Steinem Avoids Being Frozen In Time

“I’d been dealing with aging by defiance,” Gloria Steinem told me during a conversation in the summer of ‘89.

The feminist leader, an archetypal national figure known for her brains and beauty for the last 25 years, was in her mid-50s at the time, but no one would have known if she didn’t tell. She looked frozen in time. With fierce maintenance she was still pencil slim, leggy, flat-tummied and pillowy-cheeked.

But at closer range, a sadness seemed to have settled in her face. She moved without animation, as if afraid to crack the shell that had served her for so long, not knowing what, if anything, lay deeper. She was stuck and she knew it.

“I was going to become a pioneer dirty old lady, the Ruth Gordon of my generation, who dresses very inappropriately.” As she sat, immobilized, still wearing her deliberately unladylike short skirt and long, straight ‘60s hair, a recent, painful revelation came out. “It took me awhile to realize that although you’re defying convention, which is what I’ve always done, you’re not progressing. You’re staying where you are.”

Eventually the predictable crises of adult life catch up with all of us. That summer Steinem found herself blocked even in her writing. She was supposed to be writing a book about self-esteem.

This was a book she badly needed to read. In direct contradiction to her public image as an articulate, self-assured, utterly original thinker, Steinem acknowledged that she still had not learned to rely on her own authority.

As a child, she had reversed roles with her invalid mother. And as an adult before she ever had a chance to be an adolescent, Steinem had simply reversed many of life’s passages or bypassed them.

Never moving from sister to mother, or from lover to wife, she had skirted all those telltale milestones - births, anniversaries, children’s graduations, mother of the bride - that leave a proud trail in the wake of rushing years. The meaning of her life was almost entirely externalized. A social movement became her family, along with friends and lovers.

Eventually, however, we reach a point where we can no longer pretend away this passage through middlescence. Even if one waits perilously late to make this transition, it is still possible to pull out of the holding pattern and progress.

“For me it wasn’t until I was past 50 that a change occurred,” said Steinem, “and that turned out to be a very big change. Exhaustion became my signal.”

Like a thunderhead that sits dark and heavy over the sky, fatigue rose up and overwhelmed her.

After two years she was diagnosed with breast cancer. With the stark realization of what she loved about her life, Steinem dealt with the lumpectomy and radiation treatments straight on and recovered quickly. But being a woman in her 50s faced with the life accident of breast cancer, a marker of age and a warning were clear. That longpostponed midlife passage would no longer wait.

“For a long time (aging) felt like a loss,” she told me during this period. “Then gradually I began to realize it wasn’t a loss; it was another country.”

Cutting back on her constant traveling, she took pleasure in creating her first real home out of a chaotic apartment. Gloria Steinem plumping pillows and feeding a cat and giving a damn if the sheets match - yes! It felt very good to mother herself, at last.

She turned 60 at a surprise party given by friends at her favorite hangout. Steinem was already on a new journey, exploring the even freer country beyond 60 in which women, she believes, become themselves at last.

“The victory is not just hanging on to what you already have against all onslaughts,” she realized, “but going on to something different, and better.”

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate