Women are becoming the men they wanted to marry.
Women are becoming the men they wanted to marry.
Y esterday, following the death of feminist activist Gloria Steinem at the age of 92, Netflix released her episode of Famous Last Words, which records interviews with notable people that are only to be released posthumously. After a 40-or-so-minute sit-down conversation with Glee co-creator Brad Falchuk — the cameras are operated remotely by videographers who do not have audio access, so it is as private as can be — he leaves the room and, true to the series’ title, allows his guest to voice his or her last words to the public.
Steinem, especially in her heyday in the ’70s, was always known for her looks, with Vogue once having called her “the most attractive activist in Women’s Lib.” Although at the time of the Netflix recording, she no longer had the iconic streaked hair or the aviator glasses that defined her public image, she was, even in her nineties, unmistakably the same woman who went undercover as a Playboy bunny in order to expose the poor working conditions of the women in Hugh Hefner’s empire — strikingly beautiful, charming, eloquent, sincere. At the end of the episode, she looks straight into the camera and says:
Hello, you unique individuals out there . . . I wish I could meet each one of you in person, but in a way, this is what allows us now to see each other’s lives, to influence each other’s lives, to respect each other, and, therefore, to perpetuate what we hope is a global democracy. Please feel free to respond in any way you can, and please tell your own story.
I’ll briefly tell part of mine, then, to honor her memory. Around this time seven years ago, I began my first year (we did not use the term “freshman”) at Wellesley College, an all-women’s school in Massachusetts not unlike Smith College, from which Steinem graduated in 1956. Unlike Steinem, who was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934 and raised there, I grew up in a D+11 district not far from Wellesley, so it wasn’t like any of the new progressive trends surprised me all that much. The scale, however, did.
Per an unofficial student survey I recall circulating among us, more than half of my classmates identified as lesbian, bisexual, or queer, which, while high, seemed normal enough after accounting for the type of student who selects into a very progressive women’s college in a very progressive state. What seemed less normal: Around 20 percent of students identified as transgender or nonbinary, almost all of whom were biologically female. No matter how inclusive I wanted to be, I often found myself in tears, especially that first semester, seeing all these beautiful young women coming to college and getting their breasts hacked off, and all the rest of us expected to nod along like everything was fine, like this wasn’t utterly illogical and absurd.
This rejection of womanhood I saw around me — one that data confirms has skyrocketed among women of my generation and younger — is perhaps the most literal-minded fulfillment of the old feminist line, one that Gloria Steinem quoted so frequently it is commonly (albeit inaccurately) attributed to her: “Women are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”
There are also less literal-minded ways in which this has become reality for women of my generation. Women now outperform men at all levels of education, holding around 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees. In major metro areas like Washington, D.C., and New York, young women even outearn young men and, in a reversal of historical trends, are less enthusiastic about marriage than young men are. It might be one thing if this were all making us demonstrably happier, but rates of despair and depression among young women have risen relative to those of our young male counterparts. If we’re having it all but we’re sad and lonely, are we really having it all?
Now, blaming the women’s movement of the 1970s for all our current woes would be silly, especially when it accomplished some good that we shouldn’t take for granted. We can be grateful, for instance, that we can get credit cards and loans without our husbands’ permission, and pursue our professional ambitions and keep at them after we get married. We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to second-wave feminism.
But what the women’s movement ultimately got wrong — and the reason women half a century later are not happier despite the movement’s material and cultural victories — is that it denied biology. This denial predates recent gender ideology, going back to the founding assumption of the women’s movement that any area where women “underperform” men must reflect discrimination, never women’s own revealed preferences. A breastfeeding young mother who might want to return to work but doesn’t aspire to the C-suite, a homemaker with teenagers who is content with her life, a woman who prefers a more female-dominated career in teaching or nursing — all in the eyes of the women’s movement became victims of oppression, who all would have set their aspirations “higher” were it not for the patriarchy.
In short, the women’s movement ostensibly fought for women on the basis of sex and yet rejected the possibility that sex differences might lead to women and men wanting different things and making different choices.
Of course, not all of this is directly attributable to Gloria Steinem alone, but she was the de facto face of second-wave feminism — a position she claimed to abhor, maintaining throughout her life that the women’s movement should not be about any one person in particular. And yet, it’s very clear why she had become this face, beyond her activism and the popularity of Ms., the feminist magazine she founded. Her glamour was undeniable, and her general joie de vivre (which occasionally manifested in spontaneous displays like public tap dancing) was endearing. She may have called the “role of ‘wife’ . . . inhuman,” but she had no problem being the very public girlfriend of several famous, attractive men, including President John F. Kennedy’s speechwriter, a football player, an Olympian, and a bigwig media executive (eventually, at the age of 66, she married David Bale in a Cherokee ceremony officiated by her friend and co-activist Wilma Mankiller — now there’s one for nominative determinism).
Maybe most of all, she became a sort of feminist figurehead because — unlike, say, Betty Friedan, who was rather brash — Steinem always seemed to know what to say and how to say it without sounding like a crazy radical. She stuck with some positions that were often unpopular on her side — her opposition to pornography and commercial surrogacy stick out, as does the fact that she signed the Harper’s open letter in favor of free speech in 2020 — but she also seemed keenly aware of where she had to toe the line. While in 1977 she had expressed skepticism toward “transsexuality . . . [and the potential for] its big, star-spangled, commercial exploitation,” she publicly apologized for those words in 2013, at which point it was already becoming anathema among progressives not to support all the claims of gender ideology. By 2021, she was defending so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors, which she’d once called “mutilation” in Ms. So much for protecting women and girls on the basis of sex.
One more possible reason for her status: She was, reportedly, a nice person who treated people well even when she didn’t have to. That’s why I think she was being genuine when she said her advice to young women was, “Do not listen to me . . . I want to support their listening to themselves.”
Indeed, that’s precisely what I hope women of my generation do: Ignore Gloria Steinem, may she rest in peace, and listen to ourselves.