So, it’s farewell to Gloria Steinem at the astonishing age of 92: the feminist whose most striking attribute to those outside the movement was that she was terrifically easy on the eye. It didn’t endear her to the ugly sisters of the movement who complained about her unholy glamour, but it was an advantage she put to good use when she became a Playboy Bunny Girl in 1963 so as to write for Stage magazine about the sheer disagreeableness of life in that bit of Hugh Heffner’s porn kingdom. It was her first journalistic scoop, to be trumped later by her setting up Ms magazine along with other activists, which prompted Betty Friedan, who was never anyone’s idea of a Bunny girl and was probably stirred by envy, to observe that the media were trying “to make her a celebrity but no one should mistake her for a leader.”
Her dishonest, glib take on abortion is still with us
These spats were hugely enjoyable for opponents of the movement. It was only later that it turned out that firebrand Gloria was also for a time also a CIA stooge; something that did not easily square with the images of her on the front line of demonstrations.
But her most abiding achievement, I would say, is a diabolical one and it was to coin the term “reproductive freedom” as a synonym for abortion. She came to the issue publicly quite late, when she was 35, though she’d had an illegal abortion in London when she was 22. The phrase is untruthful language; one woman’s reproductive freedom is the curtailment of a foetal life. It was a way to reframe abortion from being a negative to a positive, a freedom, along with life, liberty etc, only this particular liberty was premised on taking life: prenatal life.
That dishonest, glib take on abortion is still with us. In a breathless encomium on Steinem on British radio, a presenter talked breezily about “reproductive rights” in terms of Gloria’s contribution to humanity. Let’s nail this, shall we? No one’s trying to curb anyone’s right to reproduce (though personally, I’d intervene smartly in the case of using another woman’s body to do it, as with so many Hollywood feminists using poor women surrogates); it’s precisely reproduction that abortion thwarts. But “reproductive rights” are upbeat, positive, subliminally up there with genuine rights like the franchise. They’re a right not to be pregnant, only unlike the others, it’s at the expense of another human being.
Park, for a minute, the question of whether and to what extent abortion should be legal. But let’s call the thing what it is, abortion, not try to make it sound good. Because making it sound good was the most abiding contribution Gloria Steinem made to the women’s movement. She may have been as feisty, determined, clever and indomitable as her admirers say, and she was on the right side on the Vietnam war and apartheid, but it’s hard to forgive her this weaselly little Orwellianism.
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