My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  After Dorothy had a baby and decided to travel less, my partners became friends and colleagues like Margaret Sloan, a black feminist poet and activist from Chicago’s South Side, and Florynce Kennedy, a civil rights lawyer and an infinitely quotable and charismatic speaker. Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. “If you’re lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,” she said patiently, “you don’t send somebody to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!”

  I always spoke first—especially after Flo, I would have been an anticlimax—and we each talked about our own experience of seeing talent wasted by imaginary limits of race, gender, class, sexuality, and so on—including the prison of “masculinity” that limits men. To make a balance between speakers and audience, we did our best to split the time equally between our talk and an audience free-for-all. I knew this was working when, say, someone on one side of the hall asked a question, and someone on the other side answered it. People stood up and spoke about ideas and experiences they might never have brought up even with a friend.

  Together and separately, we as speakers disproved another description used to disqualify feminists: that we were all “whitemiddleclass,” a phrase used by the media then (and academics who believe those media clippings now) as if it were a single adjective to describe the women’s movement. In fact, the first-ever nationwide poll of women’s opinions on issues of gender equality showed that African American women were twice as likely as white women to support them.8 If the poll had included Latinas, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and other women of color, the result might well have been even more dramatic. After all, if you’ve experienced discrimination in one form, you’re more likely to recognize it in another. Also racism and sexism are intertwined—as Mrs. Greene and millions of others experienced—and cannot be uprooted separately.

  Traveling in an interracial team taught me some important and unsettling truths about this country. Though we were both speaking about women’s liberation, for instance, reporters would ask me questions about women, and then ask Dorothy or Flo or Margaret about civil rights. This was true even though Flo was eighteen years older than I and had been very public as a feminist lawyer. We learned to let this effort to divide us go for a while before naming it—whether with anger and humor, as in Flo’s case, or with history, as in the case of Margaret, who recited Sojourner Truth’s “But Ain’t I a Woman?” This was a small taste of a general problem: the invisibility in the media of the many women of color who pioneered the women’s movement. In the way that image can overwhelm reality, nothing but struggle for decades would keep this from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Sometimes sexual politics took petty and odd forms. For example, I had been called a “pretty girl” before I was identified as a feminist in my mid-thirties. Then suddenly I found myself being called “beautiful.” Not only was I described by my appearance more than ever before, but I was told that how I looked was the only reason I got any attention at all. In 1971 The St. Petersburg Times headlined, “Gloria’s Beauty Belies Her Purpose.”9 It took me a few years to figure out this sudden change in response to the same person. I was being measured against the expectation that any feminist had to be unattractive in a conventional sense—and then described in contrast to that stereotype. The subtext was: If you could get a man, why would you need equal pay?

  This grew into an accusation that I was listened to only because of how I looked, and a corollary that the media had created me. Though I’d been a freelance writer all my professional life without being told that my appearance was the reason I got published, it now became the explanation for everything, no matter how hard I worked. Never mind that the opposite was sometimes the case, as when my literary agent had sent me to an editor at a major national magazine, who dismissed me by saying, “We don’t want a pretty girl—we want a writer.” The idea that whatever I had accomplished was all about looks would remain a biased and hurtful accusation even into my old age.

  Fortunately, traveling and speaking took me to audiencess full of down-home common sense. When a reporter raised the question of my looks as more important than anything I could possibly have to say, for example, an older woman rose in the audience. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said to me comfortingly, “it’s important for someone who could play the game—and win—to say: ‘The game isn’t worth shit.’ ”

  I also learned from my speaking partners. When we were in the South especially, some man in the audience might assume that a black woman and a white woman traveling together must be lesbians. Florynce Kennedy modeled the perfect response: “Are you my alternative?”

  If someone called me a lesbian—in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians—I learned just to say, “Thank you.” It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh.

  I also came to appreciate this two-way understanding that happens only when we’re all in the same space. It gradually made me less reluctant to go out on my own. Nervousness might still return, like malaria, but mostly I’d learned that audiences turn into partners if you just listen to them as much as you talk.

  After I joined with a group of writers and editors to start Ms. magazine, I was traveling not only for stories, but also to sell ads to reluctant makers of cars who were convinced that men made that buying decision; to explain to makers of women’s products why Ms. didn’t publish fashion, beauty, or cooking articles that praised and promoted the products of advertisers; and to persuade newsstand dealers to carry a new kind of women’s magazine whose cover looked nothing like the others. I remember going from city to city, buying doughnuts and coffee for men who loaded boxes of magazines onto the trucks at dawn, hoping they would persuade newsstand dealers to at least open our boxes.

  Soon I was also traveling state by state to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, or for new women candidates who represented women’s majority needs and views, or for male candidates who were doing this, too, or to fund-raise for various parts of this movement that I cared about so much.

