Sometimes when I’m on a plane, as I often am, the weather is rough and we’re worried about going down. I think: If I hold the hand of the person next to me, I’ll be holding everyone’s hand. Like my dear friend, the late Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, I want to know: I’m going to the other side of the mountain.
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Gloria Steinem has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.
GS
Gloria Steinem
Writer and feminist organiser
United States · b. 1934
Politics and public life
About
American journalist and organiser who co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972 and has been a leading figure in the women's movement since the late 1960s.
15 answers
I’m walking down a street in New York, the sun is shining, I’m on my way to see friends who are chosen family—and I’ve just written a couple of pages that I like.
I would love to have a good memory. I’m at an age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.
Dying just a millisecond before I was about to say something I really wanted the people I love to hear.
Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.
In my 30s, I was staring at a pair of expensive boots in a shop window when the photographer Gordon Parks came up behind me. He instantly understood, because he grew up even poorer than me; he made me buy them on my credit card.
Feeling you want someone else’s welfare as much and sometimes more than your own.
Seeing the future die, from Bobby Kennedy to dear friends.
I’ve had cancer three times, but never felt close to death except when I walked between parked cars on my street and a car sped past my nose.
Dr Denis Mukwege, because he is to sexualised violence against females what Mandela was to apartheid.
Being a salesgirl in a baby shop where the others said things like, “He’s Jewish, but she’s American.” Also, after college, being a waitress in London, and trying to make change in the old money of shillings and pence.
I haven’t done it yet.
I behaved badly with two old lovers. Years later, when I took one to lunch to apologise, it made it worse.
As someone who left the world around me a little kinder and less hierarchical.
First a horse rancher, then a dancer.
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