Free My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem Page A

been in Washington for that historic 1963 march. He stayed in the hotel suite of actor and activist Ossie Davis, who spoke at the march, and made sure Dr. King knew he was there in support. But as his daughter explained, “He also knew his presence would have disrupted or split the focus—and he was a supporter of the big picture.”
    Somehow I found this little-known fact very moving. These two men seemed to be growing toward each other. Dr. King was becoming more radical by speaking out on issues like the Vietnam War, and Malcolm X was beginning to talk about a bloodless revolution. Some tragedies become more tragic. They might have become part of the same talking circle.

III.
    Thanks to Mrs. Greene—and many others brave enough to stand up for themselves and other women—I began to understand that females were an out-group, too. That realization solved such mysteries as why the face of Congress was male but the face of welfare was female; why homemakers were called women who “don’t work,” though they worked longer, harder, and for less pay than any other class of worker; why women did 70 percent of the productive labor in the world, paid and unpaid, yet owned only 1 percent of the property; why
masculinity
meant leading and
femininity
meant following in the odd dance of daily life.
    More than ever, I found myself wanting to report on this new view of the world as if everyone mattered. But it was still the 1960s, and even my most open-minded editor explained that if he published an article saying women were equal, he would have to publish one next to it saying women were not—in order to be objective.
    I had retreated into writing profiles of Margot Fonteyn, the dancer I couldn’t be, or Dorothy Parker, Saul Bellow, and other authors I admired—which seemed as close as I would ever get to being an author myself. Then two women from a lecture bureau wrote to ask if I would speak to groups who had expressed curiosity about this new thing called women’s liberation. I’d recently written a piece for my column in
New York
magazine, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” It had been triggered by my own click of consciousness—namely, that I had been silent and silenced about an abortion I’d had years before. Like many women, I’d been made to feel at fault, not realizing there were political reasons why female humans were not supposed to make decisions about our own bodies.
    I was intrigued by the offer, but I had a big problem: I was terrified of public speaking. I’d so often canceled at the last minute when magazines booked me on television to publicize this or that article—as writers were often expected to do—that some shows had blacklisted me. Fortunately, I had a friend named Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneer of nonsexist, multiracial child care in New York, a fearless speaker, a mother, and a member of an extended black family in rural Georgia—all things I was not.
    We had met when I wrote about her community child care center for
New York
magazine
.
7 As we sat on child-size chairs, sharing lunch on paper plates, her one assistant, a young Italian radical, told us he was sad: the girl he loved wouldn’t marry him because he wouldn’t allow her to work after marriage. Dorothy and I didn’t know each other, but we went to work pointing out parallels between equality for women and the rest of his radical politics. It actually worked.
    Since we had been successful one on one, Dorothy suggested we speak to audiences as a team. Then we could each talk about our different but parallel experiences, and she could take over if I froze or flagged.
    Right away we discovered that a white woman and a black woman speaking together attracted far more diverse audiences than either one of us would have done on our own. I also found that if I confessed my fear of public speaking, audiences were not only tolerant but sympathetic. Public opinion polls showed that many people fear public speaking even more