Gloria Steinem talks with Micaela Marini Higgs, 9, during a book signing in the lobby of Bailey Hall after Steinem's April 22 talk. Julia Featheringill/University Photography
When a packed Bailey Hall audience, almost entirely women, greeted Gloria Steinem with applause April 22, she clapped and cheered back. "Are we going to have a good time tonight or what?" she asked the crowd. "If all goes well tonight, everyone will leave here with one new idea -- one new subversive organizing tactic."
Steinem, a leader of the modern feminist movement who was inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame in 1993, is now a writer and a consulting editor for Ms. magazine, the international feminist bimonthly she co-founded in 1972. She also continues to be an active advocate and speaker on a number of issues, from child abuse to racism.
"Frankly, it always seems that you don't need me here," Steinem said of Ithaca and Cornell. She lauded past Cornell feminists who made their mark, among them Kate Millett, the author of Sexual Politics, which Steinem reported began as Millett's doctoral thesis here. She also cited the activities commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Willard Straight Hall takeover and the Take Back the Night rally (which took place in Ithaca the evening after her talk) as examples of positive local social action. "But when I saw that your Women's Resource Center only has one room, and its funding is dependent year-to-year on the student activities budget," she said, "I thought, maybe we do have a few things to work on."
During her lecture, titled "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions," Steinem discussed examples of social injustice that she said must be remedied. "We're not going to do anything until we get outraged about it," she argued, and she urged audience members to each perform one "outrageous act" in support of social justice. Despite the forceful nature of her message, however, Steinem delivered her talk in a manner so relaxed, warm and friendly that she might have been chatting with friends, not issuing a contemporary call to arms.
One "outrage" to be challenged, she said, is the fact that women still have not achieved full social or legal equality, and some areas of life -- among them childrearing and housekeeping -- are still seen as for women only. "In the last 25 years, we have convinced most folks in the nation that women can do what men can do, but we haven't convinced them that men can do what women do," she said.
Steinem argued that the feminist movement is related to all movements that fight discrimination, but activists often make "laundry lists" of issues without seeing their interconnections. She asserted that the right wing had no problem seeing interconnections and that the movement's opposition to such seemingly disparate issues as contraception, abortion, sex education and lesbianism is in fact connected to its desire to control human reproduction. That explanation, she said, accounts for its fight against any sexual activity that doesn't end in conception.
The conservative viewpoint, she said, ignores the fact that human beings are the only animals who experience the same level of sexual desire with or without the possibility of conception. "Sexual pleasure is a mark of our humanity," she asserted.
Steinem also talked about the need for redefining what is valued as work, noting that many people still believe that women who work at home aren't working, when in fact 40 percent of work in the United States is done in the home. But perhaps her most revolutionary proposal was that we pass a bill guaranteeing a minimum income for every child. "It could be done," she said. "Every dollar we invest in our children saves a hundredfold later."
Addressing the political process, Steinem advised people to vote at every opportunity and challenge current psychological barriers to voting, such as the belief that politics is dirty and that an individual's vote doesn't count. Steinem even addressed religion, expressing her dream of creating religious institutions that honor all members, rather than follow restrictive patriarchal models. "We have never really turned around in this country and said: 'If God looks like the ruling class, we are all in deep shit,'" she said. She encouraged the audience to look for models of behavior among Native American cultures, which she praised for being gender-balanced societies that make community-based decisions.
Reminding the audience of the power that each individual has to create positive social change, Steinem said: "If all this seems daunting, remember how a physicist would say the flap of a butterfly's wings can change the weather thousands of miles away. Everything we do matters, and just those of us in this room make up one enormous butterfly."
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