Gloria Steinem Had to Convince Her Male Editors That Women Want Power

By Rebecca Traister, The Cut

15 October 18

Job: Writer and activist
Founded: The National Women’s Political Caucus with Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and Bella Abzug
Once: Went undercover as a Playboy Bunny

hen the editors at New York were starting to put together this issue, they realized that almost exactly 50 years earlier, the magazine had published a story by Gloria Steinem titled simply “Women and Power.” The main point of the piece was that women want power, but since they can’t get it through work or in public life, they date and marry for it. “Sponge-like, women acquire the status (even, temporarily, some of the power) of the man they’re with,” Steinem wrote. “So much so that it’s part of every girl’s experience to be treated as two entirely different people just because she’s changed escorts.” Ironically, Steinem says today that she didn’t want to write the piece but that her boss, Clay Felker, pushed her to do it.

“I argued with Clay about it,” she says. “His premise was that women thought men were sexy just because they had power, and I disagreed with that. I told him that I thought that was a fantasy of men in power. So I tried to make it more about the fact that women wanted power in the first place.” Or, as she wrote then: “A lot of men, and a surprising number of women, believe the sexual segregationist argument that women aren’t interested in power at all; that something in their genes makes them prefer to be ordered about … That turns out to be no more fundamentally true than all the other past myths: that women enjoyed sex less than men, for instance.”

At the time, Steinem was one of New York’s only female writers, no doubt because she was already a journalistic star. Her first big article, written for Esquire, was about the Pill. “It was new and revolutionary, and Clay, who was an editor at Esquire then, was fascinated with the sexual aspect of it. And I got fascinated with how it was developed, how it was an outgrowth of the whole movement for birth control, the science. When I turned in the story, Clay told me I’d performed the incredible feat of making sex dull. I could see what he meant, and I remember by the time I finished the piece I thought that, yes, the Pill was likely to liberate women sexually. My last line was something like ‘The problem may be there are too few sexually liberated men to go around.’ ”

Not long after she published “Women and Power,” Steinem experienced what she’s likened to a feminist awakening at an abortion speak-out and began to write about the women’s movement. “I remember Tom Wolfe or Clay or whoever saying to me, ‘You worked so hard to be taken seriously. Don’t get involved. Don’t be one of those crazy women.’ I thought, But I am one of those crazy women,” she says. “As a freelancer, I couldn’t be fired, but I did get frustrated pitching stories about the women’s movement. One editor said to me, ‘Yes, we can publish your story saying women are equal. But then we’d have to publish one right next to it saying women are not.’ ”

Eventually, Steinem and a group of other female writers published the inaugural issue of Ms. (which was printed as a supplement to New York). One of Ms.’s early pieces was about sexual harassment. Surprisingly enough, that makes Steinem feel relatively hopeful. “The consciousness levels today, and the numbers of people you have to fight it, are huge,” she says. “When we did a cover story on sexual harassment in 1977, we used puppets, because we didn’t want to be too shocking. So we had a male puppet with his hand down a female puppet’s shirt — and they still took us off newsstands.”