The only problem was that, having got this man to fall in love with an inauthentic me, I had to keep on not being myself
From ‘Revolution from Within’
It could have been worse. Gloria Steinem’s original title for this book was “Bedside Book of Self-Esteem. " Now it’s Revolution from Within (377 pages. Little, Brown. $22.95). But even a title with “revolution” in it can’t fully redeem this squishy exercise in feeling better. Steinem’s fans, hundreds of thousands of women who have been applauding her speeches and sound bites for years, and who made her “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” a best seller in 1983, are going to pick up this book and set it down again with a single, agonized cry: “Gloria, how could you?”
Or then again, maybe they’ll clutch it to their hearts and make this one a best seller, too. The latter possibility is certainly the one Little, Brown was counting on when it paid $700,000 for the book back in 1987. Self-help books sell like crazy, especially among women, and Steinem’s has everything: goddesses, guided meditation, directions on how to find the child within, dream diaries and droplets of wisdom from a range of sources including the Gnostic Gospels and Koko, the talking gorilla. If anything distinguishes “Revolution from Within” from dozens of other contributions to the genre, it’s Steinem’s feminist politics, which are prominent or at least discernible throughout. “People have asked if I’m turning away from social activism,” she told NEWSWEEK. “Of course not. I hope people will find a link between inward exploring and outward revolution.”
Steinem, 57, has made a brilliant career of outward revolution. Ever since she helped found Ms. magazine in 1971 she has been almost continuously in the public eye. Bearing the most famous name and face in modern feminism, she has traveled the country virtually nonstop as a speaker and fund raiser for the women’s movement. During these years, she writes, her New York apartment served mainly as a place to pick up a change of jeans. She had lots of friends, a pleasing love life and no need for an emotional or physical home base, or so she thought. After signing her Little, Brown contract she completed a manuscript on self-esteem and showed it to a therapist friend, who told her something was missing-Gloria herself. “I had lost my ,voice’,” writes Steinem. “I began to understand [that] we write what we need to know. I had felt drawn to the subject of self-esteem not only because other it, but because I did.”
With the help of therapy she began to explore the reasons why she of all people lacked self-esteem. All roads led back to her childhood. As the lonely caretaker of a loving but mentally unstable mother, Steinem had lost out on much of her childhood and neglected to develop what she calls a “true self.” The social imperatives of a male-dominated world completed the damage.
With this valid if unremarkable insight at hand, Steinem sets out to help readers find their own true selves, offering along the way what she calls “parables”–great moments in the history of self-esteem. Gandhi and his movement, for example, are served up as “an object lesson in ending a cycle of violence, and also in self-esteem.” It’s true that Gandhi’s success in fostering pride among Indians after years of British domination can be read as self-esteem on a national scale. But only a comicbook version of Indian history would depict the departure of the British as ending a cycle of violence: the British left a bloodbath in their wake. Steinem’s heart is in the right place, but what on earth has happened to her mind?
Here and there in the book she stops being so relentlessly inspirational and simply writes, as gracefully and naturally as any good storyteller. These are the passages that convince us she really does have something to say, and often they’re the most personal ones. In a section that has already attracted major attention in gossip circles, Steinem describes her peculiar romance with multimillionaire developer and publisher Mort Zuckerman. (She doesn’t name him in the book, but his identity has been widely reported and she has not denied it.) For a time during the ’80s the two turned up on the society pages, much to the dismay of Steinem’s fans. It was impossible to believe that Gloria Steinem was chasing a millionaire, and equally impossible to believe they had anything in common. Zuckerman isn’t portrayed as Attila the Hun, but his values do seem different from hers; as she notes, “He advocated trade with a government I got arrested for protesting.” But she says she met him at a time when years of travel, of responding to women’s movement crises, of neglecting her own needs for comfort were finally grinding her down. “When I arrived at the airport late one night to find that he had sent a car, its sheltering presence loomed out of all proportion,” she writes. “Remember the scene in ‘Bus Stop’ when Marilyn Monroe, a desperate singer in a poor cafe, wraps herself in the warm, rescuing sheepskin jacket of her cowboy lover? Well, that was the way I felt sinking into that car.”
Eventually she extricated herself, but even as she gives the moral of the story (“I chose an opposite as a dramatic example of what I missed in myself”) her writing style loses the buoyancy it had when she was describing the affair. Now her thoughts sound shrink-wrapped again. “I included this for other women who find themselves with their judgment left behind,” says Steinem. Yet the transition from smart, independent feminist to desperate cafe singer must have entailed a few more complications than simply poor judgment. Steinem resists making anything deeper than a Sunday-school text out of this experience, but it’s a first-rate human drama and its complexities are provocative.
Steinem says she has lots more books to write before she will be ready to do an autobiography, but the most meaningful story she ever tells may turn out to be the story of her own life. Her career has been a thousand times more inspirational than the poems and aphorisms, the canned benevolence, she offers here. In a world run by men, Steinem towers by virtue of her commitment, her ideals and her tough thinking; with no office and no pulpit, she is a genuine leader. But it’s passion that fuels a good story and a great life-not psychobabble. When astronaut Sally Ride took off into the skies, her mother watched on television and said, “God bless Gloria Steinem.” The book her fans are waiting for is the book that will make us exclaim the same thing.
