Free My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem Page B

than death. I had company.
    We started in school basements with a few people on folding chairs, and progressed to community centers, union halls, suburban theaters, welfare rights groups, high school gyms, YWCAs, and even a football stadium or two. Soon we discovered the intensity of interest in the simple idea that each person’s shared humanity and individual uniqueness far outweighed any label by group of birth, whether sex, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religious heritage, or anything else. That’s why my first decade or so on the road wasn’t spent going to meetings of the Business and Professional Women or the American Association of University Women or even the National Organization for Women. I was traveling to campuses, meetings of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the United Farm Workers, 9-to-5, which was a new group of and for clerical workers, lesbian groups sometimes excluded both by mainstream feminists and by gay men, and the political campaigns of anti–Vietnam War and new feminist candidates.
    We came to see our job as creating a context in which audiences themselves could become one big talking circle, and discover they were neither crazy nor alone in their experiences of unfairness or efforts to be both their unique selves and to find a community. As in India all those years earlier, they told their own stories. Often, these talking circles went on twice as long as our talks.
    When we first started speaking at the very end of the 1960s, the war in Vietnam was the main cause of activism. Buildings were being occupied and draft cards burned. At the same time, the gay and lesbian movement was moving out of the underground and into a public arena, and the Native American movement was trying to stop the purposeful obliterating of their languages, culture, and history. As always, the idea of freedom was contagious.
    A few years earlier in the 1960s, women a decade or so older than I had begun to reject the “feminine mystique” of the suburbs, as brilliantly and lethally described by Betty Friedan in her best seller, and to demand women’s rightful place in the paid workforce. Friedan had dared to name this glorified consumer role that women’s magazines were forcing on readers—though to be fair, advertisers were forcing it on editors—but younger and more radical women didn’t want just a job and a piece of the existing pie. They wanted to bake a new pie altogether.
    Eventually these more conservative women came to agree that feminism had to include all women—lesbians, women on welfare, the intertwining of sex and race for women of color; everyone—and the more radical women of diverse races and classes no longer turned up their noses at the idea of making change from inside the system as well as outside. Though the starting places of these various activist groups had been very different and had created pain and misunderstanding, by the end of the 1970s they came together as fractious, idealistic, diverse, and effective parts of the same movement.
    Given my age of just over thirty, I was in between these two groups of women—one trying to integrate and the other to transform. But because of my experience, I was drawn to the more radical and younger ones. I wasn’t married and living in the suburbs. I’d always been in the workforce, but the gender ghetto in journalism was not just a glass ceiling, it was a glass box. Also India had taught me that change grows from the bottom, like a tree, and that caste or race can double or triple women’s oppression.
    Soon feminism became a brushfire that spread coast to coast—and some people viewed it with the same alarm. To the religious right wing and much of the mainstream, we were defying God, family, and the patriarchy they decreed. To the left wing and some in the mainstream, bringing up bias against females was a distraction from struggles over class, race, and other issues that were taken more seriously, because they also affected