Steinem Research Articles

Nader: crusader, spoiler, icon

A riveting investigative biography of one of America's influential citizens. Few figures in our history have had the wide-ranging influence of Ralph Nader. Deemed by Rolling Stone the most dangerous man in America, Nader has had a profound impact on our society and government. As a public figure, Nader is virtually without parallel, playing a lead role on the national stage for nearly four decades. The consummate public advocate and the US 's toughest customer (Time), Nader has brought about the passage of groundbreaking laws covering everything from auto safety to hazardous x-rays to affordable insurance. Untold numbers of lives have been saved through his efforts. But the private man is shrouded in mystery and secrecy. For this probing biography, the first since 1975, Justin Martin spoke with Nader along with more than 300 people, including close associates, old friends, and family. The result is a sweeping portrait, covering Nader's small-town Connecticut boyhood, his days at Harvard Law, the David-and-Goliath battle with GM that launched him into the spotlight, and colorful encounters with characters as varied as Albert Einstein, Gloria Steinem, Fidel Castro, Phil Donahue, Susan Sarandon, Upton Sinclair, and Al Gore. The climax of this extraordinary story is an astonishingly revealing insider's account of the 2000 election. Nader is the definitive life of a fascinating, controversial man of our time-a true American icon. A Merloyd Lawrence Book

WOMEN AND HEALTH: POWER, TECHNOLOGY, INEQUALITY, AND CONFLICT IN A GENDERED WORLD

WOMEN AND HEALTH: POWER, TECHNOLOGY, INEQUALITY, AND CONFLICT IN A GENDERED WORLD

Marianne Moore, the James Family, and the Politics of Celibacy

Research Article| June 01 2003 Marianne Moore, the James Family, and the Politics of Celibacy Linda Leavell Linda Leavell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2003) 49 (2): 219–245. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2003-3003 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Linda Leavell; Marianne Moore, the James Family, and the Politics of Celibacy. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 June 2003; 49 (2): 219–245. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2003-3003 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Persistence and Transformation: Gloria Steinem, the Women's Action Alliance, and the Feminist Movement, 1971-1997

Historians, sociologists, and activists—including Brenda Feigen and Gloria Steinem—have written a great deal about the women’s movement between the late 1960s and the present. These reflections have raised many crucial questions for a next wave of scholars and authors to consider. The material in these collections promises to help us address some of these questions. Particularly interesting are the collections’ contents relating to feminist organizing at the grassroots levels, models of leadership and decision-making, class and race in the women’s movement, and changes in feminism over time. Grassroots organizing One of the significant contributions of these papers is less about Women’s Action Alliance (WAA) and Gloria Steinem themselves, but the information on other organizations and activities contained in their papers. Because Steinem corresponded and worked with diverse activists around the country, and because the WAA sought to serve as the center of a network of grassroots women’s groups, the collections are rich in evidence about local organizing that is otherwise hard to track down. We have relatively little systematic knowledge about grassroots feminist organizing outside of major metropolitan centers (especially the East coast). In practice, feminism in local areas often looked quite different from scholarly depictions: for example, activists did not fit neatly into “wings” separated by ideology or tactics. Feminist activism at the grassroots has long been a process of shifting alliances and coalitions or umbrella organizations that pull together activists working on different issues. This was the premise behind much of Steinem and the WAA’s work. The WAA sought to act as both resource and catalyst for grassroots feminist work on many issues—to mobilize parents for non-sexist curricula and childraising, to help women’s centers share their experiences, and to encourage alliance and information-sharing across lines of race and class. As a result, the WAA papers contain valuable information on the activities of women’s movement organizations at the local level around the country. Those of us who write about grassroots feminism in the 1970s,

Outrageous and Everyday: The Papers of Gloria Steinem

As an archives assistant for the Sophia Smith Collection, I arranged the papers of Gloria Steinem who is, needless to say, a noted feminist activist, journalist, speaker, and organizer. She is also a founder, editor, and spokesperson for Ms., a magazine that has recently attempted to resume its former status as the popular, mainstream voice of feminism. Many people might identify Steinem and feminism as one and the same. Though she was not a pioneer of the women's movement, the media singled her out for her beauty and charisma; she was an articulate, telegenic representative of women's liberation. To this day, she remains a powerful symbol of feminism.

