For
most of this decade, the conventional wisdom has had it that feminism
in America is dead – or, at least, irrelevant. The New York Times
talked to female students at Yale and found them to be mostly
interested in becoming housewives. Sex and the City told us that even the ones who became career girls were more interested in men and Manolos than in their actual careers.
Then
came Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for the presidency and the “hear
me roar” tidal wave of support it generated among women, especially
older ones. This renewed focus on feminism brought some of the
movement’s veterans back to the national fore, particularly Gloria
Steinem, a founder of Ms Magazine, the first mass circulation feminist
title. Steinem’s most talked and blogged about comment of recent months
is her assertion in an opinion piece in January that, “Gender is
probably the most restricting force in American life.”
But when I
meet her for lunch at Candle 79, an elegant vegetarian restaurant on
New York’s Upper East Side, I open our conversation with a reference to
a much older example of her work: “I was a Playboy Bunny”, an article
published in 1963 about going undercover in one of Hugh Hefner’s clubs.
I was a Playboy Bunny
The
Bunny Room was chaotic. I was pushed and tugged and zipped into my
electric-blue costume by the wardrobe mistress, but this time she
allowed me to stuff my own bosom. I added the tiny collar with clip-on
bow tie and the starched cuffs with Playboy cufflinks. My nameplate was
centred in a ribbon rosette like those worn in horse shows, pinned just
above my bare right hipbone. The wardrobe mistress also gave me a Bunny
jacket: it was a below-zero night, and I was to stand by the front
door. The jacket turned out to be a brief shrug of imitation white fur
that covered the shoulders but left the bosom carefully bare.
I
went in to be inspected by Bunny Mother Sheralee. She advised that I
keep any money I had with me in my costume. “Two more girls have had
things stolen from their lockers,” she said, and added that I should
tell the lobby director the exact amount of money I had with me.
“Otherwise they may think you stole tips.” Table Bunnies, she
explained, were allowed to keep any cash tips (though the club took up
to 50 per cent of charge tips), but hat-check Bunnies could keep no
tips at all. Instead, they were paid a flat $12 for eight hours. I said
$12 a day seemed a lot less than the salary of $200 to $300 mentioned
in the advert. “When you start working as a table Bunny”, she said,
“you’ll see how it all averages out.”
I took a last look at
myself in the mirror. A creature with three-quarter-inch eyelashes,
blue satin ears and an overflowing bosom looked back.
The elevator opened and I made my professional debut in the
Playboy Club. It was crowded, noisy and very dark. A group of men with
name tags on their lapels stood nearby. “Here’s my Bunny honey now,”
said one, and flung his arm around my shoulders as if we were fellow
halfbacks leaving the field.
“Please, sir,” I said, and uttered
the ritual sentence we had learned from the Bunny Father lecture: “You
are not allowed to touch the Bunnies.” His companions laughed and
laughed. “Boy oh boy, guess she told you!” said one, and tweaked my
tail as I walked away.
I climbed down the carpeted spiral
stairs between the mezzanine and the lobby, separated from the street
by only a two-storey sheet of glass. All of us, customers and Bunnies
alike, were a living window display. I reported to the lobby director.
“Hello, Bunny Marie,” he said. “How’s things?” I told him I had $15 in
my costume. “I’ll remember,” he said. I had a quick and humiliating
vision of all the hat-check Bunnies lined up for bosom inspection.
Extracted from ‘I Was a Playboy Bunny’ (1963) included in ‘Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions’ (Holt Rinehart and Winston)
It
is a justly famous piece of reportage, lent a special, unspoken
authority by the fact that it was written by a woman who had the looks
to be a Playboy bunny – they gave her the job – but who chose to be a
subversive feminist instead. Yet Steinem, now a lanky 74-year-old who
wears her blue jeans and trademark long hair with easy grace, shows
little interest in dwelling on past glories and we move swiftly to a
discussion of one of the hottest issues of the moment: whether sexism
is to blame for Clinton’s defeat.
It is a touchy point and
Steinem tackles it with the linguistic precision of someone who feels
she is at some risk of being misquoted. “They keep trying to make me
say she lost because of sexism. I’m not saying that,” Steinem says.
