself. In fact, Steinem has coined so many legendary phrases that it's quite hard to pick just one, but for the purposes of this podcast, I suppose the most apt is Steinem's famous declaration that brave is not being unafraid, but feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

• 3:32Elizabeth Day?

  Gloria Steinem, welcome to How to Fail.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Thank you for that very, very generous introduction. I'm going to try to live up to it.

• 3:42Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, I meant every single word and I have quoted you just so much in my life and it was really interesting reading your latest book because I just realised how many of the things that you've said have become part of common parlance. But what do you think is the secret to a good quote? And do you know when you've made one that's going to stand the test of time?

• 4:06Speaker 01

  I think quotes are the poetry of everyday life, which means condensed meaning. And movements give rise to a lot of great quotes because we're constantly trying to think of something short enough to put on a banner or a protest poster, so to say things simply. Very difficult to choose one. I've always loved quotes. I have great lists of other people's quotes, but I think the shortest way I've ever been able to say what we want is to say we are linked, we are not ranked.

• 4:41Elizabeth Day?

  I love that.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  And that is short enough and I think universal enough because we are talking about race, gender, nationality, all kinds of faults and artificial divisions, that I hope that it has a meaning for different reasons.

• 5:00Elizabeth Day?

  And women historically have been so pitted against each other by the patriarchy that sometimes I think it feels so difficult for us to celebrate the success of others, even though that's exactly what we should be doing.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Well, I hope that in both of our countries, that the concept of the women's movement that we advance when we all advance has meant we compete or feel we are in competition less. But it's true that it happens to all less powerful groups, that you are supposed to compete with each other for the favour of the more powerful group. It's one of the most tragic results because it causes us to weaken each other and it's the job of movements to put an end to that and to allow us to take joy in each other's

• 5:54Speaker 01

  accomplishments because we know it's an advance for us too.

• 5:58Elizabeth Day?

  That quote about bravery, not being, about being unafraid but feeling the fear and doing it anyway. You're 86 now and I wonder if there is anything that still scares you?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, a blank page.

• 6:13Elizabeth Day?

  That never goes away.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  That never goes away. But I think what helped me and what I learned from other women in the movement is that fear is actually a sign of growth.

• 6:27Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, I love that.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  It means you're approaching something that you're unsure of, you're not sure you can do, it's a little unknown. And that means frequently, if not, I mean, because we're not talking about physical danger here, which is an important, you know, natural, something that produces fear. But when you're approaching something unknown, it does mean that you're growing. So I think follow the fear and do it anyway is an acknowledgement of fear as a sign of growth.

• 6:57Elizabeth Day?

  And if we were to flip that on its head and flip the concept of this podcast on its head, and instead of talking about failure and fear, and if I were to ask you how you would define success, what would you say?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Well, when you say that to me, what I think of is doing something you love so much that you forget what time it is when you're doing it and being able to do that and sustain yourself by doing that. So even though if you love what you do, it's a source of fear too because you want to do it well. Nonetheless, when I sit down to write or try to write, it's the only time when I think that I shouldn't be doing something else. Does that make sense?

• 7:43Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  I mean, otherwise, I think, yes, I'm doing this, but it's temporary. When I'm writing, I think, okay, this is it.

• 7:51Elizabeth Day?

  Now, I became a journalist in the early 2000s and it was still a very sexist industry. I'm trying to imagine how sexist it was in the early 1960s when you started being a journalist. How sexist was it?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Oh, well, how long do we have? I remember I had a literary agent, which was itself a triumph, and the agent sent me to an editor at Life magazine about a particular assignment. When I walked in the door, he looked up from his desk, saw me and said, I don't want a pretty girl, I want a writer. And that was it. When I was doing an assignment for the Sunday New York Times Magazine, my editor there, when I went to hand in my manuscript, would at least once or twice give me a choice. Either I could mail his letters on the way out or I could go to a hotel room with him in the afternoon.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Needless to say, I mailed his letters. But of course, it was the nature of the assignments too. I remember asking to do the profile of Mayor Lindsay, who was then the mayor of New York City, and they said, no, but you can profile his wife. There were lots of examples like that.

• 9:13Elizabeth Day?

  I, as a junior reporter, was once asked to try out an orgasm machine and these were not the kind of-

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Wait a minute, there's an orgasm machine?

• 9:23Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah. It didn't work, Gloria, sorry, spoiler alert.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Well, was it at least universal or was it gender-specific?