Agents of Social Change: Celebrating Women's Progressive Activism across the Twentieth Century

More than half a century ago, “No Documents, No History” was the rallying cry of women's historian and archivist Mary Ritter Beard. In that spirit, the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC) at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, sponsored a two-day conference from September 22–23, 2000, to celebrate the opening of eight collections that document the incredible achievement of six women and two organizations in the collective struggle for social change throughout the twentieth century. In the papers of Mary Metlay Kaufman, Dorothy Kenyon, Constance Baker Motley, Jessie Lloyd O'Connor, Frances Fox Piven, and Gloria Steinem, and in the records of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women and the Women's Action Alliance can be found primary documents associated with the ongoing quest for social justice. The potential impact of movement history based on such archival holdings is immense. As conference organizer Joyce Clark Follet noted in her opening remarks, such documentation can change the way we think about the past, thus changing the way we think about the future.

Women's lives: the view from the threshold

Eve has been supposed to have remarked to Adam as they left the garden, my dear, we are in a state of transition, and of course they were. It is no coincidence that Eve delivers this line. While humanity in every era and stage in history has been marked by a strong sense of itself as being in a state of transition, women have always had a particularly close relationship to changeable terrain. In their quest for self knowledge, boundaries, and names, women have found themselves between varying cultural demands. In one view, perhaps the dominant one, the only way to gain positive status is to fit appropriately into approved categories: appropriately beautiful, appropriately young, appropriately thin, appropriately successful. In another view, the view compellingly expressed by Carolyn Heilbrun, women must abandon the appropriate and seek out the liminel. The word limen means threshold. To be in a state of liminality is to be poised upon uncertain ground, on the brink of leaving one condition or country or self to enter upon another. When recognized, liminality offers women freedom to be or become themselves. In Women's Lives: The View from the Threshold Carolyn Heilbrun looks at the biographies and memoirs of women who have wrestled with their own betwixt and betweenness (in the process altering the face of literature, and the world): George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Gloria Steinem. She reveals the ways in which feminism has changed our perceptions of these lives. Surprising explorations of the positions which launch women into uncertain ground extend these lectures outside the academic purview. Each year the Alexander lectureship invites a distinguished scholar to the University of Toronto to give a course of public lectures on the subject of English Literature. These four lectures from the 1997 series put Carolyn Heilbrun in a line of distinguished scholarly work with such previous lecturers as Walter Ong, Robertson Davies, and Northrop Frye. But Heilbrun, within this distinguished genealogy, reworks the very notion of the line, creating a new pattern of writing and approaching literary culture, just as the women whose lives she examines have done. The reader will come out of this experience moved, refreshed, and inspired to create rather than take a position.

Encyclopedia of American activism: 1960 to the present

In the 1960s, a number of activist movements in the United States played a significant role in reshaping public attitudes. This encyclopedia describes the movements, events, people, and ideas that have contributed to social change from the 1960s to the present, encompassing movements across the political spectrum.The volume's A-to-Z entries, many of them illustrated, include such topics as the Anti-Abortion Movement, Black Panther Party, Christian Identity Movement, and Yippies, the March on the Pentagon and Earth Day, Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Che Guevara; consciousness raising, communes and collectives, and terrorism. This work's usefulness is enhanced by end-of-entry references, extensive cross-references, a comprehensive bibliography, and a thorough index.

The truth that never hurts: writings on race, gender, and freedom

Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom provides a universal message about struggle, resistance, and freedom, grounded within a black Lesbian feminist critique of America's culture and politics. The cogently written essays represent a cross-section of work over the past twenty years and the first book dedicated exclusively to her own writing. Focusing on race, feminism, and the politics of sexuality, Smith provides an alternative lens to view the world by making connections between systems of oppression and offering suggestions for social change.--The Washington Blade Smith's book is an excellent example of powerful, introspective writing that challenges readers to reexamine their stance on complex issues concerning race and gender.--The Bloomsbury Review Stretches of sublime prose translate [Smith's] crystalline intellect to the page, exciting both mind and senses. --Publishers Weekly As one of the first writers in the United States to claim black feminism for black women in the early seventies, Barbara Smith has done groundbreaking work in defining a black women's literary tradition; in examining the sexual politics of the lives of black and other women of color; in representing the lives of black lesbians and gay men; and in making connections between race, sexuality, and gender. essay Toward a Black Feminist Criticism is often cited as a major catalyst in opening the field of black women's literature. This essay also represented the first serious discussion of black lesbian writing. Essays about racism in the women's movement, black and Jewish relations, and homophobia in the black community have ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers address. The collection also brings together topical political commentaries that examine the 1968 Chicago convention demonstrations; attacks on the NEA; the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Senate hearings; and police brutality against Rodney King and Abner Louima. Barbara Smith is cofounder and publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has edited three major collections about black women, including Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, and is coeditor with Wilma Mankiller, Gwendolyn Mink, Marysa Navarro, and Gloria Steinem of The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History.

