On the sad and barren legacy of Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem died on September 2nd, yet I’m still thinking about her. I recently listened to her updated autobiography, released shortly after she passed away. I did it because I wanted to understand her better before writing about her.

Listening led me to consider more carefully the life she presented and the legacy she left behind.

I wasn’t prepared to hear her deep, gravelly voice as she told her own story. Whatever one thinks of Gloria Steinem, she was born with the dignity that comes from being made in the image and likeness of God. What she did with it is another matter.

Steinem was of a different age, literally and figuratively. She sounded old, and she spoke very slowly. She was 92, after all. She shared a lot about her childhood. But she had lost much of her former fire, as the elderly often do.

Her obituaries celebrated her as a trailblazer, an icon, a feminist heroine, and the voice of a generation. That praise may ring true for faithful followers, but only if one leaves out the facts: Ms. Steinem did indeed change America, though arguably not for the better.

There’s something sad, verging on the pathetic, in assessing the life of Gloria Steinem. She’s best known for being a vigorous, often belligerent, feminist, which, in this day and age, is no longer quite the compliment it once was. The world has moved on, and many women today, young and old, shy away from her old-style, combative spirit. I cringe for any man these days who tells me he’s a “feminist.”

When the late Dolly Parton was asked if she was a feminist, she offered an emphatic “No.” She said she liked men. And, like Dolly, so do most women. A woman with any maturity, a woman who knows who she is, has little interest in a tedious battle of the sexes.

In the end, Steinem became a lesson in consequences; in how not to live as a woman, or even as a fulfilled human being. She never bore a child. She didn’t marry until she was 66. Her “fertility” was purely political.

By the end of her life, Steinem was a secular icon past its time. Nothing of her flesh and blood survives her. She leaves behind no skin in the game; nothing alive, unique, and new to benefit the future—just a legacy of ideas that are abstract, time-conditioned, and bloodless.

The sexual revolution, which she helped promote, normalized sex detached from commitment and the real intimacy that flows from it. Rejecting traditional family roles left marriage and parenthood increasingly weakened. But elevating women’s career independence did not erase family burdens; it too often merely added professional competition to the list.

Steinem wanted women to escape the demands of being an object, but she herself became a cultural totem. She wanted all women to have a voice, but she was the loudest and most aggrieved. In her celebrity, she alone licensed, or sought to license, which female voices mattered, and which feminist positions were legitimate.

She was extraordinarily good at identifying what women should be liberated from. In practice, this involved freedom from the needs of husbands, children, and any obligation that was unchosen and inconvenient.

But she lacked an equally compelling account of what women were being liberated for, and that lack must be counted in any serious judgment of her legacy.

She talked a great line about justice and equality for women, but again—in practice—she was thoroughly bourgeois; she was the voice of some women of a particular class and outlook. And the bitter irony is that her life and work unintentionally licensed many men to avoid ever becoming the kind of men women really need: responsible, mature, unselfish, loving, and faithful partners.

We might usefully remember some words Steinem borrowed from the Australian scholar, Irina Dunn: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” It’s a clever line. It’s also false.

What Steinem failed to comprehend about life is how the human species actually survives and thrives. Women do need men, and men do need women. Both are imperfect, both are flawed, but we’re creatures hard-wired for mutual dependence.

Each has gifts and wisdom that the other needs for a rich and meaningful life. The species fails when the sexes hold each other in distrust and contempt. This is a key message of Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, which was a focal point of his pontificate.

There is a story that the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue once told about Gloria Steinem and the 1995 papal visit to the United States.

When Pope John Paul II came to New York … Ms. Steinem not only marched with protesters–many of whom hurled obscenities at the Pope–but she delivered the following remark to the press: “We will live to see the day that St. Patrick’s Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.”

When reporters questioned Steinem at the time about her papal comment, she said, “I’m an equal-opportunity jokemaker. I think the Pope has enough sense of humor to know that.”

As it turns out, John Paul had an excellent sense of humor. And so, too, does history.

Karol Wojtyla is remembered today as “John Paul the Great.” St. Patrick’s Cathedral was, is, and always will be a “child-care center”–of the soul. And if there’s a joke anywhere in the fruit of Ms. Steinem’s feminism, it seems to be on her.

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