• 9:32Elizabeth Day?

  It was gender-specific. It was for women because we were being told that it was very hard for a woman to come to orgasm and pull her without, obviously, the deeper question being asked, which is like, why isn't she sexually satisfied?

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yes, right, I mean-

• 9:45Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  That leads to a much longer discussion.

• 9:51Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah, but similarly, the commissions that I was given were very gendered, but that has changed happily and largely because of the work that you have done. We will go on to your failures now because they are really profound ones and they start early in your life. And your first failure, you wrote to me that you think the most unfixable failures are the ones linked to the mortality of the person that we failed. And for you, that means something very specific. So can you explain to us what that means for you?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Well, I do think the inability to go back and rectify or make up or apologize or make right is haunting. So in my case, that has to do with the deaths of my parents. First, my father, who lived in California, all the way across the country. My parents had been separated since I was, I don't know, ten or so. And he lived a very vagabond life. He was living the life he wanted. I knew that he was ill. My sister and I, and my sister has six children, so I was the one who could more easily have gone.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  But we talked to the doctor and decided that I could wait a while before I went. And I fear that what was in my head was that if I went, I would end up staying there forever, caring for him as I had taken care of my mother. So I listened and didn't go. And when I finally did go, when I was in Chicago, was changing planes, I learned that he had died. And I will regret all of my life that I wasn't there sooner. But one of the rewards of writing is that when I wrote about this feeling, I got a

• 11:44Speaker 01

  letter from two friends of his, a doctor and the doctor's grown-up son, who actually had seen him just before he died. Because they read what I wrote, it was the first time that I knew that he had at least seen two familiar, friendly faces before he died.

• 12:03Elizabeth Day?

  That's very beautiful. Was part of your haunting regret, as you express it so eloquently, that there were still things that you wanted to say to your father?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  It's interesting you ask that. Of course, I would have said, I love you and, you know, but it wasn't so much about words as it was just about being present. Because he had chosen to live a vagabond life by himself. But at the end, he was in a car accident, he was in a strange hospital by the roadside, all by himself. And I so regret that I wasn't there.

• 12:42Elizabeth Day?

  I'm so sorry. That's such a shocking way to lose someone. You've spoken very warmly in the past about your father, and there's a particular quote that I love, which is that your father had two points of pride. He never wore a hat, which in his generation he was supposed to, and he always worked for himself, which I think gives such a sense of who he was. He sounds like someone who was very clear about what he wanted from life.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, that he never wore a hat and never had a job, he often said, you know, marked him apart with pride from everyone else. And I'm grateful for that because it enabled me also never to have a job, which writers have to do, you know, frequently. That is, we're freelancing, we don't have a continuous paycheck. But on the other hand, it's a more free life because there's something great about the fact that you can't be fired. No one can actually fire you. And that's probably helpful in a movement to have a certain small percentage of people

• 13:53Speaker 01

  who can't be fired, because then you're not punished for saying what needs to be said.

• 13:58Elizabeth Day?

  I mean, he sounds an unconventional person, and I wonder if you think you've inherited his unconventional spirit, but also whether you think it's possible to be the kind of activist you have been without being unconventional?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  You know, hard to know, isn't it? It's hard to think out of one's own consciousness and circumstance. But I am grateful to him because I think we need, in a social justice movement, you need people inside the system who are actually making the physical changes that need to be made. And you need people outside the system who make the ones inside look reasonable, because you're out there in the street stating what the longer-term goal is. So I recognize that it was really because of my father, my mother too, but in this

• 14:54Speaker 01

  sense, perhaps my father more, that enabled me to think that this was okay. I mean, for instance, once I worked for a magazine here, McCall's, which is a large, successful magazine for women. And they asked me to do a small regional magazine that they had at the end of each issue, which was really about selling advertising that was regional, but anyway. And so I was happily sitting at home, assigning writers to fill these few pages at the end of each issue. Then a new editor came in, and he had the nerve to ask me to be in the office two days a week rather than doing this from home. I quit.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  I mean, I didn't think about it all that much. I quit. How dare he expect me to be in the office two days a week? And I went out in the street, I bought an ice cream cone, I walked around in the sun eating my ice cream cone, I felt great. So it's not rational, it just becomes part of who you are.

• 15:57Elizabeth Day?