“It’s never one thing.”
She explains: “Here’s an analogy: It
doesn’t make sense to say, ‘Is cancer heredity or carcinogens?’ because
it’s both. But it would be good for the country and for our political
and physical health to get rid of misogyny and get rid of carcinogens.”
A
chief purveyor of that hostility towards women, Steinem believes, is US
television. On this point, she has no qualms about aiming her guns
squarely. “We need to send those news executives to a 12-step programme
because they are in denial” of the sexism in their coverage of the
Democratic primaries, she says.
While I’m a feminist and Steinem is one of my heroes, I didn’t
share her enthusiasm for Clinton’s candidacy, partly because getting to
the White House by having been married to a president seemed rather
more an affirmation of traditional women’s roles than a shattering of
the glass ceiling. But when I ask whether Clinton’s political success
has demonstrated the power of dynasty, rather than the possibility of a
feminist breakthrough, Steinem is categorical.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”
Clinton’s
eight years as the president’s wife should be seen as valuable, Steinem
explains, because “what we have done so far is only count the kind of
experience that men also have. What we need to be able to do is count
all human experience. So I would like to count the secretarial
positions as good training places to take over the jobs of the bosses.”
I
press the dynastic point a few more times and Steinem offers more
rebuttals. I think we are both relieved when the waitress interrupts to
take our order. Steinem, a vegetarian, chooses the specials – chilled
corn chowder and a salad of avocado with black rice and shiitake
mushrooms. I pick the market plate with tofu, spinach, cauliflower and
mushrooms. Born in Toledo, Ohio, she has made her home in New York for
many years and tells me the restaurant is one of her favourite local
hang-outs.
I urge her to have a glass of wine – “It’s Friday
afternoon” – but she demurs. As a writer and activist without “a proper
job”, Steinem says she “doesn’t have weekends” and needs to go home to
work after our lunch. We both settle on homemade ginger ale instead.
Conscious
of our photographer and her image, she had asked me whether she needed
to be careful to order food that “we won’t have to pick out of our
teeth while she’s photographing”. But now she focuses on her in a
different way: “You get to eat too, I hope!” Assured that she will, she
observes, “That’s a Jewish mother thing to say.” It is. Taken together
with her fond recollection later in our meal of the 1960s and 1970s,
when she enjoyed wearing mini-skirts and a button that read “C***
power”, you can see why over four decades Steinem has made such an
effective representative of an American feminism that said women could
have jobs but also be mothers and lovers, and look good doing it too.
Everyone
nourished, we are back to the 2008 election. Steinem is supporting
Obama in the general race. “Women are more than smart enough to see
that McCain’s policies are a disaster ... He is anti every reproductive
issue we’ve ever fought for.”
She believes women will vote for Obama even if Clinton doesn’t
get the much-mooted consolation prize of the vice-president’s spot on
the Democratic ticket – a job Steinem doesn’t think is good enough for
her anyway. Why? “It’s not an independent position, to put it mildly. I
would rather see her as the president of the Senate.”
The wave of
enthusiasm for Clinton after she admitted defeat angers Steinem. “Women
are liked better when they lose,” she explains. “Now that she has lost,
people are paying tribute to her who were attacking her before.”
Steinem describes this reaction as the “Enforcement of Gender Roles
101: You approve of women when they allow themselves to be dominated
and not when they don’t. It’s the way you perpetuate a male-dominant
society.”
It seems like a good moment to ask Steinem if, more
than a generation after the “second-wave” feminist revolution she
helped lead, she is disappointed that women haven’t made more progress
in the workplace.
I expect outrage. I get the long view. Steinem,
whose grandmother Pauline was a suffragette, reminds me we’re
contending with “5,000 years of patriarchy”, then suggests we should
think of women as “the last immigrant group ... The Irish, the
Italians, the Jews, you know, couldn’t make it through other people’s
hierarchies because of bias. They tended to start their own
businesses,” she says. “And I think that’s part of the reason women are
starting businesses at a higher rate than men.”
