Gloria Steinem passed away on September 02. I wanted to pay my respects to her. Tonight it’s too late for me to stay up much longer, but I shall post this much already. This is my way of reminding myself that the rest of what I wanted to say must be written soon. The rest of you who can’t tell her from Eve might Google her up before coming back here.
(September 09): I have always been deeply persuaded by
the women’s liberation movement as long as they fought against all the ugliest
and stupidest kinds of oppression and deprivation, and as long as they fought
for real freedom, equality and justice, especially for the poorest and least
educated among them. I have read, and read about, some of the great feminists,
from the time of Sita and Draupadi through Mary Wollstonecraft and J.S. Mill to
Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan, along with many contemporary
Indian stalwarts, some of whom I have written about with admiration and respect,
not to say awe, here. Gloria Steinem was among the truly great. She left us at
92, so she was at her fighting best long before today’s young adult feminists were
born, and I deeply regret that so many of them neither know about the likes of
her nor about how much of their now-taken-for-granted freedoms and privileges
they owe to the bitter lifelong struggles of women such as she. She was still writing about burning
issues at 90: what energy, what conviction! Though she had a low opinion of
marriage and never had children, she lived a full and vigorous life, and never
hated or despised men: indeed, as my newspaper obituary (The Telegraph, Sept. 04, p. 2) says, ‘she led a glittering social
life and enjoyed relationships with many high-voltage men’. Also, ‘even as she
personified the women’s movement, (she) defied the stereotype of women’s
libbers as sexless, humourless and dateless’.
Some of my dearest grown up female ex-students have
told me that feminism today has turned into something far less honest, a far
more selfish, vicious, opportunistic thing; it is (to many) no longer about
freedom, equality, friendship and cooperation between the sexes any more. I
have seen something of this with my own eyes, in the lives of many people
around me. To a great extent, a lot of ‘feminists’ today seem to be trying very
hard to prove merely that they can be just as bad, and given a chance, just as
dishonest, exploitative and unfair as the worst of men can be. Some of them are quite unaware about it, and many are in furious denial. Given a
different role of the dice, I’d have loved to have had a chat with Gloria about
what she thought about it in the last days of her life, and whether she was
just a little bit disillusioned.
I didn’t write much in detail about her
life and works, but if this post makes some readers curious, I shall urge them
to read up at least the Wikipedia articles about her.
