Best of Design Matters: Gloria Steinem

Design Matters with Debbie Millman

In this special episode of Design Matters with Debbie Millman, legendary feminist icon Gloria Steinem reflects on her remarkable life and ca

Key takeaways

• Righteous anger at injustice is a powerful energy source that can be harnessed for positive change.
• Optimism is not passive—it's an active form of planning that helps make progress possible.

Main topics

• Gloria Steinem's early life and family background
• Her mother's influence and her father's unconventional lifestyle

Notable quotes

"Righteous anger, anger at injustice, unfairness, pain, cruelty, is an energy cell. And if we look at it that way, this is a gift. This is energy I can use."

Conclusion

Gloria Steinem closes the conversation with a reflective and hopeful vision of

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Gloria Steinem passed away last week at the age of 92. To celebrate her extraordinary life, we want to replay Debbie's interview with her from 2023. Speaker 3 (0:11) Righteous anger, anger at injustice, unfairness, pain, cruelty, is an energy cell. And if we look at it that way, this is a gift. This is energy I can use. Speaker 4 (0:29) From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, Gloria Steinem talks about the past and the future. Speaker 3 (0:51) Optimism is a form of planning. If we don't imagine something positive that is possible, it's way less likely to happen. Speaker 1 (1:05) Support comes from WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose WISE. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get WISE. Visit WISE.com. Decencies apply. Speaker 2 (1:38) She is an award-winning journalist, a New York Times bestselling author several times over, a co-founder of one of the most significant magazines of the 20th century, and an activist whose work has impacted the place women and girls now have in the world. She's also co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus, the Women's Action Alliance, and the Women's Media Center. For over 60 years, She has been in the thick of American cultural and political life, where she has been instrumental in shaping our ideas about feminism, humanity, and equal rights for all people. She is, of course, the legendary Gloria Steinem, and I have the great honor of interviewing her today in my studio at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Speaker 3 (2:32) Gloria Speaker 2 (2:33) Steinem, welcome Speaker 3 (2:34) to Design Matters. Thank you so much. And now listening to your introduction, I'm only worried about living up to it. Oh, you already have. That's the great thing. You've Speaker 2 (2:45) already done these things. Gloria, I understand that your older sister, Suzanne, was actually the person in your family who named you. Is it true you were named after her favorite doll? Yes, Speaker 3 (3:00) I think so. My parents had had another child, a boy, who was stillborn between us. And that meant that my sister was almost a decade older than I. So she was another mother in a way. And I looked up to her and followed her around, much to her alarm. And Speaker 2 (3:22) yes, she did name me. Speaker 3 (3:24) I Speaker 2 (3:24) wonder what... type of doll we could find now back in the 50s that is named Gloria. I think we're going to have to do an eBay search to figure that out. Speaker 3 (3:34) The dolls that I adored, and I did have a collection of dolls, were named after Sonia Henney, who was a great figure skater of the era. I don't know. They came with names, not mine, but I was in love with dolls. Speaker 2 (3:49) You were born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio. Your father's mother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was a suffragist and the first woman in the state of Ohio to be elected to the national board. This was before women had the right to vote nationally. How did she manage such a victory? First of all, I'm so Speaker 3 (4:12) impressed with your research. Thank you for that. Because I think Pauline deserves notice and attention. She had come from Either Russia or the country close to Russia, we're not sure, when she was a teenager, then lived in Vienna, I think, not sure. And my grandfather went there to find a bride in a very European traditional way. So she arrived in her late teens as a bride, and she did become a suffragist. Also, she founded the first vocational high school. Otherwise, they were all learning Latin and Greek, whether that was going to be useful in their lives or not in Toledo. And she was greatly admired. I only remember her in a sensory way, you know, because I was too little. I remember her kitchen and food. But my mother was definitely in love with her mother-in-law. Speaker 2 (5:15) Did her activism even subliminally influence you at all? Did you look back at what she was doing and feel like that was something you also wanted to do at that age? You know, I'm not Speaker 3 (5:27) sure. I mean, I certainly admired the fact that she had made it possible for women to vote. by organizing them to vote in a group. Otherwise, they were harassed and scared away from the voting places by gangs of men and boys who were hostile to women voting. I knew that. I knew about the vocational high school. I knew she was very admired. But I'm not sure. Maybe it made me assume. that I could go to college, which