  And I'm guessing you've never regretted quitting that job?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  No. I mean, it wasn't a job that I was terribly fond of, because, you know, it really was about income, though it was fun to be able to supply jobs for other writers. But it wasn't rational, it was just instinctive.

• 16:17Elizabeth Day?

  You mentioned your mother there, and when you wrote your failures to me, you said that part of the reason you delayed going to your father's bedside was that fear of being forever his caretaker, as you had been for your mother. So can you explain a bit about that particular dynamic with your mother?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  You know, after my parents were separated, my sister, who was nine years older, was already in college, working, you know, she was away from home. So it meant that my mother and I were living on our own in Toledo. And my mother was not very well for a series of reasons. And so I was looking after her much of the time. You know, and talking to other people since then, I realized that a lot of my experiences were shared by children whose parents were alcoholic or ill. I mean, you know, this is not an uncommon experience.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  But it didn't mean premature responsibility, cooking and looking after, and also not quite knowing what you will find when you come home. There was that constant kind of tension, which, you know, I'm certainly not alone in experiencing. But having been the parent of a big person when you're a small person is quite different from being a competent adult with a child. You know, it's a reversal of the power relationship, and it's difficult.

• 17:53Elizabeth Day?

  You've written in the past about how you would see male doctors dismissing your mother's mental health issues, and that long before you realized you were a feminist, you recognized this anti-female bias in medicine. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Because I think it's a bias that exists still in treatment of women in so many areas.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Well, it took me a long time to understand that it really was a bias. But once I began to realize that, for instance, tranquilizers were almost completely prescribed to women rather than men, rather than find out what the problem was, just to, I mean, kind of, the idea was, well, you know, women can be tranquilized into feeling okay about their subordinate role or doing the kind of work they're doing, much less worry about competency or being able to use their talents completely. Phyllis Chesler wrote a wonderful book about this, that was a pioneering feminist book,

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Women in Madness, about the different standards for women and men of what constitutes mental health.

• 19:08Elizabeth Day?

  Did you ever ask your mother why she didn't break free of her situation? I mean, I know that that's a loaded question because we're talking about a very different era. But did you ask her?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yes, I did. I mean, because, first of all, it took me a while, I think I was a teenager, before I realized that, a decade before I was born, she had been a journalist, a newspaper editor at a time when that must have been quite revolutionary for women to have that kind of position. And once I realized that she had given that all up after my sister was born and was about six or so, and my mother had what was then called a nervous breakdown and was in a sanatorium for a year or two. And after that, she just gave it up and became a wife in a much more traditional sense, and also became addicted to tranquilizers and so on.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Now, I didn't realize that until I was a teenager, but once I did, I was said to her, but why didn't you leave my father, take my sister, you know, go to New York? She had a friend who was a journalist too, and they dreamed of coming to New York and working. And also, she had fallen in love with a man who was in the office. Why didn't you marry the other man, go to New York, become a, whatever it was you dreamed of doing? And she would always just say to me, but if I had done that, you would not have been born. And I never, ever had the courage to say to her, but you would have been born.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  And I realise that in many ways, like many women and some men too, I'm living out the unlived life of my mother.

• 20:53Elizabeth Day?

  I find it so impressive that she was a newspaper editor.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 20:58Elizabeth Day?

  In the nineteen twenties, I guess.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  And in the late twenties, and yes, of the Toledo Blade, which was a big city newspaper. She had started working there as a columnist, writing under a man's name. She had other jobs and became Sunday editor, which must have been incredible.

• 21:25Elizabeth Day?

  Your second failure is related to this, which is that you say you failed to do as much as you could for your mother. What more do you think you could have done?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  I could have offered her a lot more companionship. I was kind of subterraneously saying, I don't want to be like my mother. I don't want to live the life my mother is living. So sometimes that translated into not sharing her interests. And now I see her books, she left me all of her books. And I read, you know, she's in the Saint Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker and books about theosophy, all of her books, and I realise how many interests we shared. That if I hadn't been so trying not to become her, I could have shared more.

• 22:15Elizabeth Day?

  And how old were you when your mother died?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh, I have to think. I was in my thirties, I guess.

• 22:22Elizabeth Day?

  And your dad was the similar sort of age. You were also in your thirties.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  He died before my mother did, yeah, right.

• 22:30Elizabeth Day?

