FEMINIST ENIGMA

"AN ENIGMA and a paradox" a woman who is "essential and ubiquitous" in the world of feminism. This is how Carolyn Heilbrun describes Gloria Steinem in her new biography: The Education of a Woman: The Life and Times of Gloria Steinem. To this thirtysomething Irish reporter, Gloria Steinem is not, a particularly familiar feminist icon. Other American feminists, like Kate Millett, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, or Naomi Wolf, are more forceful presences, associated in my mind with more memorable insights or actions. I knew little of Steinem other than a hazy impression of an earnest, willowy beauty, publisher of Ms., the only glossy women's magazine that was really about women's issues, but which failed due to lack of advertising.

This biography is a reminder of how often the most central and altruistic figure in a time of great social change can become the one who is either forgotten, or worse, reviled and misrepresented, even by members of her own camp. In Steinem's case, she was not only attacked by the predictable enemy, namely chauvinistic men, but also by fellow feminists like Betty Friedan.

The Redstockings, a group of radical feminists, even accused Steinem of being a CIA agent assigned to subvert the women's movement.

Steinem emerges as a generous and naive non materialistic champion of the underdog (not only of women, but also of other groups such as Native Americans and migrant farm workers). A pacifist who protested against the Vietnam war and was very influenced by the philosophies of Gandhi, Steinem has always abhorred confrontation and possesses what she terms a "Ms Rescue Complex".

Why has this gentle, beautiful, kind woman been treated so badly, notably by her own sisters in the cause? The answer, says Heilbrun, is envy: "Women seem to have found it hardest to deal with Steinem's particular combination of gifts. Such looks and such radical and Feminist ideals are rarely enough conjoined and when they are publicly exhibited they seem to instil a simmering indignation in even the most generous of women."

Steinem herself believes: "Just as men victimise the weak member of their group, women, through lack of self esteem, victimise the strong one."

Heilbrun returns repeatedly to the subject of Steinem's looks, in her efforts to locate the source of this envy. If anything, this ends up reinforcing the sexist attitude Heilbrun affects to criticise, that a good looking, fashionably dressed feminist has to be an incredible paradox.

Exploring the envy issue further, however, Heilbrun gets closer to what seems to be its real source: not only Steinem's looks, but the fact that she has been known and admired in glamorous circles. Julie Andrews said that ill she couldn't be Julie, she would like to be Gloria. Steinem regularly helped Ted Sorenson to dream up witticisms for the speeches he wrote for JFK. She was loved by handsome, intelligent, influential and wealthy men! - including Herb Sargent, producer and head writer of That Was the Week that Was; and the former Olympic athlete, Rafer Johnson - most of whom helped, her out when she needed donations for the causes she supported; or introduced her to other people who brought opportunities her way. Elizabeth Harris accused Steinem of being "a manizer": "She has a remarkable ability to manipulate men, to get them, to do what she wants them to do."

But, as Steinem has said: "If women could sleep their way to the top, why aren't more women heads of companies?" Not to mention the fact that she had to suffer appalling humiliation from many men who continued to treat her as a sex object and trivialise her achievements. She was dubbed "the mini skirted pin up girl of the intelligentsia". Chat show host David Susskind said: "I just wish Gloria would find a good chap and relax ... What Gloria needs is a man ... The whole thing is so boring and ridiculous. Gloria comes on with that flat Ohio accent and goes on and on about women's oppression - you feel like either kissing her or hitting her. I can't decide which."

Heilbrun records the horror of Steinem's then companion, Stan Pottinger, as he watched how Steinem was treated by hostile journalists at a press conference.

The first question was "Do you have lots of boyfriends?" The next was "We know you came in with a man; will you tell me who he is?" All Steinem had to do was appear beside Henry Kissinger in a photo and it was assumed universally that they were lovers.

Steinem worked on many fronts to fight the sexual objectification of women which she knew about all too well on a personal level. One of her first big journalistic stories was her account of her experience as an undercover "bunny girl" (which was followed, disappointingly enough, by letters from young women asking her how they could become "bunnies" too). She also encouraged Linda Lovelace, the abused star of the pornographic movie, Deep Thmat, to speak out about her terrible experiences during the filming Steinem helped to arrange a liver transplant which Lovelace required because of the violence of the beatings she had received.

