In 1957, when 22-year-old Gloria Steinem procured an illegal abortion, it was not uncommon for doctors to ask for promises.
As Steinem reported years later, women often promised to be sterilized as part of the procedure. If a woman’s condition was grave enough to justify the end of a pregnancy, reasoned the all-male hospital boards, it must be grave enough, too, to preclude the possibility of more pregnancies. Women promised other things, too: to be celibate in the future, to use contraception, to declare themselves suicidal in hopes of obtaining abortions on “therapeutic grounds,” to obtain spousal or paternal consent, to keep the procedure a secret, to be blindfolded, to sign self-incrimination statements, to perform sexual favors, to provide exorbitant amounts of cash in advance, and never to return.
In a landscape of sexual exploitation and quid pro quo, “female pills” and sepsis, “the backstreet” and price-gouging, there’s a temptation to see Steinem’s doctor, who referred her to a London abortionist, and to whom she dedicated her memoir, as a sympathetic man who wanted to help. He only made her promise two things. Later in life, Steinem recounted the words he said to her younger self, a woman fleeing an engagement back in the States and about to embark upon a fellowship in India. “You must promise me two things,” he said. “First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.”
She kept, it seems, both promises.
Born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem died last week at 92. She kept Dr. John Sharpe’s name a secret until his death. And she was surely one of the most consequential women of the twentieth century. In America, her once radical convictions are now widely accepted as feminist dogma.
But by Steinem’s account, her life only properly began with the end of her child’s. The second-wave feminist movement she spearheaded shared this sentiment: only with “reproductive freedom” (a Steinem-coined euphemism) could women truly say, as she did, “I’ve done the best I could with my life.”
Some of Steinem’s legacy ought to be enthusiastically lauded. Consider “A Bunny’s Tale,” Steinem’s breakout essay. As research, she infiltrated one of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy nightclubs, labored undercover as a waitstaff-sex-doll, and exposed the exploitative working conditions inside Hefner’s shrine to the sexual revolution. It’s a damning, bracing piece of investigative journalism. She also helped to found Women Against Pornography in the late 1970s and stood her ground with Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon during the “sex wars” of the ’80s. She argued for decades against female genital mutilation, for fathers to embrace caregiving, and for the abolition of prostitution. She exposed domestic violence and sexual harassment in the pages of Ms. magazine.
But the real legacy of Steinem’s movement is an abortion-centered autonomy feminism, now so solidly embedded into elite American culture that it’s often difficult to disentangle the good she achieved from the faultiness of its core premise: what Steinem called “the basic issue.”
Second-wave feminism rightly recognized that men and women possess equal human dignity and the intellectual capacities and moral agency that properly define human beings. Though men and women are differently sexed bodies, and this sexual difference affects the person as a whole, men and women still share the same human purpose: to live life to its fullest. But in the righteous pursuit of the equality of the sexes, Steinem’s feminism undermined the core difference between the sexes. As a result, motherhood lost its status and moral authority, too.
Basic to every strand of feminism is the implicit reality that women, by nature of their physiology, bear the consequences of sex disproportionately. When a man fathers a child, he can easily abandon it. When a woman conceives, it’s not so easy—her child is growing inside her body. Once pregnant, a woman’s body is forever transformed in its effort to sustain the new life within it. To Steinem, abortion was the first, nonnegotiable step to achieve women’s “equality.” In 2020, speaking of abortion, she said, “It isn’t the side issue, it’s the basic issue. In…egalitarian cultures, women can decide the fate of their own bodies. If we didn’t have wombs, we’d be fine.”
If we didn’t have wombs, we’d be fine. It seems that Steinem, for all her focus on the interior life of women—the last-surviving proponent of consciousness-raising groups, who titled one of her books Revolution from Within—adopted as her own the oldest patriarchal principle: that sexual difference dictates sexual hierarchy. Women’s “wombs” are the “basic issue.” Without bodily autonomy (meaning abortion rights), Steinem declared, “there is no democracy.” The message was clear. Only by treating reproductive asymmetry as the core problem hindering female advancement, a defect to be “fixed” to fit the male model, can women achieve equality, exercise political agency within a democracy, and live a rich, meaningful life.
Steinem’s feminism preached that a woman’s femaleness—that which makes her different from men—is the obstacle women must overcome.
In her writing, the leader of the second-wave movement appears to come close to recognizing the sad misogyny of such logic. In “If Men Could Menstruate,” a seminal essay for Ms. Magazine, Steinem imagines a world in which men, rather than women, get periods. The effect is a culture that honors menstruation rather than treating it as a mysterious, taboo, icky, and embarrassing complication. In Steinem’s vision, menarche precipitates “stag parties,” rapists are pardoned on grounds of “monthly stress,” Congress funds a “National Institute of Dysmenorrhea” to alleviate “monthly discomforts,” and menstruation serves as the justification for political, clerical, and military office.
Steinem prefaces the thought experiment with a frank admission: “The characteristics of the powerful, whatever they may be, are thought to be better than the characteristics of the powerless—and logic has nothing to do with it.” But the whole premise of feminism is that logic should have something to do with it; that, empirically, logically, women obviously possess equal human capacities, and therefore, they ought to enjoy the opportunity to pursue the myriad goods of life, as men do. Yes, the capacity to become pregnant imposes burdens on women, but it also, in the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, gives women a creative power “second only to God.”