Too Much Memory

Too Much Memory

“All Brides Are Not Beautiful”

In a memorial service in 1987 for a long-time New York Times employee, then-Publisher A.O. Sulzberger recalled how she caused him problems by often ruffling the feathers of New York's high and mighty. It was up to him to offer explanations: I played a round of golf with a young woman who obviously had more on her mind than her putting. After the third hole, she couldn't hold back. That was a terrible piece Charlotte Curtis wrote about my mother-in-law, she exploded. Why did she have to write about all those diamonds and furs and the like. I was mortified. I'm sorry, I replied. what did your mother-in-law think about it? That's the terrible part, she replied. loved it.' Such is the story of Charlotte Curtis, who from 1961 until her death in 1987, served as page and society reporter, page editor, associate editor and columnist for the New York Times. Her irreverent style, which included price estimates of the gowns of New York's most elite society matrons, paved the way for her rise at the Times and led her to become the first woman to have her name on the Times masthead.2 She also was credited by some writers of the 1960s and 1970s as the journalist who expanded women's and society news from recipes, bridal gown descriptions, and club chitchat to controversial topics such as abortion and divorce.3 Curtis's rise at the Times came during the 1960s and 1970s, an era when few women held top editorial jobs at the nation's major newspapers. Some top news managers at the Times, including Sulzberger and former Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal, credit her rise to an extraordinary writing talent and the willingness to work hard. Her husband said it was because of a combination of diligence and a steely determination to succeed.4 Some former co-workers and observers, including feminist author Gloria Steinem, say it went beyond that: she maneuvered by developing friendships with the men who ran the Times.5 Curtis walked a fine line as she rose through the ranks of the male-dominated Times of the 1960s and 1970s. Her personal papers, previously closed to the public but made available to the author by Curtis's husband, indicate that it was a combination of this innovative style and her ability to cultivate friendships with top Times editors that led to her success. In addition, she came to the newspaper at a time when a top editor was seeking variety from the staid, competent, hard-news style that characterized the Times, and he saw her as a fresh voice and a needed change of pace. To nearly everyone who knew her, Curtis' personality was a series of contradictions. She believed men and women were equal in every way, yet she opposed the use of Ms. as a reference in the Times. She was a shy person who shunned personal confrontation, yet she often ridiculed the rich and famous by quoting the silly and self-incriminating comments they sometimes made at public gatherings; she was a vocal and long-time supporter of civil rights, yet she had ambivalent feelings about the growing feminist movement; and, while she was not reluctant to meet with the vice president of the Times to protest an editor's treatment of a friend or to criticize the demotion of a fellow employee, she did not join or speak publicly about a sex discrimination lawsuit filed against the newspaper in 1974 by many of her longtime co-workers.6 Curtis became one of the most powerful and visible women on the Times during the late 1960s and 1970s, but her lack of participation in this lawsuit came with a price: some who knew her believe it cost her the respect of many of the women at the newspaper. When first encountered, Curtis seemed a clone of the Junior League types she frequently covered; throughout her life, she wore simple, classic dresses and limited quantities of discreet gold jewelry. But physical appearance and manner were the extent of her resemblance to a demure young woman. …

Reflections and Projections on American Feminism and Culture: An Interview with Gloria Steinem

Reflections and Projections on American Feminism and Culture: An Interview with Gloria Steinem