  Okay, and so they had time to see you make your life in New York, become this acclaimed journalist. What did they make of your career?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  That's interesting. I think, here's an example of my father. When I came home from India, where I lived for a couple of years after I got out of college, he met me at the boat and he said, you know, he clearly was trying to figure out what an overeducated twenty-four-year-old then, you know, was going to do with herself. And he said he was going to introduce me to a man who sold aerosol cans, because then I could travel, which of course he loved to do and was sure I did. And I could sell aerosol cans. So, you know, obviously that was not something that was going to be very satisfying.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  My mother, on the other hand, understood, I think, clearly the aspiration to be a writer. And when I was a senior in college and I was engaged, because I had met a wonderful man and I didn't quite know what to do except get engaged, she said to me with a great double message, she said, well, good that you get married right away, because once you get out into the world and see how interesting it is, you'll never get married.

• 23:53Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, my goodness, what an extraordinarily ambiguous thing to say.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:59Elizabeth Day?

  So how did you respond to that? Because the engagement didn't last.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Well, I fled to India in order to break the engagement and, of course, you know, because I had an opportunity of a fellowship and so. So I did what probably she might have predicted that I was going to do, but I didn't know that at the moment.

• 24:20Elizabeth Day?

  She sounds like such a phenomenally bright and humorous woman, and it just breaks my heart that she was born into an era that straitjacketed her.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Yes, I so agree. And every once in a while, she would tell me a story that made me see how true it was. For instance, when she was a teenager, I think, the first cars were on the road. And her family was not well-to-do. Her father worked on the railroad and her mother made money by writing sermons for ministers, which I loved, because it was so clear that she was not sort of going along with the religion, but she understood how to fake it, so to speak. Anyway, someone in the block had a Stanley Steamer, which was an early car. And my mother was the only person on the block who drove it.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  So I think she, you know, she was always adventurous.

• 25:21Elizabeth Day?

  And I hope you don't mind my saying this, but it strikes me that you were in a position at a very young age where you were the responsible one in that family unit, where you were doing a lot of your own parenting. And you don't sound at all bitter about that. You talk very lovingly about your parents. Has that always been the case?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think that children in general are very perceptive about what's going on in the household. So if the parents are withholding something from the children that they could give them, the children understand that. I also understood that my parents were absolutely doing the best they could. It wasn't as if they were consciously withholding something from me that they could otherwise have given me. I knew they loved me and they were doing the best they could. And that is pretty much what children need.

• 26:20Elizabeth Day?

  You mentioned in passing there that your older sister has six children, and you don't have children. And I am always wary about asking women about this subject. But the reason I want to ask you is actually, is a personal thing for me, because I have tried and failed to have children on several occasions, and it's been very painful. And therefore, I really admire and need women like you to be in the public eye, saying that they don't have children, they're okay with it. And I just wonder if I could ask you about that, about whether not having children was an active decision or whether it was something that just didn't happen.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  It wasn't a decision in the beginning, because remember that I was growing up in the nineteen fifties, not even the sixties, so I assumed that women had to marry and have children, that there wasn't an option. So there were a lot of years when I just kept putting it off into the future. Oh, yes, I'm going to do that, just not at this moment, right? But fortunately, the women's movement came along and said, wait a minute, not all women have to live the same way. You have a choice. And I just kind of discovered that I was happy as I am. So I think I was in a more privileged position in a way, definitely, than you were,

• 27:46Speaker 01

  because I didn't have an unfulfilled wish. I just discovered that I was okay with the way I was living.

• 27:56Elizabeth Day?

  And have you ever regretted not having children?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Not for a millisecond, no.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  You know, this is so deep and individual, so I so respect what you were saying. We all have different kinds of regrets, but that is not a regret I have.

• 28:17Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you for saying that, and I absolutely hear the respect that you have for it, and I really appreciate it. One of the reasons I bring it up is because of what we were talking about there, about insidious sexism in medicine, because my experience of fertility medicine was absolutely that, that I was predominantly seen by male clinicians who used language that was designed to make me feel like the failure as a defective woman. And I wonder if you have seen that in other areas as well? The insidiousness of that language of the other that is so embedded in societal norms?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yes, I think so. You and I together should come up with a list of terms that are bizarre.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  I wonder what men are told when their sperm are not impregnating someone? Do you think they are told their sperm are incompetent?

• 29:11Elizabeth Day?