Though Steinem’s essay acknowledges gestation as a unique female “power,” her politics treat it as a liability. If men could menstruate, menstruation would be accepted as the default best model, codified into law, and publicly accommodated. No pill or procedure would be offered as a solution to this “inconvenience” or “problem.” This monthly experience would no longer be treated as a glitch in the machinery, a bodily malfunction in need of a fix. Extending Steinem’s exercise, one could only imagine the fanfare if men could really get pregnant: a womb the insignia of every nation’s crest, anthem, and founding folktale, the creation of a federal Department of Gestation, and an immense Pregnancy Administration whose manpower and funding would make the military budget look meager.
But why can’t women dream this same dream?
A more boldly dreaming feminism did exist before Steinem. As Erika Bachiochi writes, mid-to-late nineteenth-century women’s rights advocates recognized the same reproductive asymmetry Steinem did, but they found a path forward with a different, woman-centered logic. Victoria Woodhull, leading suffragist and the first woman to run for president, demanded that women take “ownership and control” of their bodies while fervently condemning the “antenatal murder of undesired children.” The first-wave feminist solution for the father who abandons his child? To call him back to his duties and responsibilities—of care and chastity, or, at the very least, burdensome maintenance of mother and child—not to give women the right to imitate his worst transgressions.
Even as she rightly encouraged men to be active fathers, Steinem inadvertently shifted the reproductive “burden” from women…back to women. Men were biologically “off the hook,” so why shouldn’t women also be? In 1969, the same year Steinem began “her life as an active feminist” at an abortion speak-out in a West Village church basement, attorneys for 300 women submitted a brief challenging New York State’s abortion laws, arguing that because a man, who no doubt shares responsibility for a pregnancy, “can and often does just walk away,” a woman ought to enjoy that very same “freedom.”
But abortion restrictions do not deny women reproductive autonomy. The reality of reproductive asymmetry does. Steinem’s generation purchased its “equality” by embracing the male model as the default human, at the expense of the next generation of women. To get a seat at the table, they accepted the unencumbered male body as the ideal template of the democratic citizen. If pregnancy is a purely elective enterprise, the woman who chooses it has chosen nonconformity and thus must pay the cost herself. She’s on her own.
Second-wave feminism achieved innumerable goods, but it did so using a rulebook designed for men. This faulty logic made the precondition of female participation in public life—or often now, just ordinary life—the diminishment of a vital aspect of what actually makes women women. In the end, this became a campaign that treated women as deficient creatures only up to snuff when supplemented with the technology necessary to make them more like men.
Steinem’s feminism ultimately abdicated its true mission: to affirm, celebrate, support, and accommodate full femaleness as full humanness. Instead, women’s unique role in human reproduction was traded as an entrance ticket into male-dominated spheres of life. Rather than women’s experience of motherhood recentering care as the common human experience (one shared by women and men alike), care was marginalized yet again, this time by feminists. Advocacy for a new wombless woman ensured nothing was remade in woman’s real (wombed) image: in the U.S., she can now participate in the forty-plus-hour workweek, but in the decade that either establishes or ruins a career, which happens to coincide with women’s peak fertility (a new redlined requirement in the workplace for her to delay family life into her 30s), while the federal government still offers her no legally protected, paid maternity leave; engineers and designers continue to build environments that take women as an afterthought, from tiny, airless lactation rooms to too-small public toilet facilities to wrong-sized automobile airbags that endanger both mother and infant in the womb; and truly female-centered law and policy initiatives have altogether stagnated or been subverted for want of female alliances.
Steinem once wrote: “The ability to decide when and whether to have children is the single biggest determinant, worldwide, of whether a woman is healthy or not, educated or not, active outside the home or not, and how long she will live.” How may we, in good conscience, propose the right to abortion as the solution to such a startling series of correlations, rather than ask, doggedly, incessantly, why a woman experiencing pregnancy and raising a child must sacrifice her health, her education, her engagement in interests outside the home, and years off her life?
Second-wave feminism’s failure was a failure of imagination. Steinem didn’t dream big enough.
Today’s young women are hungry for more. We were born, as Jill Filipovic rightly notes in her tribute to Steinem, “into a world of unfinished feminism.” Our debts to the women who came before us are great. No one of actual intelligence doubts anymore the strength, range and diversity of women’s capabilities. But so, too, is the work left undone. Old villains rage on: a powerful pornography industry, the trafficking of women and girls as a global trade, male predation finding new expressions in our increasingly digital world. Now, commercial surrogacy, new reproductive technologies, an emboldened misogynist punditry, and more than a generation of children growing up without their fathers. None of these problems can be answered by a feminism whose “basic issue” is the right to be unencumbered by the vulnerable.
The pressing threats of our time require the recovery of the pro-woman feminism that came before Steinem and the wisdom, creativity and dexterity to resurrect it and carry it forward: a movement that is willing to articulate the natural responsibilities of men and women to each other, in which femaleness and our sacred role in bringing life into the world is not viewed as an obstacle to be overcome on the road to equality but as the cornerstone and object of women’s advocacy—that we neither marginalize and medicalize this uniquely female capacity away nor spay ourselves as the price of admission to the professional world or just getting by day to day. We need a feminism in which we make no woman mimic mythic male autonomy to feel that she has lived her life well. No human being—neither man nor woman—is the sole author of his or her own life. We need a feminism that recognizes that we are born into interdependence, and the obligations we do not choose are not the limits of a good life, but its very substance.
God rest the soul of Gloria Steinem. But as for her deeply misguided desire to center abortion as the “basic” feminist “issue,” let it rest with her. Let the promises she worked so hard to keep turn, too, to ash, and let the phoenix of a new woman’s movement rise—one that implores young women not to do “what we want” with our lives at the cost of other lives, but to live well, to love bravely, and to owe much—as women, in the true form of women, for all women.
