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Authors: Gloria Steinem
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hadn’t known that the tactics we were drawn to were our own. She made us both laugh again—and learn. As Vita Sackville-West wrote:
I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong.
—
W HEN I WENT HOME after that second India visit, I saw my own past differently.
I had walked in Indian villages in the 1950s, sure that they had no relevance to my own life. But now a women’s revolution was springing from talking circles of our own. At home, I had been going to everything from battered women’s shelters and freestanding women’s clinics to women’s centers on campuses and protests by single mothers trying to survive on welfare. My becoming an itinerant feminist organizer was just a Western version of walking in villages.
Though I had imagined my life would be that of a journalist and observer, sure that I didn’t want to be responsible for the welfare of others as I had been for my mother, I found myself committed to colleagues and a magazine that made me lie awake at night wondering if we could make the payroll. Yet this responsibility had become a community, not a burden.
I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us—which is both the good and the bad news.
Finally, I could see that the love of independence and possibilities that I absorbed from my father now had a purpose. All movements need a few people who can’t be fired. When you’re dependent, it’s very hard not to be worried about the approval of whoever and whatever you’re dependent on. For me, a mix of freedom and insecurity felt like home and allowed me to become an itinerant organizer.
This is not a calling you will learn about from a career counselor, or get recruited for, or even see in a movie. It’s unpredictable and often means patching together a livelihood from speaking fees, writing, foundations, odd jobs, friends, and savings. But other than becoming a rock musician or a troubadour, nothing else allows you to be a full-time part of social change. It satisfies my addiction to freedom that came from my father, and my love of community that came from seeing the price my mother paid for having none. That’s why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow consciousness to change. Following them has given me a road that isn’t solitary like my father’s, or unsupported like my mother’s. They taught me to talk as well as listen. They also showed me that writing, which is solitary, is fine company for organizing, which is communal. It just took me a while to discover that both can happen wherever you are.
II.
In 1963 I was making a living as a freelance journalist, writing profiles of celebrities and style pieces—not the kind of reporting I had imagined when I came home from India. I read that Martin Luther King, Jr., was leading a March on Washington, a massive campaign for jobs, justice, new legislation, and federal protection for civil rights marchers who were being beaten, jailed, and sometimes murdered in the South, all with police collusion. However, I couldn’t get an assignment to write about it.
True, I did have a long-sought assignment to write a profile of James Baldwin—who would be speaking at the march—but following him around amid multitudes seemed impossible, intrusive, or both. Plus I could see and hear his speech better on television. Also the press was full of dire warnings about too few people and failure, or too many people and violence. This march was being called too dangerous by a White House worried that it could turn off moderates in Congress who were needed to pass the Civil Rights Act, and too tame by Malcolm X,
I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong.
—
W HEN I WENT HOME after that second India visit, I saw my own past differently.
I had walked in Indian villages in the 1950s, sure that they had no relevance to my own life. But now a women’s revolution was springing from talking circles of our own. At home, I had been going to everything from battered women’s shelters and freestanding women’s clinics to women’s centers on campuses and protests by single mothers trying to survive on welfare. My becoming an itinerant feminist organizer was just a Western version of walking in villages.
Though I had imagined my life would be that of a journalist and observer, sure that I didn’t want to be responsible for the welfare of others as I had been for my mother, I found myself committed to colleagues and a magazine that made me lie awake at night wondering if we could make the payroll. Yet this responsibility had become a community, not a burden.
I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us—which is both the good and the bad news.
Finally, I could see that the love of independence and possibilities that I absorbed from my father now had a purpose. All movements need a few people who can’t be fired. When you’re dependent, it’s very hard not to be worried about the approval of whoever and whatever you’re dependent on. For me, a mix of freedom and insecurity felt like home and allowed me to become an itinerant organizer.
This is not a calling you will learn about from a career counselor, or get recruited for, or even see in a movie. It’s unpredictable and often means patching together a livelihood from speaking fees, writing, foundations, odd jobs, friends, and savings. But other than becoming a rock musician or a troubadour, nothing else allows you to be a full-time part of social change. It satisfies my addiction to freedom that came from my father, and my love of community that came from seeing the price my mother paid for having none. That’s why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow consciousness to change. Following them has given me a road that isn’t solitary like my father’s, or unsupported like my mother’s. They taught me to talk as well as listen. They also showed me that writing, which is solitary, is fine company for organizing, which is communal. It just took me a while to discover that both can happen wherever you are.
II.
In 1963 I was making a living as a freelance journalist, writing profiles of celebrities and style pieces—not the kind of reporting I had imagined when I came home from India. I read that Martin Luther King, Jr., was leading a March on Washington, a massive campaign for jobs, justice, new legislation, and federal protection for civil rights marchers who were being beaten, jailed, and sometimes murdered in the South, all with police collusion. However, I couldn’t get an assignment to write about it.
True, I did have a long-sought assignment to write a profile of James Baldwin—who would be speaking at the march—but following him around amid multitudes seemed impossible, intrusive, or both. Plus I could see and hear his speech better on television. Also the press was full of dire warnings about too few people and failure, or too many people and violence. This march was being called too dangerous by a White House worried that it could turn off moderates in Congress who were needed to pass the Civil Rights Act, and too tame by Malcolm X,
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