The prostitution of sexuality

In 1979, Kathleen Barry's landmark book, Female Sexual Slavery, pulled back the curtain on a world of abuse prostitution that shocked the world. Documenting in devastating detail the lives of street prostitutes and the international traffic in women, Barry's work was called powerful and compassionate by Adrienne Rich and a courageous and crusading book that should be read everywhere by Gloria Steinem. The Los Angeles Times found it a powerful work filled with disbelief, outrage, and documentation ...sexual bondage shackles women as much today as it has for centuries. In The Prostitution of Sexuality, Barry assesses where we are 15 years later, how far we've come and, more importantly, how far we have still to go. Shifting her focus from the sexuality of prostitution to the prostitution of sexuality, Barry exposes the practice of teenage sexual exploitation and the flourishing Asian sex tour industry, emphasizing the world-wide role of the expanding multi-billion dollar pornography industry. The work identifies the global conditions of sexual exploitation, from sex industrialization in developing countries to te normalization of prostitution in the West. The Prostitution of Sexuality considers sexual exploitation a political condition and thus the foundation of women's subordination and the base from which discrimination against women is constructed and enacted. Breaking new ground, Barry convincingly argues for the need to integrate the struggle against sexual exploitation in prostitution into broader feminist struggles and to place it, as one of several connected issues, in the forefront of the feminist agenda. Barry concludes the book with a sampling of strategies-- international, regional, local, and personal--that feminist activists have employed successfully since the early 1980s, highlighting new international legal strategies for human rights resulting from her work.

Revolutions within: self-government and self-esteem

This paper is about the relationship between power and subjectivity in a democracy, about the lines between subjectivity and subjection, democracy and despotism. The ability of the democratic citizen to generate a politically able self depends upon technologies of subjectivity which link personal goals and desires to social order and stability, which link power an subjectivity. I begin with the contemporary self-esteem movement spearheaded by feminist Gloria Steinem and California legislator John Vasconcellos to show that programs which attempt to enhance the subjectivity of women and the poor-strategies of empowerment, self-help, and democratic participation - are also practical techniques for the subjection of individuals. I go on to outline a history of the present ‘state of esteem’ beginning with the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. I locate the emergence of democratic self-governance in the advent of the social as a sphere of governability and expertise.

Feminism in Turkey

Feminism in Turkey has reached a new exciting dimension in the last decade with the emergence of autonomous and multifarious female voices. Duygu Asena, an editor and novelist, has much to do with paving the way for the emergence of these voices. With her controversial writings and independent lifestyle, she is an icon of Turkish feminism, the Gloria Steinem of Turkish culture. As a proponent of staunch individualism, she has not allied herself with any group or movement. But through her editorials in Kadinca (Womanly) and two controversial novels, Kadinin Adi Yok (Woman Has No Name) and its sequel Aslinda Aşk da Yok (In Reality, Love Does Not Exist Either) that insist on female equality and autonomy, she has greatly shaped public opinion that has made possible the mobilization of other feminists.

Ethical Concerns in Caring for Older Women in the Community

Given the preceding discussion, what can be summarized at this point about the ethical concerns we face in the care of older women? Overall, we have presented a perspective that combines our understanding of women's health and nursing ethics. The essence of much of our concern about caring for older women is that we have views about their care that reflect our understanding of what it means to be professionals who have a social contract with our clients. We have discussed nursing ethics as a process that occurs within a social context that emphasizes working to maximize self-determination and informed choices for older women. We have emphasized autonomy and a perspective that places the nurse in an advocacy position with the patient in a relationship of partners. Arriving at reasoned positions on the ethical issues in the care of older women leads to agreement with Gloria Steinem that women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.

Recommended: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Move over Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet. Perkins Gilman is back. Actually, Gilman has been with us for a long time, just lying low until the time came when she was needed again. Although some readers may be saying Charlotte who? Gilman was a household word in the first part of this century, an early feminist whose works were not recognized as feminist writings until the 1970s. Gilman, however, would not have used the word feminist to describe herself; she was, instead, a humanist-concerned with the equality of both men and women. And this is the theme which dominates all of her

