The Awokening
Part One: Gloria Steinem in Hell Gloria Steinem is dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The news of her death at the beginning of this month was not exactly unexpected (she was 92; it was going to happen at some point) but I confess it hit me harder than I had thought it would. To begin with, there were the portents. For decades, Steinem has been the face and the voice of the women's movement in the US and beyond, tirelessly striving to demonstrate that a person's gender does not need to be the be-all and the end-all of their identity. It's thanks to her that we no longer simply assume that marriage, motherhood and domestic subservience must inevitably mean giving up any semblance of a life or a career or a vocation. Remember Mary; Donna Reed's character in It's a Wonderful Life ? When George glimpses the dystopian alternate reality of a world in which he had never existed, Mary is shown to be a miserable "Old Maid" (the exact term t...