The Week I Met Gloria Steinem

This week I met Gloria Steinem. I shook her hand, introduced myself, and chatted with her for a while. You didn’t automatically notice her when you entered the room. But once she started speaking, people flocked around her to listen. I was completely taken aback by her humility, grace, and humor. She could respond with knowledge and deep insight on any topic thrown her way. I sat stunned, watching a 76-year old woman discuss transgender rights in Iran, followed quickly by the power and ills of social networks. My own 76-year old grandmother seems to be stuck in the 1950’s, and here is a shining star of the movement today, as relevant and informed as ever.

At the Ms. At 40 Keynote Speech, Gloria Steinem showed her keen understanding of the future of the women’s rights movement, explaining the important issues on our to-do list, describing the current problems we face, and expressing our unbridled hope for a better tomorrow.

I’m not sure what I expected to hear from Gloria Steinem, the face of second wave feminism herself. But I didn’t expect what we got. Most importantly, I wasn’t expecting her to understand our generation. At a different Ms. At 40 event, the discussion quickly degenerated into everything young women are doing wrong, and how we are singlehandedly letting down the movement. I thought Gloria might also be disappointed in how we’ve carried on her legacy.

But Gloria, in all her wisdom, started out the keynote speech by denouncing the troubling myth that women are no longer involved in the fight for equality, and rejecting the idea that there are no young feminists. To serve as concrete examples, she listed off the names of young women who blog about feminism for teens, advocate for comprehensive sex education while in high school, and many, many more.  

This week Gloria Steinem taught me a thing or two about social justice movements and social networks. I did not expect to get schooled on the proper use of Facebook from an eighty-year old. Speaking of intergenerational rifts, it is probably our stubborn know-it all confidence that older feminists find most annoying. But we blog, we tweet, we create social change in a whole new way, and I thought we understood that best. Nope. We don’t.

Gloria told us the main goal of using social networks should be to bring people together in the same room. I wasn’t convinced. Then she explained that social media can cause us to become isolated, cocoon, and only reach people in our networks who agree with us. Oh, this is sounding more like my twitter account. For the final punch, Steinem said one of the biggest traps of social media is that we feel accomplished by just pressing send. Yes, okay, you got me. She called me out; she knows how I use social media and how I view my online activism, and she knows how to do it better.

It is clear that Gloria Steinem lives in the future, as she bravely declared at the beginning of her speech. She expressed so much insight—into the use of social media, the need to combine social justice movements, the current danger of political upheaval and the looming hope of achieving equality—that I am convinced she has seen a wonderful future. This week I decided I want to join in to create that future with her.