  No, but I, and I would love, I would love to say they should be, but no, they shouldn't be. We should just like lift the language up for both of us.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's not, how can you assign blame? It just means that they're, the sperm are not twirling at the right speed or the walls of the womb are not, I mean, you know, surely we could put it in a less judgmental way.

• 29:36Elizabeth Day?

  Do you think you've ever been judged for not being a biological mother?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yes, I think so, in a way that people assume I must be unhappy or unfulfilled. Or, not everyone, but some people, I think, assume that. Just because they, where I think they perhaps would not assume about a man.

• 30:00Elizabeth Day?

  I think the other assumption that people make about feminists and activists generally is that they are angry. And the language of female anger is very different from the language around male anger. And this is something that I quote you saying all of the time. And you're actually in my latest book, where there's a whole chapter that I talk about female anger. And I quote you saying, there was a whole movie named Twelve Angry Men, and that was a good thing. When men are angry, it's usually assumed to be for a reason. When women are angry, it's been considered unfeminine or a character defect. Where do you think we are now in handling female and male anger?

• 30:44Elizabeth Day?

  Have you seen progress in your lifetime?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yes, certainly I've seen a lot of progress, and there is an understanding that women have a right to be angry. But I notice it especially in the difference of treatment, including in the press, of political candidates. There was such an emphasis, say, on Hillary Clinton's demeanor. If she was righteously angry in the cause of social justice, suddenly she was an angry woman in a way that a man would not have been. It's seen as a character flaw or trait, instead of a realistic reaction to events in the world.

• 31:30Elizabeth Day?

  Exactly. And male anger is seen as sort of righteous and powerful, rather than true-ish.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  And it's true racially, too. That is, certainly with racism in my country, clearly, people of colour have a right to be angry. But the caricature of an angry black man, as well as a woman, is of a dangerous person, rather as somebody who's reacting to reality.

• 31:58Elizabeth Day?

  Are you angry?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yes, and I do think anger is an important source of energy, because when you see something or experience something that is just not right, anger gives you the energy to do something about it. So anger is an energy cell.

• 32:18Elizabeth Day?

  And when was the last time you were really angry?

• 32:21Speaker 01

  The last time I looked at the White House, which was like an hour ago.

• 32:25Elizabeth Day?

  Inescapable.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Because we have a virus in this country who happens to be president.

• 32:33Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Elizabeth Day?

  There's another Steinem quote, it's a classic.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  And I would like to say in defence of my country that he lost by six million votes. He did not win the popular vote. He's only there because we have something called the Electoral College, which was a creation of the slaveholding states in the first place, and we should get rid of it. So in defence of this country, we did not vote for him in the majority, and hopefully we will get rid of him soon. I apologise for imposing him on the world. He does not represent, well, I guess he represents peak thirty percent of the country, which is in kind of racist backlash against change and sexist backlash and, you know, only interested in money or something.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  But he doesn't represent the vast majority of this country.

• 33:26Elizabeth Day?

  Does that backlash that you describe feel dispiriting to you? Or does it feel more like, I heard someone express it recently as the death rattle of the kind of old order. It's just like flailing around madly, trying to impose itself again, but ultimately we'll rid ourselves of it.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Well, I do understand, I mean, on the upside, it is not the majority. As I was just explaining, you know, he was not elected by the majority. And it is a sign of change in the sense that the folks who still feel as if they've been deprived of a hierarchy they were born into and now they see slipping away are here, you know, let's say it's something like a third. And it is a sign of enormous change that it is not the majority. They can see the change. For instance, the first generation of babies in this country, who are majority babies of colour, have already been born. So soon this will not be a majority, quote, white, unquote, country.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  And they can see that, and they feel displaced by that. So it is a backlash against change that is inevitable, and that is cheerful in a sense. But it's also dangerous. I mean, the best analogy I can think of is when a woman who is experiencing domestic violence, we know that the most dangerous time, that is the time she's most likely to be beaten or even killed, is when she is about to escape or has just escaped because she is escaping control. So in a sense, I think this country is in the position of a woman who is escaping. The good news is she is about to be free.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  The bad news is it's a moment of maximum danger. So we need to be conscious of both things and look after each other. But of course, we're not turning back.

• 35:26Elizabeth Day?

  That is such a powerful metaphor.

• 35:39Elizabeth Day?

