Gloria Steinem - interview: ''The Delhi rape was a moment of learning the world over. We are all grateful to everyone who came out..'
Writer and activist Gloria Steinem has been involved in feminist and social justice movements for over 40 years. She talks to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta, on NDTV 24X7’s Walk the Talk, about what set her off on her path, why categorisation into masculine and feminine is essentially dehumanising, and her relationship with India that began nearly half a century ago.
Gloria Steinem — the pioneer of women’s movement in the whole world. I know you don’t like the term, but really you are an icon when it comes to fighting for equality and also teaching all the world’s women and, most importantly, the men the definition of equality.
That’s a high compliment, but it’s a movement, so it doesn’t happen from one individual, you know, at least in this country. But I feel very lucky to be a part of it. I get to do what I love and care about the most.
Sometimes the individual is an activist and sometimes the individual is a victim, like in Delhi’s December 16 gangrape.
That was a moment of learning, and feeling, the world over. We and the rest of the world are grateful to everyone in India who came out on the streets and demonstrated and made this a moment of learning for people far outside this country.
And see the difference it has made. We now have an eminent editor in jail on charges of alleged rape and we have two former Supreme Court judges under a shadow. All three complainants are women in their 20s.
Women are feeling empowered, in the sense that women have been colonised — in the way countries were colonised. Our bodies were colonised by abuse or assault or unwanted pregnancies, our mind was colonised by patriarchy. So we ourselves sometimes believed that we were inferior… And now there is a big anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal movement, and I think that the good news is that men are liberated by this too, because the masculine role may be superior but it dehumanises men. It keeps men from developing all of their qualities.
There’s a line you spoke in an interview, which I wish every Indian family would frame. I think it went something like, ‘We have had the courage to bring up our daughters like our sons, but not yet the courage to bring up our sons like our daughters’.
Yes, absolutely, because we are all humans. What binds us as human beings is infinitely more than what separates us. In fact, for all purposes except reproduction, the differences between two women or between two men are more. So we are dehumanised by these masculine and feminine roles, both of us, and it wasn’t always so. In the old cultures of my country, most of the languages seem not to have even had ‘he’ and ‘she’. People were people. And governance was done by groups, by reaching consent. It was a very different kind of culture. We should know that the way we live now is not inevitable. Hierarchy is not inevitable; masculine, feminine, polarisation is not inevitable.
How would it help if we brought up our sons like our daughters?. read more:
