After the passing of the American journalist and staunch social activist this month, Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger looks back at Gloria Steinem’s life and shares the influence the writer had on her
For my generation of women, Gloria Steinem was an icon. She symbolised all that was good about modern feminism, with her wit, beauty and ability to befriend people whose views she didn’t share, and often tried to change. When I was a student rabbi in the 1970s, I was particularly bowled over by her association with matters Jewish. Her adored father Leo, who left the family when she was 10, had been Jewish, and her mother, whose long history of mental illness required enormous amounts of care from Gloria, was not. Yet Gloria threw in her lot with her Jewish side whenever she felt it was needed, despite being avowedly irreligious. In an interview with Forward she said: “Never in my life have I identified as a Christian, but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”
I still remember, 50 years on, the news of her participation in what was the first known Women’s Seder, run by a group of well-known feminist writers and thinkers. For Gloria, it was the first truly spiritually centered experience of her feminist life, but she still couldn’t get it quite right, which I find amusing, arriving for such a seder with an ordinary leavened cake.
She wanted to know more – and she learned. But her Jewish activism was only a small part of her campaigning that so moved me. I loved her wit, her fierce campaigns for abortion rights, her belief women should be in charge of their own bodies, even her use of being a Playboy Bunny to show how women were objectified and exploited. She was ready to shock when needed, and she argued hard. When she set up the National Women’s Political Caucus with Betty Friedan in 1971, I was still a student at Cambridge. I, and other students at my all-female college, were in awe. She emboldened us, and from her I learned the art of being friends with political opponents; of never being afraid to speak one’s mind, but with charm, and a healthy distrust for the women’s experience denying facets of much contemporary psychotherapy.
All these years on, I regret never meeting her, but I still count her as one of my key influencers, despite making some very different choices. If it were not for Gloria Steinem, I would not have campaigned for so many issues all my life. Thank you, Gloria, and may your soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.
By Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger DBE
Photo by Lynn Gilbert