  Your third failure is actually to do with a different country. You mentioned earlier that after graduating from Smith, you spent two years living in India. And your failure is related to when you came back. So tell us about that one.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  I'm so grateful that I had the chance to live in India for two years. I learned so much, including from the huge women's movement there that was very much part of the independence movement. And as one of its great leaders, Kamala Devi Chatterpaadya said when I was asking her about Gandhi, because she knew him, of course. She listened to me very patiently and then she said, "Well, of course, my dear, we taught him everything he knew."

• 36:27Speaker 01

  But when I came home, I thought, "All right, what I've learned there in terms of the women's movement and its power and importance, the method of nonviolence, so much organising from the bottom up, from the village level up, everything that I'd learned there, I continued to think was peculiar to India." It wasn't really until I was awakened by the civil rights movement and then the women's movement that I realised that those were universal. So I did waste a couple of years, or parts of a couple of years, compartmentalising, thinking geographically instead of thinking humanly.

• 37:08Elizabeth Day?

  And is that experience, that solitary experience in India when you were in your early twenties, does it affect you still? Do you think about it a lot?

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, I do, yes. First of all, my oldest friends are there. My oldest continuous friends are in India. Secondly, they are going through some of the same heartache that we are here because they also have an outrageously undemocratic leader. Modi, the prime minister, is divisive and punitive towards Muslims. In a way, he's more dangerous than Trump because he's smarter. He's rational.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  So I'm in touch frequently with my friends who live there and with some friends who go back and forth, who were born there and, you know, go back and forth from this country to there. So I feel very connected to what's going on there.

• 38:03Elizabeth Day?

  And is there a sense in India that, religiously speaking, which I guess then infuses the broader culture, that things are circular rather than hierarchical? I mean, that's a massive generalisation because I understand there's the kind of caste system. But is there something in that, that thing that you were talking about at the very beginning, about being linked rather than ranked? Did you bring that back from India?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  That's interesting. I hadn't thought about making that connection. There is a caste system. There are all the divisions that people are struggling with there. But on the other hand, there is a strong sense of reincarnation. So the continuity of life is perhaps more part of the culture there than it is here.

• 38:52Elizabeth Day?

  And I know that you've done a lot of study into sort of Cherokee outlooks. And the idea that many other original languages don't have gendered pronouns for he and she. And I just sort of found that really beautiful. And I just wondered if you could tell us a bit more about it.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm fascinated by that because I began to think about it because of friends here in what we call Indian country, that is, all the many different nations, tribes, cultures that were here before Europeans showed up. And I'm not sure about all their languages, but in many of them, there is no he and she. A person is a person. And so I began to think about the oldest languages in other parts of the world, in Africa and Asia, and realised too that pronouns are not gendered. And to think about the whole concept of gender as political, as an invention, that obviously what joins us as human beings,

• 39:52Speaker 01

  male or female, regardless of caste or race, is hugely more than the very minor related to reproductive or, I mean, perhaps in the case of race, so-called race, maybe it has something to do with vulnerability to diseases. I mean, but all that is really situational. The truth is, we are each uniquely individual. You know, we could never have happened before or again. We're a unique combination of heredity and environment. And we share our humanity. Especially in the last twenty years or so has become so clear to me that we invented gender. We invented race. We invented class.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  We invented caste. And we can disinvent them.

• 40:41Elizabeth Day?

  And have you felt restricted by the invention of your own gender in intimate relationships ever?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm sure. We're raised with a whole set of expectations. When you say that, I think, you know, something as simple as the man you're with will say, well, what movie do you want to see? And and a woman will say, well, what do you want to see?

• 41:07Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah, yes, totally.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Instead of saying, oh, here's what I'd like to see. So I think generationally, that's getting much, much better. I think younger women are much more likely to actually say what they think and feel.

• 41:24Elizabeth Day?

  You got married when you were sixty six, and I wonder why you chose to get married then at that particular age?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the most important reason was that we were in love and we wanted to be together. However, we would not have thought about getting legally married at that age, except that he had been born in South Africa. He was continuously worried about his legal status here. And clearly, the easiest way to affirm his legal status, and so he could stop worrying about being deported, was to get married. So that was one reason. And then another even more immediate reason was that we were on our way to see my friend Wilma Mankiller and her husband and family in Oklahoma. And she offered us a Cherokee ceremony.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  So, you know, who could resist that? So we had a wonderful wedding in which Wilma's husband, I have no idea what was said because it was in Cherokee, but the two of us walked around a fire. And Wilma got a local woman judge to come and sign the certificate. This was before breakfast, and then we all had breakfast, and that was it. I mean, it was kind of irresistible.