  In the 1980s, I published my first real book, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, and discovered the author’s tour as a new kind of road trip. There were actually author’s escorts—often freelancers themselves—who knew each city and schlepped authors around to book signings and media appearances. That plus two more books and tours in the 1990s made me realize that bookstores were the great community centers. Anybody could come, whether they could afford a book or not, and the spaces reserved for talks and signings invited talking circles. Since no computer can provide this companionship, the more personal the store, the more likely it is to survive.

  I know that some authors hate book tours—and maybe I would, too, if I had to keep repeating the plot of one novel—but I grew to love these spontaneous gatherings in shopping malls, university bookstores, and specialty bookshops that couldn’t be replaced by the big chains, all the spaces with coffee, comfortable chairs, and the presence of books that allow people to browse and discover interests they didn’t know they had. Recently when a book of mine was published in India,10 I did a tour of bookstores from Jaipur and New Delhi to Kolkata. Those, too, range from big cheerful chains to small, discussion-filled, art-filled shops. Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.

  Every author also creates a world of her or his own. I watched Bette Midler signing every last book for her hundreds of fans lined up around the block, all while wearing a perky hat made to look like a piano. Oliver North of the Iran-Contra arms scandal had two guards carrying poorly concealed guns, took no questions, and signed copies of Under Fire: An American Story—The Explosive Autobiography of Oliver North. Ai-jen Poo, who won a MacArthur “genius” award for her organizing of domestic workers, turned book signings
into rallies. No one left one of her events without knowing that living longer is not a crisis, it’s a blessing, that the twelve million Americans over eighty-five will double in number by 2035, that many more home care workers will be needed, and that these workers deserve the same legal rights as workers anywhere else.

  Altogether, I can’t imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there. Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.

  IV.

  There are events that divide our lives into before and after. I notice that most people, when asked to name such an event, cite something that gave them a feeling of emotional connection, whether it was witnessing a birth, or walking New York streets after 9/11, or viewing a photo of our fragile planet from space.

  Mine was an event you may never have heard of: the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. It may take the prize as the most important event nobody knows about. In three days, plus the two years leading up to them, my life was changed by a new sense of connection—with issues, possibilities, and women I came to know in the trenches. The conference also brought a huge and diverse movement together around shared issues and values. You might say it was the ultimate talking circle.

  I’m not alone in being a different person after Houston. In the years since then, I’ve met diverse women who were there, and every one has told me of some way in which she, too, was transformed; her hopes and ideas of what was possible—for the world, for women in general, and for herself. Because eighteen thousand observers came to Houston from fifty-six other countries, and because delegates were chosen to represent the makeup of each state and territory, it was probably the most geographically, racially, and economically representative body this nation has ever seen—much more so than Congress; not even close. Issues to be voted on in Houston also had been selected in every state and territory. It was a constitutional convention for the female half of the country. After all, we had been excluded from the first one.

  If you wonder why you haven’t heard about this event—I’m glad. It all began in 1972, when the United Nations declared that 1975 would be International Women’s Year—right up there with the Year of the Child or the Year of the Family Farm. In 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed a thirty-nine-member delegation to represent U.S. women, and named a man from the State Department to head it.

  But the one who took on this task of finding out what issues and hopes really did represent the female half of this country was Congresswoman Bella Abzug, a woman who never thought small. She enlisted Congresswoman Patsy Mink as coauthor and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm as coconspirator in writing a revolutionary piece of legislation. It called for federal funding for fifty-six open, economically and racially representative conferences over two years, one in every state and territory. Delegates elected and issues selected at each meeting would then go to a national conference in Houston. There, a National Plan of Action would be voted on. The purpose was to represent U.S. women not only to the rest of the world, but also to our own leaders in Washington and in state legislatures. At last, there would be democratic answers to the classic question: What do women want?

  I couldn’t think of anyone but Bella who could dream up such a massive series of events, much less have the chutzpah to ask Congress to pay for them. Though I’d campaigned with her in a Manhattan that loved her, a Washington that feared her, and a women’s movement that depended on her, I’d never seen her try anything this huge. Women in every state and territory would be invited to debate and decide such contentious issues as reproductive freedom and abortion, welfare rights, lesbian rights, domestic violence, and the exclusion of domestic workers from labor laws. Her request for $10 million was actually a bargain at twenty-eight cents per adult American woman, but Congress went into shock. It delayed voting until a year after the first state conference was supposed to start; then it slashed the appropriation in half to $5 million. Still, money was approved, and the National Women’s Conference was scheduled for Houston in November 1977.

  To organize this mammoth undertaking, President Jimmy Carter appointed a new group of IWY commissioners. I was one, which is why I and about three dozen other members of this new commission ended up spending two years crisscrossing the country to help organize fifty-six conferences of two days each.

