Gloria Steinem: If you could edit your past, what would you change?

If you could edit your past, what would you change?

Originally asked

The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Gloria Steinem said elsewhere, not written here

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.

The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 March 2017 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 203 →

Erin O'Connor English model

The bits that consumed me with guilt.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 1 March 2008 source ↗

Jeremy Vine English presenter and journalist

I’d stop my teenage self worrying about how my life was going to pan out.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 17 August 2019 source ↗

Toby Stephens

There was a very large part of my 20s where I was an alcoholic, and an addict. When I lost my dad to cirrhosis, I knew that the only difference between us was that, tragically, he couldn’t stop whereas I could.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 13 June 2026 source ↗

Tracey Ullman British and American actress

I would have stopped making records after They Don’t Know.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 March 2017 source ↗