I wonder whether part of the problem might be women themselves,
in particular my generation, which can seem soft and self-indulgent
compared to our barricade-storming mothers. But Steinem is sympathetic
to women who choose “the mommy track”. “What choice did they have? Did
they have husbands who were willing to limit their own careers to the
same degree? I don’t think so.” The problem, in her view, isn’t women
and work, it is men and family.
“Men don’t raise children as much as women do,” she says. “This
is the understatement of all time. That will change, eventually.
Corporations frequently punish men who even leave early or leave on
time, you know, to go to their kid’s soccer match.”
In fact, men and their travails turn out to be an object of
compassion for this arch-feminist. She doesn’t think much of the
masters of the universe, despite having famously dated one of them –
Mort Zuckerman, the real estate and publishing magnate. “One of the
great advantages, I must say, of being a female human being is that you
are able to go out with men and be accepted into their world,” she
tells me. “So I discovered young how boring money is.” But she does
think that men as a group “have gotten better”. “There were always good
ones,” Steinem says but, “now that women have started to tell the
truth”, she believes that men “have begun to regard women as human
beings. What will most fundamentally make us fully human is for men to
raise children as much as women do.”
This turn in the discussion
is my chance to ask Steinem the one personal question I have often
wondered about. I warn her that it is probably not an issue it would
occur to me to raise with a man – a big no-no for a self-declared
feminist like me. But Steinem tells me, “That’s OK,” so I go ahead.
Does she regret not having children?
In a nearly three-hour
conversation, full of nuance and carefully parsed replies, my tentative
foray into what is usually sensitive terrain elicits the simplest
answer of all: “Not for a millisecond. No.”
Steinem says she can
provide complicated psychological and social explanations for her
decision, if I like. As a child she cared for her ill mother after the
divorce of her parents left her mother bitterly poor and severely
depressed. That experience, she speculates, may have satisfied – and
exhausted – her maternal instinct early on. “The conditions of
motherhood” in the west, as an often lonely, unsupported vocation, may
have something to do with her choice as well. Ultimately, though, it
seems more basic than that. “I can honestly say I’ve never had a moment
of regret,” Steinem says, and the chief reason is that she feels so
“happy and lucky” in the life she has had.
Steinem belongs to the
generation of feminists who said the personal is political and tried to
live by that credo. So I ask how she balances her inner life with her
external one. She is winningly self-deprecatory: “Poorly.” Then she
elaborates, telling me about the turning point she experienced at 50
when she decided she was too focused on “the external”. There was no
epiphany or disaster: “I just got very, very tired.”
She realised that she was “hooked on activity” because she only felt
“visible” if she was “being useful”, a condition she attributes to the
neglect she experienced as a child, which left her feeling “invisible,
or less visible than most people”.
So,
has she now enough inner peace to feel visible even at moments when she
isn’t leading the feminist revolution? She has, but it took the
lingering death from cancer of her husband, the entrepreneur and
environmentalist David Bale, five years ago “to burn away the last
feeling of any unreality”.
“He was an abandoned child, so he feared abandonment. I kept
hoping he knew that we were there,” Steinem recalls. “He was ill for a
whole year ... and, you know, 100 per cent present emotion makes you
real.”
At this point, the conversation becomes a little too real
for me. Throughout lunch, Steinem has been reminding me of my own
pioneering feminist mother, who happens to have died almost exactly a
year earlier, also after a year-long struggle with cancer. I burst into
messy sobs. “So sorry,” I sputter. Fortunately for me, I am in
sisterhood territory, not on Wall Street, and Steinem takes my tearing
up in stride.
“No, no, no, it’s good, it’s stress chemicals,” she
reassures me, with a gentle pat. But we have both revealed too much of
our inner selves for a meek third-wave feminist like me easily to
switch back to politics or reproductive rights. Instead, we chat about
Steinem’s next book; her striking, golden snake-ring (an ancient symbol
of female wisdom, apparently); and the 13th, the date we are meeting,
which is “unlucky for patriarchy” but, as the number of witches in a
coven, a good number for feminists.
Eventually, I calm down
enough for Steinem to feel it is safe to leave me. So she does: it is
time, she says, for us to go back to work.
Chrystia Freeland is managing editor of the FT’s US edition
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