  —

  I CONFESS THAT I was as scared as I had ever been. This organizing challenge was a little like a presidential campaign, with a fraction of the resources. It meant helping to create a representative planning body in each state and territory, including groups that probably had never been together before. I would learn the big difference between protesting other people’s rules and making one’s own—between asking and doing.

  Our election process for delegates was so open as to be terrifying. Anyone sixteen years old or over could be elected if the result, as a group, represented the state racially and economically.

  Success can be as disastrous as failure—and it almost was. As if we had tapped some underground spring of desire, women came to conferences in such numbers that they overflowed the campuses and government buildings where our shoestring budget put them.

  In Vermont, more than a thousand women slogged through ice and snow to create the biggest women’s conference ever seen there. If most hadn’t supplied their own brown-bag lunches and child care, our organizing goose would have been cooked at this first of all the state conferences.

  In Alaska, an auditorium designed for six hundred had to make way for seven thousand. Fortunately, most of the women good-naturedly sat on the floor.

  In Albany, the capital of New York State, more than eleven thousand women—four times more than we planned for—lined up outside government buildings in the sweltering July heat, then waited most of the night in an airless basement to cast ballots for delegates and issues. I’d stopped in Albany for the opening ceremony—and then I was going home to write and make a living, but I ended up staying for two days and two nights without bed or toothbrush, helping with the voting lines.

  Events in some other states made us realize that we’d been living in a fool’s paradise. To represent majority views was definitely not everybody’s goal. For instance, only about 2 percent of the population of Washington state was Mormon, but nearly half the women attending that state’s conference were. Such disproportion also turned up in Michigan and Missouri, part of a massive Mormon effort to head off the Equal Rights Amendment, then in its ratification process and sure to be voted on in Houston.11 Though over 60 percent of Americans supported it, one Mormon woman was about to be excommunicated for campaigning for the ERA.12 Some said this opposition came from a fear that the ERA would take women out of a traditional role by offering them equality outside the home; others pointed out that Mormon-owned insurance companies would lose money if gender-rated actuarial tables were outlawed, as race-rated ones had been. (For instance, a woman who didn’t smoke often paid higher premiums than a man who did smoke. Why? Because on the average, women live longer.) Opposition literature also said the ERA could mean integrated restrooms, women in combat, husbands who no longer had to support wives, and more—none of which was accurate.

  On the theory that exposure cures many ills, Bella called a press conference to disclose this attempt to overrepresent one religious group. Congress members from states where Mormons had political power accused Bella of religious bias, demanding she apologize in public—and she had to. It was the only time I ever saw her give in to power.

  Some other religious groups were just as opposed to representative conferences. In Missouri, church buses brought five hundred or so Christian fundamentalist women and men to the state conference—in time to vote but not long enough to be tainted by open discussion. In many states, Catholic groups brought anti-abortion and anti-birth-control pamphlets and picket signs, even though—or perhaps because—Catholic women were at least as likely as non-Catholics to use both. In Oklahoma, Christian fundamentali
sts voted to call homemaking “the most vital and rewarding career for women” and then to end the meeting. I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.

  In Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan grew so alarmed at a multiracial conference that its members called in reinforcements and elected an almost totally white delegation in a state that was at least a third African American.”13

  Finally we ruled what we should have in the first place: registrants for the conferences had to sign up individually in advance, not at the door by the busload.

  Koryne Horbal, a founder of the Feminist Caucus of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, saw that anti-equality groups were distributing lists of issues to oppose in Houston, but pro-equality groups were giving out no lists of what to support. She put all the pro-equality issues into one National Plan of Action, made buttons that said I’M PRO-PLAN, and spent weeks phoning delegates to explain why each issue was important. Once in Houston, her work in creating clarity would save the day. I’M PRO-PLAN buttons would help women to recognize allies they didn’t know, just as anti-equality delegates recognized each other by wearing red STOP ERA buttons.

  —

  THIS LONG, HARD, HUMOROUS, educational, angering, unifying, improvised, and exhausting two-year process probably shortened all our lives.

  But it was worth it. On a hot November day in 1977, two thousand elected delegates and about eighteen thousand observers began to fill the biggest arena in Houston. With issue areas from the arts to welfare, and three days to vote on them, there was a feeling of urgency, excitement, and even a little fear that we couldn’t pull it off. Also hundreds of anti-ERA, anti-abortion, and other pickets were marching outside the arena in the hope of making sure that we couldn’t. Across town, a right-wing and religious counterconference—led by Phyllis Schlafly—was getting equal media coverage for accusing the National Women’s Conference of being antifamily, anti-God, and otherwise unrepresentative; never mind that those counterconference participants had been elected by no one.