Now I knew from a half-digested reading of her collected journalism that Ms Steinem was a crystallised and not an accidental feminist. One of the book’s many successes is the way it documents the slow politicisation of a contented and prospering individual. After a hard, poor and painful childhood in Toledo (much of it spent caring single-handedly for a crushed, confused mother), and after a spell in show business as a dancer, Gloria pursued a thriving career as a New York journalist. It was the usual freelancing pot-pourri; pieces on stockings, fashion, Truman Capote, John Lennon, Vidal Sassoon. As early as 1963 she wrote the classic expose, ‘I was a Playboy Bunny’. Despite various ‘no broads’ ground rules, Ms Steinem started working on the campaign trail, both as a journalist and an aide — to George McGovern. This soon led her into the civil rights movement; she found herself writing about migrant workers, Puerto Rican radicals, Martin Luther King. Then, in 1969, it happened: Ms Steinem ‘got’ feminism – and realised she had had it all along. The experience ‘changed my life’, she writes. ‘It will never be the same.’
Encased by the limousine, and also by a sense of comfortable male irony, I kicked off by asking Ms Steinem whether the movement was now undergoing a phase of retraction or redefinition. Hadn’t Nora Ephron recently joked that the only thing feminism had given women was the privilege of going dutch? Hadn’t Susan Brownmiller confessed that while she would never remove the hair on her legs, she had started dyeing it (this being the centrist or SDP stance on the leg-hair issue)? Weren’t women finding that going out to work and joining the ‘pink-collar ghetto’ only doubled their hardships, since they were obliged to moonlight with the Hoover? What about Germaine Greer’s sudden championship of motherhood, chastity and coitus interruptus?
‘Well, I don’t know anyone who’s into coitus interruptus,’ said Ms Steinem, and gave her musical laugh. She then proceeded (pretty gently, it now seems) to put my argument in its place. This was the first lesson of the day: to challenge feminism, in America, in 1984, is to disqualify yourself as a moral contender. It is the equivalent of espousing a return to slavery. One of Ms Steinem’s dialectical techniques is that of role-reversal; she puts the (white male) reader in a different racial or sexual circumstance — then asks how he likes it. And this is more than a trick of argument. It speaks for a passionate identification with the fate of the American black. Feminism in England lacks that dimension, just as England lacks a history of racial guilt. The second lesson of the day took a little longer to learn. Reasonable and unmenacing though Ms Steinem’s logic sounds, it contains the core of something quite revolutionary, indeed millennial.
The previous or ‘reformist’ school of feminists, she explained, ‘wanted a piece of the existing pie. We want to bake a new one.’ The more radical view centres on the home — ‘on families, not the “family”, which has become a codeword for reactionary power-groups’. When Ms Steinem talks of ‘democratic parenthood’ she has more in mind than a bit of male nappy-changing. If the rearing of children were undertaken equally then the intractable stereotypes of Male and Female would finally begin to fade. No longer would a child perceive femininity in terms of warmth, care, devotion, and masculinity in terms of energy, action and business elsewhere. ‘We grow up dividing our natures because of the way we’re raised.’ And this is her Children’s Crusade in another sense, because ‘sex roles’, she believes, ‘are in the anthropological, long-term view a primary cause ot violence. Any peace movement without that kind of challenge to violence — well, it’s like putting a Band-Aid on a cancer.’
Then what? If, as she says, ‘the sex or race of an individual is one of 20,000 elements that go into making up an individual person’, the proliferation of human types would be ceaseless. Sexually ‘there would be thousands of ways to be’, rather than the existing three or four. ‘There would be no average. Sameness would be done away with.’
‘And so,’ I said, with my last ironic breath, ‘there might be an enclave in your Utopia where the Victorian marriage still thrived.’