The Gloria Steinem I knew She rejected tick-box feminism

I first met Gloria Steinem at the Café des Artistes in October 1997. That bohemian spot in Lower Manhattan was the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin’s favourite meeting place. She once told me that she often held “feminist mafia” summits in its backroom. Indeed, visiting Dworkin was the main purpose of my trip to New York that year; I’d asked for her help to establish an international campaign to improve criminal justice responses to rape and sexual assault. And Dworkin was Steinem’s close friend and feminist ally.

A number of feminist icons were at the Café that day — but all heads turned when Steinem walked in. Dressed in skintight jeans, heeled boots, a brightly coloured cowl-neck sweater and eye-catching jewellery, she oozed confidence. She looked so different from the rest of us, dutifully clad in our “feminist uniform” of ill-fitting jeans, slogan t-shirts and trainers. Nevertheless, I noted a palpable affection between Dworkin and Steinem that day, though both told me that they had had to agree to disagree on certain important issues, not least the Lewinsky fiasco.

The scandal had broken three months later, in January 1998. In March of that year, Steinem published her defence of Bill Clinton in The New York Times. I received a fax from Dworkin the same day: she couldn’t understand how Steinem could possibly defend the world’s most powerful man against so many allegations of abuse from women. “Feminists,” she wrote, “are supposed to stand by all women to whom this happens. Gloria has betrayed those women.”

Yet Steinem was adamant: she said that even if the allegations against Clinton were true, feminists were right not to demand his resignation or impeachment. She argued that as long as Congress was controlled by conservatives — who were hostile to women’s rights in general — it was better that he remain in power: since he was a crucial defender of abortion rights and had committed to ending violence against women. In practice, this led to some strange moral contortions. In the case of one accuser, for instance, Steinem defined what Clinton had done as a crude, clumsy sexual advance. In fact, at least technically, it was sexual assault.

This tension — between principle and strategy — would persist throughout her life. I had long labelled her a liberal feminist, insofar as she was committed to reform rather than a root-and-branch shake up of the patriarchal system. Yet Steinem often described herself as a radical feminist, saying that women were oppressed under a “sexual caste system”. These attitudes were clear in 1987, when she publicly disagreed with feminists like Susan Brownmiller about whether Hedda Nussbaum had been complicit in the brutal killing of her six-year-old adopted daughter at the hands of her common-law husband Joel Steinberg, a wealthy lawyer accused of first-degree manslaughter. For allowing the death of a child, Nussbaum initially faced charges herself — but these were dropped once it emerged Steinberg had terrorised and beaten her too.

Alongside other prominent feminists — including Dworkin,  Martina Navratilova, Susan Sarandon, and Shirley Chisholm — Brownmiller accused Steinem of seeing Nussbaum as a “helpless victim”: one who dodged responsibility for failing to protect her daughter. “As an extreme victim,” Steinem responded, “[Nussbaum] forces us to do one of two things: reject and blame her, or think we could be her. It’s hard to think we could be her — so we’d rather blame her”.

That familiar blend of empathy and pragmatism was equally apparent in 1999, when Dworkin reported being drug-raped in a Paris hotel room. Some feminists abandoned her, thinking she had gone crazy. But not Steinem, who sent a psychiatrist specialised in PTSD to assess her. Dworkin never forgot this, even reminding me of it the last time I saw her. Despite their huge difference of opinion on the Clinton scandal, she and Steinem remained close. She was, by all accounts, a deeply loyal friend. I witnessed this first-hand. Despite disagreeing with my views on prostitution, she she enthusiastically agreed to blurb my 2017 book on the subject, in which I outlined the abolitionist position.

This flexibility was also clear when it came to gender ideology.  In a 1977 essay, commenting on Jan Morris’ medical transition, Steinem argued that a sexist, polarised society is often a factor in pressurising individuals to alter their bodies — rather than fight the prejudice that comes from sex stereotypes. Yet that didn’t stop Steinem from later establishing herself as a full-blown ally of transgender rights. As late as 2012, she expressed agreement with Janice Raymond’s book The Transsexual Empire, dismissed by gender ideologues as “hate speech”. But just a year later, she shifted on the issue, writing in The Advocate that “trans people should be celebrated, not questioned”.

Rachel Moran, author of Paid For, also disagreed with Steinem on the transgender issue — but appreciated her “respectful tones” and the “open way” she discussed such matters. “That’s rare in this cultural moment,” Moran says. “She certainly understood prostitution as a system of misogynistic exploitation, we had numerous conversations about it. She did a lot of good in the world.”

That subtlety sometimes cost her. Fiona Broadfoot, a British sex-trade survivor, got to know Steinem following a 2017 summit on how to eradicate the practice. “She always stood with prostitution survivors, despite getting a load of flak from the pro-prostitution lobby,” Broadfoot tells me. “She saw women like me as her equal, there wasn’t an ounce of snobbery or superiority about her.”

The last time I was in contact with Steinem was on her 85th birthday, in 2019. She joked about looking forward to a good-natured sparring session the next time we met. There are lessons to be learned from this approach to politics. Though Steinem battled to end other kinds of institutionalised oppression — including racism — she never embraced the omnicause. Her absolute priority was the liberation of all women and girls globally. More to the point, she didn’t believe in a tick-box list of prescribed opinions, despite remaining firmly on the Left. Ultimately, she believed in building bridges across difference, now a dying art, particularly among younger generations.

Steinem lived long enough to see many of the rights feminists of her generation won being lost again. What will her legacy be? Beyond an openness to dissent, younger feminists will hopefully recognise how tenuous those rights are. May that momentum keep the fight going.

There are reasons for optimism. Whatever feminists think about Steinem’s views — or her relationship with the US government — there seems to be universal respect for her tenacity and outspokenness. Her role in the women’s liberation movement was pivotal, in that she didn’t try to hide the fact that she believed that the larger goals of feminism mattered more than any individual woman’s interests. That’s a hard path to tread, and I for one couldn’t do it. But Steinem did so with honesty and integrity, her principles intact until the end.

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