• 42:42Elizabeth Day?

  I was so sad to read that your husband, David Bale, died four years after you got married in this beautiful ceremony. And I just wanted to say I'm I'm so sorry for your loss. We're living during a time, as we've mentioned, of a global pandemic, and we're recording this remotely. And I know that a lot of people listening will also be suffering some form of loss. And as someone who has really weathered those kind of storms, I wonder whether you had any advice or something that you wish you had known when you were experiencing your own grief that you could share with us?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  It's such a individual experience. I'm not sure that I can give advice. But I guess it's to just treasure the time that you had together and try to understand that as long as you remember and other people remember, that person is still with us. I remember sitting in my living room after he died with a yellow pad, writing him a letter. That it's not rational, but somehow it meant to me, you know, that he was he was still here. I related to his grown up children, who are wonderful. I think it's

• 44:06Speaker 01

  helpful to understand that as long as we remember the person, they are still with us.

• 44:15Elizabeth Day?

  You wrote to me that the reason that you chose that failure when you came back from India to interpret and integrate what you'd learnt there into the feminist movement is because you felt you had wasted a lot of time. And then you wrote this gorgeous phrase, and time is all there is. And I wonder how you feel now at the age of eighty six. What age do you feel inside?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting, isn't it? I don't know what your experience is, but I now, for instance, I watch on television all the authorities saying that the most endangered group are older people, you know, over seventy five, eighty, or whatever. And I think, oh, that's too bad. It takes me a full minute to understand that I'm part of that group.

• 45:08Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  So I'm not sure that I'm very good at so far at understanding the the reality of age, or how precious the remaining time is, because we have this both blessed and unfortunate notion that we're immortal somehow. But I'm trying. I'm trying. I'm sort of making more lists of what I want to do, hoping that I can understand that I'm not immortal.

• 45:39Elizabeth Day?

  Well, except by your rationale, you actually are immortal, because so many people will remember you and have been formatively influenced by you, that you leave such an incredible legacy that you will still be around. So that's so you actually are immortal, Gloria Steinem.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Well, no, that's very comforting. But don't you feel that there's so much you haven't written, or done, or said? And certainly, my publisher thinks so. So.

• 46:10Elizabeth Day?

  I feel exactly the same. And I'm, I'm forty one, and I had a similar thing recently when they were talking about age groups affected by the pandemic, and how they were going to potentially let out young people in their twenties and thirties. And I was like, well, I'll be fine then. And I was like, no, actually, I don't fit into that category.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Do you think that each person has a kind of psychic age?

• 46:33Elizabeth Day?

  I do.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  We feel, different people feel different, you know, somebody feels perpetually thirty, and somebody else perpetually forty.

• 46:41Elizabeth Day?

  I can only speak from my own experience, but I do believe that. And I feel perpetually thirty two. And I felt thirty two when I was ten.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  And why do you think you picked thirty two?

• 46:53Elizabeth Day?

  Such a good question. I think I always felt like an older person trapped in a child's body. And it always really frustrated me because I couldn't wait to have control over my own life and to have independence. And similarly, I think in my head, I thought twenties were the decade for kind of going out to parties and having fun. And I'm quite introverted. So that didn't appeal to me. Whereas thirty two felt like just the right balance of everything. And I thought by then I would have two children, and you know, I imagined my life in a very conventional way. And obviously, it didn't turn out like that. But when I was thirty two, I really did feel in sync with myself.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Well, that's interesting. And I think you should continue to ask people this question, because I bet each person has a different psychic age. While you were saying that, I was trying to think what mine is. And I think it's early forties.

• 47:47Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  That was the time in which I feel like I finally came into the life that I was meant to live, and stopped trying to live a life that I was expected to have.

• 48:00Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, my gosh, it's like you are in my head. That's exactly how I feel about my forties. It's exactly how I feel about my forties.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  All right. Well, now now you have a whole series of programs, ask people their psychic age.

• 48:14Elizabeth Day?

