Play It Again: Gloria Steinem

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

A heartfelt tribute to Gloria Steinem, one of the most influential voices in the feminist movement, reflecting on her life, activism, and le

Key takeaways

• Steinem's life-altering experience of seeking an illegal abortion at 22 shaped her lifelong commitment to reproductive rights.
• Her time in India as a young woman inspired her sense of global connection and social justice, rooted in both personal journey and family heritage.

Main topics

• Gloria Steinem's early life and formative experiences
• Reproductive rights and the abortion experience at age 22

Notable quotes

"You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want with your life." – Dr. John Sharp

"The world outside of home was safer than the world inside home." – Gloria Steinem

Conclusion

This episode serves as both a personal reflection and a powerful tribute to

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:07) In that period of time, and especially in places where there was not access to information about what the women's movement was, for me and Flo Kennedy or me and Dorothy Pittman Hughes to go out on the hustings and talk, something happens when you're in a room physically with other people that can't happen on the printed page. And I don't think I ever would have learned that if it hadn't been for the movement and being forced out to speak. Speaker 7 (0:37) That was Gloria Steinem. Speaker 8 (0:39) I'm Sam Fragoso, and this is Talk Easy. Welcome to the show. Speaker 7 (0:56) There are few people who have led a life as interesting, varied, and courageous as Gloria Steinem. For more than half a century, she was one of the defining voices of the feminist movement, helping millions of women gain equality at home, in the workplace, and society at large. She marched and organized, wrote essays and delivered speeches, formed shelters and crisis centers, and in 1971, co-founded Ms. Magazine, all in service of a simple... if often contested, truth, that women should be able to live whatever life they chose. For Gloria, the work was never finished. But unfortunately, the work was never finished with her either. Like the rest of us, she lived to see Roe v. Wade overturned in 2022 in the landmark Dobbs decision. The Equal Rights Amendment, which she began fighting for in the early 70s, has yet to be added to the Constitution, with, of course, many of those rights, values, and mores coming under renewed attack in the era of Donald Trump. I feel proud, and I feel mad as hell, she told the New York Times in 2022. We are still dealing with the same issues. But because of Steinem, the country she left behind is profoundly different from the one she entered in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio. She passed away this week at the age of 92 at her home in Manhattan. And so today, in honor of the late activist and writer, we wanted to replay our conversation from 2019 around her book, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off. That title comes from a quote she popularized long ago, but then again, Steinem was always, throughout her career, one step ahead, trying to carry us into a better and more just, if imperfect, future. May she rest in peace. Speaker 6 (2:52) This Speaker 7 (2:52) is Gloria Steinem. Speaker 8 (3:09) How Speaker 4 (3:09) are you doing Speaker 8 (3:10) right Speaker 4 (3:10) now? You know, I'm doing okay because once I actually leave home, which of course takes some doing, you know, we all have a kind of inertia about leaving home, and get out on the road, it's interesting because you talk to people and learn things that you didn't know. So it's interesting. I Speaker 8 (3:32) have, I think, many things I don't know about you that I'd like to know. I want to start, if you don't mind. At the opening of this book, it's called My Life on the Road, and in it you wrote the following. This book is dedicated to Dr. John Sharp of London, who, in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a 22-year-old American on her way to India. Speaker 8 (4:09) Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, you must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want with your life. Can we go back to you being 22, afraid to get a procedure that was outlawed in many places? Where are you at in that moment? Speaker 4 (4:39) You know, I was really quite desperate. I was also delusional because I thought if I went riding in Central Park or threw myself down the stairs, somehow that this would accomplish an abortion. Didn't you do that? No, I didn't. But the mythology was very much part of our lives. Remember that I am a product not even of the 60s, but of the 50s. Speaker 4 (5:07) left home right after college graduation. I was engaged to a very nice man who remained my friend the rest of his life, but I knew that it was really not the right thing for either one of us. And also, marriage was made to seem the end of life then because you assumed your husband identity and it was as if that was the only decision you could make. So because I had a fellowship in India, I left early and worked as a waitress in London, waiting to get my visa. And it was there that I realized that I was pregnant, and I didn't know what to do. I had this whole notion that if I went to Paris, somehow, surely the French who were more liberal, forgetting entirely that it was a Catholic country. Speaker 4 (6:04) Just narrowly and with a lot of desperation and finding in the London equivalent of the Yellow Pages the name of this doctor who turned out to be a wonderful man, a generous, principled man who I had so promised that I wouldn't say his name that I didn't say his name for years. And when I was writing this book, I thought, All right, he cannot possibly be alive now. The laws have changed. I must thank him. Speaker 8 (6:39) You picked him by random. Speaker 4 (6:41) Yes, out of the phone book, right? Speaker 8 (6:43) What do you make of that? Speaker 4 (6:47) I don't know what to make of that. I mean, it was just luck or divine providence. But mainly it was him as a principled, compassionate person. Speaker 8 (6:59) I bring that passage up because it seems to me that 22 is a very precarious age. Ideas are not fully formed. Ideas of self are just coming together. A life hasn't exactly been built. You finish college and decide to go to India. Are you afraid at all? Speaker 4 (7:21) No, because of the way I grew up, I don't know if I can explain this, the world outside of home was safer than the world inside home. Not because my parents were in any way not good people, they were, but my mother was not able to take care of herself, so our roles were reversed. I was looking after her, and my father... They had separated when I was about 10, and he was on the road all the time buying and selling jewelry, and he was a total wanderer. And you went along with him? Well, when I was a child, I did, yeah. So it always seemed to me that the world outside the house was safer than the world in the house. And that meant that I was not