my older sister did too. It was possible in my family for women to be educated. But she seemed distant and so honorable, I couldn't imagine imitating Speaker 2 (6:12) her. Your parents, Leo and Ruth Steinem, met at the University of Toledo in 1917 while they were working together on their college newspaper. After they graduated, they got married, and you've written how your mother married your father because of his refusal to worry, and then, as a result, was left to worry alone, on her own. Why didn't your father worry at all? He seemed to be such a carefree, risk-taking experimenter. Speaker 3 (6:51) I can only imagine it had something to do with his family, which was well to do. He was one of four boys, and he was a kind of devil-may-care person. Whereas my mother came from a very working-class family. Her father was a railroad engineer. So I think my father's... carefree attitude was charming to her. And his great argument for getting married was, it'll only take a minute. Speaker 2 (7:21) I believe they were married twice, right? Didn't they get married privately in a very quick civil ceremony and then have another marriage? Yes, Speaker 3 (7:28) a Speaker 2 (7:28) private ceremony Speaker 3 (7:30) and then a public one, yes. Speaker 2 (7:31) Ultimately, I believe that... Because they were married twice but only divorced once, I think your mother felt that they were still married for quite a long time. Speaker 3 (7:39) Yes, Speaker 2 (7:39) because Speaker 3 (7:39) she felt divorce was a shame. And so when pressed, she would say, well, you know, really, they were still married. Speaker 2 (7:48) Your father was a man of many trades. He ran a dance pavilion and a summer resort. He was an antique salesman. He tried to write slogans for ad agencies. I loved some of the slogans that you've included in some of your writing. He dreamed up a living chess game with costumed teenagers moving across the squares of a dance floor very ahead of his time. He was always looking for the next big deal, and he was often on the road. You were often with him, sometimes working alongside him as a little girl and still in single digits. Can you talk about how you assisted him in his efforts as an antique salesman? He Speaker 3 (8:31) used to go to country auctions. to buy jewelry, antiques, small antiques, things he could carry around in his car, and then he would sell them to roadside dealers. So this was his winter way of life when the summer dance pavilion was not going. My job was to pack and unpack these little items of jewelry or glassware or china or whatever when he went into a roadside shop in order to... try to sell them. So I was the packer and the unpacker, which I was in heaven about. You know, I mean, kids love to be necessary. So I felt I was part Speaker 2 (9:12) of the grown-up world. Didn't he sometimes send you into some of the antique stores to work independently of him as a little girl? Well, depending on how little Speaker 3 (9:24) I was, yes, right, right. Speaker 3 (9:29) I mean, there was a downside to it because I always felt a little bit as if we were the gypsies of the highway and looked down upon by whoever it was who owned the shop as we drove up in our dusty car. Speaker 2 (9:46) When your family was on the road, you never started out with enough money to reach a particular destination. Instead, your dad took a few boxes of china, silver, other small antiques he bought at country auctions and then used them to sell and buy and barter your way through your travels. Did you know what he was doing? Did you feel okay about that? Did you ever feel insecure? Speaker 3 (10:10) I Speaker 2 (10:10) knew that it worried my mother, Speaker 3 (10:12) who had grown up in a way less economically secure way and therefore was more worried. But my father's slogan was kind of, if you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, it could be wonderful. And that's seductive, too. I'm sure I've absorbed a lot of that because I, too, have never had a proper job. Speaker 2 (10:32) You've written how there were only a few months every year when your dad seemed content. with a house-dwelling life. Do you know what the motivation was behind his desire to be constantly moving? Did you ever ask him about it? Speaker 3 (10:49) No, we never talked about it in those terms. I just accepted who he was, even though it did also cause my parents to separate eventually because my mother wanted to live in a more secure place. And after my... decade-older sister was in college, it was possible for my mother and I to move into her old family house in Toledo. But my father, you know, was always present. He never had a bank account because I think he feared the IRS would attach it. But he used to send me money orders every once in a while. $50 Speaker 2 (11:31) money orders, which is a lot of money at that time. Speaker 3 (11:33) Yes, yes. He did his best. to be attentive, and he was certainly fun to be with. I don't remember ever feeling that my parents were not doing their best, whatever it was, either my mother or my father. Speaker 2 (11:51) From what I understand in what I've read, you've described yourself as a child who wanted too much to fit in and have written about how you longed for a home. much of the time you were on the road before you were 10 years old, you weren't going to school, your sister enrolled in whatever