From the S&S archives:
Gloria Steinem: Anger and activism

TOKYO — Gloria Steinem concludes her lectures on feminism by asking the women in the audience to "do something outrageous" in the name of justice and equality.

"Object to unequal treatment," she said. "Refuse to listen to a sexist joke."

Women who do — women who "stand up in court and accuse a rapist" — aren't making headlines; they're making history, Steinem said.

It's not important for women "to be grateful" for what the movement and feminists have accomplished, but "ungrateful," she said.

"I want you to want more and continue. There's still an enormous injustice. The point is to increase women's anger and activity."

The 51-year-old activist, author and editor was in Tokyo earlier this month to lecture and promote the Japanese language version of her 1983 book "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions."

Editor and co-founder of Ms. magazine, Steinem is a catalyst behind what she calls the "second wave of feminism" in the United States.

The first wave, she said, was marked by women's battle for legal identity, such as winning the right to vote. At the end of the '60s the second wave began as women started to fight for legal and economic consolidation.

"We needed the civil rights movement of the '60s to spark the women's movement," Steinem said.

"If the racial inferiorities were not true then how could the parallel myths of sexual inferiority be true.

"We have won identity, but we are far from equality."

In the military, for example.

Paternalism and protectionism, she said, have excluded women from combat roles.

"It's absurd," Steinem said. "Women are in combat every day in the street. We are the victims of the most violence in every society.

"If women were allowed to volunteer for the U.S. military in the number in which they want to do so and in which they are qualified to do so right now — including combat positions — all of our personnel needs would be met and more. We could save men from the draft.

"I'm very suspicious as to the reasons for this so-called protectionism. They just don't want us to use guns.

"Suppose all the rape victims and battered wives and underpaid waitresses had two years of (combat) military training ... it would be quite interesting."

Steinem looks at the Reagan administration with the same critical eye.

"Reagan has opposed every measure of equality — with maybe the exception of men paying child support," Steinem said. "I would say he has been as hostile as he possibly could. The only thing that could be worse is Jesse Helms."

Even though the administration has "defunded or severely cut every program of particular benefit to women and children," the women's movement is "stronger than ever," she said.

"If you look at the local level there is no community that doesn't have a women's center, a rape crisis hotline, a battered women's shelter or a women's study program on campus."

REAGAN DID NAME the first woman to the Supreme Court, Steinem said, but Sandra Day O'Connor was a "very minor victory" for the women's movement.

The appointment was the result of pressure from women voters, she said.

O'Connor, Steinem said, "is certainly far from the champion of equality."

Steinem, however, views Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy as a long-term victory for the women's movement, even though "we are being punished in the short term because she is some people's scapegoat."

Active in the political campaigns of Adlai Stevenson, Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Shirley Chisholm and George McGovern, Steinem is quick to point out that people vote for a president, not a vice president, and that no insurgent group wins the first time out.

"It's an important long-term victory because it's broken peoples' stereotypes of who can be in the White House," she said. "Thanks to Geraldine Ferraro and the Rev. (Jesse) Jackson people don't think it has to be a white male anymore."

BUT, STEINEM SAID, "We have learned that in the future we should pick a woman who already has a national image. There isn't enough time between the convention and the election to get to know a candidate."

The facts surrounding Ferraro's husband's tax record demonstrate that situations of this type are "certainly proportionately more of a problem for women candidates because they're much more likely to have spouses who are economically active and who refuse to disclose their finances," Steinem said.

"The problem was extremely minor ... It's not respectable to be anti-equality anymore so the hostility is displaced on something else like your husband's finances."

At the time, television reporters asked Steinem if there was a lesson to be learned for women candidates. "I was tempted to say never get married," she said.

Steinem, who never has been married or had any children, made those decisions because, she said, it was right for her.

"But I hope that it serves a purpose because we need to know that women can be happy and fulfilled with and without children and with and without marriage."

Marriage, she said, is something she would never say never about, noting that laws are different now. "It's not quite as horrendous as when I was growing up. You had to give up your name, your credit rating, your legal domicile and your whole identity."

IN THE '50S AND '60S women were told they had to choose between marriage or career. "Now the problem is women are told they can have both which is not true," she said.

"The problem is that men are not asking how to combine career and a marriage. Why should we be the only people to take care of babies? Until men start worrying about it, it just won't work. You can't have two full-time jobs."

Steinem has always been recognized as an activist for her involvement in various civil rights and peace campaigns including the Vietnam War tax protest and the Committee for the Legal Defense of Angela Davis.

"When I was growing up I think I spent many years of my life identifying with every other group that's been discriminated against," said Steinem, who also marched on the Poor People's trail with Cesar Chavez and smuggled pizza's to Puerto Rican radicals who occupied a church in Spanish Harlem.

"It's because I was a victim, too," she said. "Nobody told me that women were serious."

THE COURSE WOMEN took to win their identity needs to be recorded and remembered, Steinem said.

For her, the facts and events that surrounded women winning the right to vote were omitted from her formal education. A '50s textbook at Smith College summed up in one sentence the events that led to the Aug. 18, 1920 ratification of the women's vote.

It read: "Women were given the vote."

"It took our foremothers incredible massive opposition and hunger strikes to be legal human beings," Steinem said. "If those facts are wiped out of history as they were for me, then we will go on expecting paternalism will take care of us."