  It's a new podcast. But before I let you go, Gloria, I'm very interested in this notion that you've spoken about in the past, about how women become more radical with age. And that's definitely been my experience. So how radical do you feel now?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Well, I think the reason that that is the case is that we outlive society's expectations. And actually, society doesn't have, for both good and bad reasons, expectations of women beyond childbearing and child rearing age. I think older men are discriminated against too, but less so, because there's a connotation of wisdom or power that comes with older men and not necessarily with older women. So just to be beyond society's expectations is a kind of freedom. And, you know, I always thought that the most revolutionary thing

• 49:14Speaker 01

  to happen would be for an army of gray haired women, or concealing their gray hair. But anyway, gray haired women to take over the earth. Because they will be less likely, there's not that all women are virtuous, but they're less likely to be afflicted with the gender need to be in control, more likely to have a familial model of leadership, which depends on cooperation. And even now, did you see this survey that shows that female headed nations have responded to this COVID crisis much better than any other nations?

• 49:52Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, it's extraordinary, particularly like nations like New Zealand are just leading the way.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yes, it's not inevitable. It has to do with culture. It's not that women are in any way inherently more virtuous. But given the cultural differences, and the differences in women's lives, that older women in league, acting together, could be a very positive force in this world.

• 50:19Elizabeth Day?

  I'm very intrigued to know what is on those lists that you are writing of things that you want to do.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Well, first is to meet my book contract that I'm working on with two friends. The image of the women's movement here. Perhaps you see online every once in a while, the word white feminism, you know, well, if it's white, it's not feminism, obviously, because either it includes everybody or it doesn't. But people think about the women's movement and the civil rights movement, and they divide it racially. And so they don't understand that in my country, black women have always outnumbered or been disproportionately more likely to be creating and part of the women's movement. So we're writing a book about that.

• 51:07Elizabeth Day?

  Interesting. And who are you writing it with?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Well, Beverly Gaisheftel, do you know who that is? She's a great scholar of women's history at Spelman College. She's been head of the Women's Studies Association, a great woman. And Paula Giddings, who also is an author, a journalist, a professor. And they are African American women. And so the three of us are bringing our experiences together in this book.

• 51:35Elizabeth Day?

  I can't wait to read it, but first you have to write it. My final question Gloria Steinem is that for me, you are one of the most impressive people I have ever had the privilege to interview. But I wonder for you, who is the most impressive person you've ever met?

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so hard.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  That's your hardest question.

• 51:59Elizabeth Day?

  I'm sorry, it's a horrible question. Feel free to ignore it and say you can't answer.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  No, I'm trying to think. I mean, in a way, the person who changed me the most is someone I, who's a friend and I have only written about briefly, and that's Wilma Mankiller, because she was a pathway into my belated discovery, because our school system doesn't explain to us. You know, our, our books still start when the first Europeans showed up, not with all the millennia of people who were here before. That there was and still is on my own subcontinent here, cultures that were and are matrilineal, that don't honour gender in the same way, that the paradigm of social organisation was

• 52:48Speaker 01

  the circle, not the hierarchy. She was, I think, among and maybe the most influential person I ever interviewed. That is, she changed me in the process of talking to her. I mean, in a way, I've had the luck to interview a lot of people who, from whom I learned a lot, you know, I mean, in a way, being a journalist is like having a licence to learn, to ask questions.

• 53:15Elizabeth Day?

  I actually, I read somewhere that you interviewed John Lennon, and I just wondered what that experience was like.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  They were just coming here, the Beatles had just dawned on the world. And I was assigned by a magazine here to follow them around New York during their first visit, which literally meant I was just following along and writing about them. So it wasn't as if I was able to spend a lot of time with him, I wasn't. But it was clear even then that he was a gifted and imaginative and a wonderful writer. He had written his little book of, of doggerel prose, wonderful, with that great sense of sound and alliteration that comes with England's understanding of English and speech and its, in all of its different forms of class and so on.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  So though I didn't really get to know him, it just was always clear how imaginative and gifted he was even then.

• 54:15Elizabeth Day?

  Gloria Steinem, I cannot thank you enough, not only for finding the time to come on my podcast, but for spending a life shaping my ideas and challenging me to think and writing the most brilliant things, and you are one of my heroes, and it's just been such a privilege for me to talk to you. So you have lived up to every single expectation, if not exceeded them. Thank you so, so much for coming on Out of Fail.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Well, and I just want to say that I feel about you that I just had to wait for some of my friends to be born, so.

• 54:49Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, oh my God, that's the most beautiful thing you could say.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  I'm so, I'm so grateful for your work, for your words, for writing, interviewing. Thank you so much.

• 54:59Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you.