Gloria Steinem has died. I am much personally sadder than I would have thought I would be. She fought for and shaped so much for me and so many other women, and took so much shit for it with grace and courage.
If any young ‘uns want to understand why she was important, I suggest watching the excellent miniseries Mrs America, which is a brilliant portrait of the dynamics of second wave feminism and the roots of what became “women eating their own faces” family-values MAGA.
Those women were more than a generation ahead of me, but as a teenager with a lot of angst about my gender, sexuality and the shame brushed over women for violating the norms, I devoured Steinem, Friedan and other contemporaries. Their pre-intersectionality lenses (esp. Friedan’s) don’t stand up to scrutiny now, but we can’t miss how unbelievably radical they were.
I lived in a world where I was literally not given a school award because my principal thought it would be inappropriate to honour a kid being raised by a single mother because it would legitimize that situation. I lived in a world where my grandparents consistently tried to school me in how to be a “lady,” and where my mother navigated shame and castigation for my appearance six months after her wedding, and for her divorce. I lived in a world where, of course, there were no visible queer women.
Reading Gloria Steinem and discovering Ms magazine were the first lifeline into a different way to be for me as a 15 year old in 1980 windsor. Their words led me to the first wave french feminists, and to every book about women claiming their sexuality and desire and agency I could find (some better than others, lol), and to every piece of queer theory I ever read. I read Ms. fiercely for two decades, and a vintage mug from the magazine holds the pens on my desk now. That mug symbolizes the container that Steinem and her contemporaries created so I can use my voice the way I want to today.
Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who lives in Mi’kma’ki, the unceded and ancestral land of the Mi’kmaq Nation.
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