An Interview with Toni Morrison

morrison: That's what this is all about. Black writing has to carry that burden of other people's desires, not artistic desires but social desires; it's always perceived as working out some body's else's agenda. No other literature has that weight. q: Gloria Steinem made it clear that Alice Walker's work was a departure from other black male writers. What do you think of that in terms of the prototype black author Richard Wright? Do you think Richard Wright was carrying the burden of that weight to do more for the reader than writing a novel? tm: He had a very strong program. Powerful as he was?is? as a writer, nobody can surpass him in doing certain kinds of writing. He does action practically better than anybody; also, he is courageous?he was able to look into areas that nobody at that time was willing to look at. But I think he had a legiti mate and necessary historical slash political outlook. And that surfaces in his text and that is a legitimate purpose. The question now as it was then is: how do you make an art form that is both unquestionably beautiful and also political at the same time? [her son enters the room] But nobody can gain say that book. Now, I guess he had terrible pictures of men in them, terrible pictures of women in them. If you are asking the characters to function as role models?if that [laughter] is what literature is for, I suppose a lot of people would find him offen sive. Black women might find him offensive, vis-a-vis the char acter's relationship to the woman that he has to rape, mutilate, murder, etc. [deep breath]. We are accustomed as black women, anyway, to that kind of dismissal, even by black men, unless we were the tragic mulatto. So what is different, I think, is that black women, who seem to be the only people writing who do not regard white men and white women?the white world?as the central stage in the text. White men write about white men, because that's who they are; white women are interested in white men because they are their

What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement, by Gayle Graham Yates

women's movement is perhaps the most baffling of the recent social reforms to sweep the United States. It is composed of numerous distinct groups, each with specific interests and goals, each with individual leaders and literature. are the philosophies behind these groups? Who are their leaders and how have their ideas evolved? Do they have a vital connection with the women's movement of the past? And where are today's groups headed? In this study that brilliantly illuminates the literature and purposes of contemporary feminists, What Women Want: Ideas of the Movement, Gayle Graham Yates has produced the first comprehensive history of contemporary women's groups.Concentrating chiefly on the movement from 1959 to 1973, when it erupted in such activist groups as the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL), and the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), the author analyzes in detail their literature, factions, and issues. Her survey encompasses virtually every major expression of the movement's multiple facets, from The Feminine Mystique, Born Female, and Sexual Politics, to Sex and the Single Girl and Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. In a significant breakthrough, the author discerns the pattern underlying this diversity, which should contribute to a fuller understanding of future developments in the women's struggle. She accomplishes this by identifying three key attitudes informing the movement: the feminist, the women's liberationist, and the androgynous or cooperative male-female relationship.The author provides a sensitive, yet critical analysis of the chief spokeswomen in contemporary America, activists like Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone, and Ti-Grace Atkinson. She treats each of the feminist ideologies with balance and respect, yet is refreshingly unafraid to criticize new developments. She bolsters her own conclusions in support of an androgynous or equal sexual society with a judicious spirit. Scholars and the general public alike will find Yates' book not only an indispensable contribution to women's studies, but also a strong and timely addition to contemporary American life and thought.

A Talk with Nikki Giovanni

We met Giovanni in an unused lounge in the student union building. Although two other people were also present, Giovanni, occasionally puffing on her long, brown cigarettes, did most of the talking. In fact, during the lengthy, rambling conversation, it was sometimes difficult for us to squeeze in our questions. Giovanni had a lot to say--some of it amusing, some of it angry, all of it interesting. The interview covered a wide range of subjects. Giovanni, punctuating her conversation with gestures, y'know and mean, talked about baseball: she had bet $100 on the Cincinnati Reds to win the World Series, and they were about to play the seventh, decisive game. She talked about cooking: she considers herself an excellent cook (she's fond of New England boiled dinners, she said), and produced an unsolicited testimonial to crock pot cookery. She talked about birthday gifts: she wants a peanut butter maker for her next birthday. But most of all, Giovanni talked about her work, her politics, and her views on the women's movement. On that last subject, her views proved surprising. Although her poetry would seem to indicate otherwise, Giovanni does not consider herself a feminist. And she seemed to resent being asked, Why not? hate to say it, but I don't think that's a proper question, she replied. Maybe 'cause not a feminist, I couldn't define it, and tell you why Its like why not Jewish, why not a Catholic, or why I don't like sauteed crabs. You ask a question that's impossible; I can't tell you why not, because not. Perhaps it is because she doesn't feel oppressed as a woman. I'm oppressed as a black, certainly, and I think that probably women are oppressed, because I take their word for it. But not particularly interested in banding with any group of women because the problems that I face, predominantly, are problems of racism in America. Giovanni is disillusioned with the women's movement, she said, because of its failure to support other oppressed people. For example, women demonstrated against busing in Boston and Louisville, and the women's movement did nothing to stop them. Gloria Steinem goes all over the world, she goes to Mexico City to build the case for women, but she can't go up to Boston to say, 'Please stop throwing bricks at those kids.' Those are her