When the woman who represented the feminist movement 40 years ago walked in front of the Union Ballroom podium, hundreds of the attendees stood for her ovation. She clapped for them as well.
Gloria Steinem, writer and activist, who once rallied women in 1968 to claim the rights of equal pay and career pursuit, received the praise saying, “And they said this was a conservative campus.” At 71, her long hair was pulled back but loose around her face. She spoke as clearly as anyone youthful, commanding attention from the quiet audience with her voice.
“I was born female,” was her answer to why she got involved in feminism. The moment she began her speech, she addressed the patriarchal influences on the room. “This is still a hierarchal structure,” she said.
“I am standing higher on this podium, while you are all below. Haven’t we learned that patriarchy doesn’t work in any place?” After the audience clapped again, she suggested “turning this very precious hour into more of a circle,” where after her speech, others could not only question her, but comment, plea and announce.
Steinem, who was born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, was the granddaughter of suffragette Pauline Steinem. Gloria Steinem was 8 years old when her father left them. She and her chronically depressed mother lived in poverty, and as her mother’s condition worsened until she could no longer function, Steinem took care of her.
When she was 15, she moved in with her 25-year-old sister, who lived in Washington, D.C., where Steinem would enter Smith College and graduate Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. She also won a fellowship to study in India for two years.
“When I came back, I realized how many luxuries Americans took for granted,” she said. At the time, she said, “America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.” Steinem, who later founded the first mass-circulated magazine for women, Ms., returned to the United States with a zeal for social reform.
“We invented sexism and racism,” she said. “We are naturally a species that is motivated by empathy.”
Perhaps it was empathy or social consciousness that led her to write a series of articles of the working conditions of Playboy bunnies after being hired as one herself. The series was published in the magazine Show.
“Each of us in this room came from the same two people,” Steinem said, tracing humanity’s origins. “Knowing this, how can we live in racism?” she asked
She said racism was invented when overpopulated societies wanted to move other societies away from their land or make them work for them without pay. “The more land people acquired, the more inferior they were,” she said.
“In a racist caste system, women are more restricted,” Steinem said. According to her, European men only gained the motivation to control women, when they sought to control reproduction and population. “When they started to view children as wealth and laborers, they did away with the natural fertility system,” she said. This fertility system allowed women to have two or three children, two years apart, which was less harmful for a woman’s body than indefinitely bearing consecutive children. “Did you know one of the first acts Hitler ordained was to padlock contraception,” she said, later explaining that he wanted an Aryan white society.
Ten years ago, Steinem visited the Bushmen of Kalahari. There were male chiefs, but female elders picked and advised them. Women had children two or three years apart, “no more than their bodies would allow,” she said. When the children played games, their main focus was cooperation, not competition. Violence occurred, but only in self-defense.
Steinem said the people believed God was in everything and much less vertical than the patriarchal religious systems of many other cultures. “Ever wonder why God has to look like the ruling class?” she asked.
This culture had a male-female balance that she said was needed in America. “They didn’t force their children to remain virgins, and they could experiment sexually if they wanted to with whatever sex they wanted to.”
Cultural anthropologist and assistant professor Ronald Loewe validated her observations of the Kalahari Bushmen. Modernized civilizations could live in such cooperation if they had better models, he said. “We need more ways of looking at changing. We could look at matrilineal societies, for instance, instead of patrilineal ones. If we don’t see other ways, we won’t be motivated to work towards anything better.”
Politically and socially, Steinem seemed to cover it all. When a man who would only reveal himself as Pete stood up and professed his pro-life leanings, he asked, “After conception, when is it not ok to have an abortion?” Steinem answered, “As long as the fetus depends on the womans’ womb to live, it should be her choice.” He then said, “What about,” but did not finish and sat down.
After the speech Pete, who wouldn’t reveal his last name for fear of losing his job, said, “She is entitled to her opinion, but I think she is in error,” he said.
The man, who said he had researched intelligent design, said, “I am troubled by her comment about right-wing nuts,” adding, “She needs to look at issues objectively and realize when a nut is a nut.”
Nancy McCarley, director of the Honors Program, which helped sponsor the event, closed the speech thanking Aretha Jones of the Holmes Cultural Diversity Center, another sponsor, for getting Steinem to come to MSU. Later, McCarley said that there was a place for feminism today. “As long as there is any kind of discrimination on the basis of gender, we’ll need a forum for change,” she said.