high school was near whatever destination you were going to, but you were young enough to get away with your love of comic books and horse stories and Louisa May Alcott. You were essentially teaching yourself. Did you feel that it would have been... preferable at that time to have one stable place that you lived? Speaker 3 (12:29) What I remember emotionally is that as we were driving to Florida or California, we would pass through neighborhoods with conventional houses with front yards and porches, and I would fantasize living there. I would think, oh, you know, wouldn't it be nice to live there and to go to school like the other kids? But I was always well-treated. You know, it isn't as if I wanted to escape. I just had a case of envy for the life I saw in movies. Speaker 2 (13:03) Every summer, you and your family stayed in a small house your dad had built across the road from a lake in rural Michigan. And there he ran a dance pavilion on a pier over the water. And though there was no ocean within hundreds of miles, he named it Ocean Beach Pier. I kind of love that about him. On weekends, he booked the big dance bands of the time, and people came from Oliver to dance to live music, Guy Lombardo, Duke Ellington, the Andrews sisters. And I understand that during this time, you also fell in love with dancing. And Ruby, the cigarette girl at the resort. taught you how to tap dance. And is it true you could tap dance to the minuet in G in a hoop skirt at six years Speaker 3 (13:47) old? Actually, the minuet was not tap dancing. It was a, I had a dance partner who was a girl a little taller than I, dressed up as a boy. And we did. An old-fashioned minuet. Wow. But we also tap danced, and I somehow thought I was going to tap dance my way into, I guess I wanted to be a raquette. I thought, you know, that would be the peak of success. And also, there were Hollywood movies that were full of dance scenes. That was my impractical, to put it mildly, imagination of Speaker 2 (14:27) my future life. Well, I believe you also took ballet lessons. Did you have fantasies about being a professional dancer beyond even a raquette? Speaker 3 (14:36) Well, I think I had sense enough to know that I had started ballet too late and that I was not likely to be. a real ballet dancer. But whenever a ballet company stopped in Toledo, I went and fantasized about how I could do it in spite of the fact that the toe shoes that I wore on each weak ankle were not going to get me there. But it was the only way I could imagine moving forward in life. My 10 years older sister, had gone to college. So I guess I knew that was a possibility. But the only way of not following the script of getting married and having children and living in the suburbs, if you're lucky, was show business for me. Not very practical, obviously. I felt like a writer, but I didn't know you could make a living that way. Speaker 2 (15:39) So even then you felt like you wanted to have a sort of unconventional life. Speaker 3 (15:43) Yes, both because my parents were somewhat unconventional and because I didn't see happiness much, you know, in the conventional neighborhoods around me. The most attractive... People in my childhood were the band members for whom my mother cooked because there were no restaurants in that part of Michigan. So there were often all these band men sitting around the table, and I was the only child, and they were very nice to me. Perhaps they were missing their own children. But everything that seemed attractive was not 9 to 5. It was some form of show business. Speaker 2 (16:29) One of my favorite stories about your dad was how he was unable to resist swearing. And your mother asked that he not swear around you and your sister. So he named the family dog, Damn It. True. When my brother was a little boy, he was also forbidden to say, for whatever reason, that word was his favorite word to say, Damn It. And my parents were like, you can't say that. So he decided to reorganize the way he said that word. He said, Damo and Navit. And I think that really tells you like almost everything you need to know about him. Yes. Speaker 3 (17:12) No, that's very inventive and poetic. And my father also invented a very satisfying long epithet. that was, gosh darn, choleromorphous Antonio Canova, the young of the age of the middle age. I don't know. It just went on and on, which he would rattle off at great speed. Speaker 2 (17:30) And he also, from what I understand, liked to say that that was stynamite. Speaker 3 (17:36) Well, that was his business stationery, actually, that showed you who he was. I have a letterhead that's a big three-inch high. read with dropped out, kind of like exploding letters in my office framed, it's dynamite, because it definitely tells you who he was. Speaker 2 (17:59) I got the sense from everything that you've written about him that he was a happy man. He was a kind man and a happy man. Was there a time where you felt that your parents loved each other? Yes, Speaker 3 (18:12) I think so. I mean, I could imagine why my devil-may-care father from a well-to-do Jewish family would appeal to my very, very hardworking, not quite penniless, but I mean, my... That grandfather worked on the railroad. So I think also they shared a sense of humor. And I could understand why they appealed to each other, even though their interests were so distant.