The reason that Steinem was able, in spite of all of this, to enjoy the egalitarian love and/or friendship of many men, where ideas, support and opportunities were swapped back and forth, is due, says Heilbrun, to her affection for her father.

Although he was feckless and financially irresponsible, and largely absent from her life after the age of ten, she was fond of his happy go lucky company and said that he taught her how "unopposite" men could be.

Her relationship with her mother was more problematic. Born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem is the grand daughter of a suffragist (whom she never knew) and the daughter of a frustrated newspaperwoman. Her mother's first nervous breakdown and subsequent mental instability (brought on largely by financial worries due to her husband's unreliability during the Depression) meant that Ruth Steinem would never get to pursue her dream of developing her journalistic career.

Heilbrun observes: "Steinem sometimes muses that she has lived the unlived life of her mother; perhaps all the accomplished women of her generation have tried to live their mother's unlived lives."

Steinem was forced to grow up too fast. At the age of three, she was trained to answer the door to debt collectors and say: "My daddy's not here". By the age of 10, she had become her mother's mother - keeping house, going to school, attending to her invalid mother's needs. When she was old enough she worked in the evenings and at weekends as a waitress or shop assistant; she even tap danced in a chorusline to keep some money coming in.

Even so, the two lived in a rat infested basement, and Steinem survived on fantasies of escape, determined that the punitive, poverty stricken way of life she saw all around her would not become her own.

Later she would say sensibly: "Don't worry about your background; whether it is odd or ordinary, use it, build on it."

Unlike her more conventional college peers (who included Sylvia Plath), she eschewed marriage. It is ironic that, on her way to pursue postgraduate studies in India, she discovered she was pregnant by the wealthy fiance whom she had just discarded. Telling no one, she spent half her scholarship money in London on an abortion, describing years later how the operation had taken place in an atmosphere of "isolation, illegality and fear".

It was this experience which drew her eventually into the women's movement in 1969. She attended a meeting on abortion organised by Redstocking leader Kathie Sarachild, where 12 women spoke openly about their experiences of abortion. To Steinem, who had told nobody about her own abortion, this was moving proof that she was not alone and should not have to feel like a criminal. Soon after this she was touring the country, giving lectures and having meetings with large audiences of women.

This biography shows that however reluctantly Steinem became America's acceptable face of feminism, she was the obvious person to be a figurehead for a movement which many women found threatening in the early days. She reassured them that "one did not have to eschew elegance or `femininity,' or, above all men, to be for `women's lib'."

She showed that a woman could be feminine and powerful: "Here was a woman who looked, good enough to be one of Esquire's sexy dolls, but who threatened to take away their rights to these dolls."

Unlike many other pockets of feminism, Steinem's approach, was based on inclusiveness: she felt it was important that the feminist movement should avoid being associated with any one camp (Betty Friedan, for example, was a figurehead for middleclass women only, and openly criticised lesbian feminists). Steinem brought in working class women, women of different racial backgrounds; she even had time to recognise the powerlessness of women married to very wealthy men.

The best revolutionary function of a writer: to forge language that doesn't divide," is a Steinem dictum. Her love of inclusiveness and dislike of confrontation did not prevent her however, from making powerful and hard hitting speeches. In her commencement speech given to the Smith graduating class of 1971, she criticised the illegality of abortion, said women's work was "shit work" and quoted a remark of Flo Kennedy's (an outspoken black feminist) that "there are only a few jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina".

For 20 years Steinem worked extremely hard for the women's movement: never a week went by that she wasn't on a plane somewhere in the service of the cause. But the death of her mother, who had a lumpectomy following breast cancer, and the demise of Ms. magazine have all led to a certain change of pace, a realisation of the necessity of conserving some of her energy for herself.

She is now 62, writing books and working towards making the Ms. Foundation for Women a permanent feminist institution. She lives alone in a small apartment in Manhattan, where Rebecca Walker (daughter of Alice) is a beloved and frequent visitor. She has not had a partner for some time, and confesses her interest in sex has waned. For the women's movement, she wishes that "women would treat ourselves as well and take ourselves as seriously as we do others". For herself, she is beginning to relish "the upcoming pleasures of being a nothing to lose, take no shit older woman." May she inspire many more women to follow the same path.