all that brave to be an adventurer. It felt safer. Speaker 8 (8:17) It felt just natural. Speaker 4 (8:20) Well, natural, I don't know. I mean, I was well aware that other people lived in a different way. But it seemed to me that as long as I had an opportunity to have an exchange with another human being, then I had an equal chance of understanding or being understood. It Speaker 8 (8:37) seems to me that when you go to India, some probably dormant quality, that is generosity, was... poor verbiage here, but it sprung up. It seemed that it inspired you in many ways. Is that Speaker 7 (8:50) accurate? Speaker 4 (8:52) Yes. I mean, this was an India that was only a decade or so after independence, and it was the object of the same kind of hope and optimism that South Africa would become later. Also, it happened that my mother and both of my grandmothers were theosophists, which is a philosophy that comes from India in many ways. So as a little girl, I'd been reading Lotus Leaves for the Young. I mean, I had a kind of sense of connection to India, both from the past and its own very exciting democratic future. Speaker 8 (9:30) Were you writing over there? Speaker 4 (9:32) I was, because soon the $1,000 scholarship was out, and I began writing for Indian newspapers. essays and columns for Indian newspapers. Speaker 8 (9:46) I'm very curious to see how those read now. Speaker 4 (9:50) Yes, I should look at them and see. You should. You know, I think that the reason I was assigned was that people had a curiosity about what someone, an outsider, would see in India. So I remember... writing one called Sari Psychology, which was really about the difference that you feel as a female human being dressed in a sari. And you do feel different. Speaker 6 (10:16) I Speaker 4 (10:16) mean, it is kind of a mobile dress that you can, you know, wear in many different ways and that subjects you to the breezes. And, you know, it's very different from Western dress. Speaker 8 (10:28) You've talked about how plans are in some ways, they sort of... are linked to class and economics, that to even have a plan is usually... Speaker 4 (10:40) A measure of class. Yeah. I do think that that's something we don't think about usually, that the ability to plan ahead is a measure of class because well-to-do families are perhaps planning for even generations forward. Yes. Whereas working people, poor people are just planning for the next week. Speaker 8 (11:01) Right. Right. I think you say plan for Saturday. Yes. Is what you've written. Right. I ask that because at 22 to 24, you're in India. You seem to be smart enough to get there, smart enough to write for an Indian newspaper. I wonder, were you making plans? Speaker 4 (11:19) No, I was not. I mean, I was living an adventurous life before I did what I assumed one had to do, which was... to marry and have children and lead the life of the person you marry. Speaker 8 (11:36) I Speaker 4 (11:36) mean, that was the message of the 1950s. But Speaker 8 (11:40) did you believe you had to do that? Speaker 4 (11:42) I did. I just kept putting it off. Speaker 8 (11:47) I'll get around to it. Speaker 4 (11:49) Yeah. No, I just kept putting it off. And fortunately... what we might think of as the women's movement or feminism or consciousness or whatever you want to call it, both in this country and globally, sort of rose up. And suddenly I realized that not everyone has to do the same thing. Speaker 3 (12:08) You Speaker 4 (12:09) know, it's okay to choose your own unique life. So that is a huge, huge gift. Speaker 8 (12:17) Did you have a sense at that time in your 20s that you had been almost gifted this new start? Because there weren't people who were going to perform this operation and that they did radically change the trajectory of your life. Speaker 4 (12:32) Yes, no, even at that time, absolutely. Because I could not have gone forward with traveling to India, pursuing the fellowship. I don't know what would have happened to me exactly. I was working in an espresso bar as a waitress in order to make a living. I suppose I would have had to return home. I don't know. I mean, it's kind of unimaginable. But I was enormously relieved and felt free. Speaker 8 (13:02) When you returned home, did you feel free coming back to America? Speaker 4 (13:07) I did, but I was by then, after two years in India, also greatly influenced, of course, and changed, transformed by what I had seen. Because, you know, you suddenly realize that most people in the world do not live the way we live here. And the other thing was that when I came home, and I was staying with my sister and my mother in Washington, I suddenly realized what I should have realized before, which is how segregated we are. Because I had grown accustomed to seeing many different hues of people in India, even though, of course, they also have a caste system and problems of division along color lines. But at least every day in the street, you know, you see, you know, many different folks. So when I... came home and realized that where I was living, even though in the summertime I had been the only, when I was in college, I'd been teaching at a swimming pool in Washington where all the families in that neighborhood were black and all the other lifeguards were black. So I was the only white person. So I'd had that experience, which was a good experience. Speaker 8 (14:28) Well, you've described that job as the most formative job. that you've ever had. Speaker 4 (14:32) Yeah, it's very helpful, I think, to be the only one. And they were very patient with me and, you know, very funny and humorous and so on. Speaker 8 (14:40) Patient how? Speaker 4 (14:42) Well, they just waited until I got over being self-conscious. Speaker 8 (14:46) And Speaker 4 (14:46) then they taught me to play Bidwist and Kunkan and when it was raining and, you know, and made jokes about the kind of racist teenage boys who would, you know. go by on their bikes and say something terrible. So I realized how segregated society was. But I think when I came home from India, it was the first time I got mad on my own behalf. How dare they tell me who my friends are and who my neighbors are? And I think that's quite healthy because otherwise... The dialogue is too often assuming that white people have the power to include black people and not the other way around. So I think it was helpful that it wasn't a should or a do good kind of impulse that I got mad on my own behalf. You know, nobody can tell me who my friends are going to be. Speaker 8 (15:40) How did your anger manifest itself at that time? Speaker 4 (15:45) I think, you know, I just started to... realize that if you, especially when the women's movement got started, that if you're starting an organization or a group of any kind, it has to look like the group that you have in mind. You can't start with all white folks and then later on include the other, which is already a mistake to say the other. But I was greatly helped because once the women's movement got started, and I was writing for New York Magazine, so I could