By admin 
Gloria Steinem died yesterday. The following is an adaptation from her forthcoming memoir, An Unexpected Life.
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My father had two points of pride: He never wore a hat, as men of his generation were supposed to do, and he never had a job, by which he meant he worked for himself. In the summertime, he ran a dance pavilion in rural Michigan with the slogan “Dancing over the water and under the stars.” When the weather grew too cold for this outdoor enterprise, he hitched our house trailer to the car and my parents, my older sister, the family dog, and I headed toward the warmth of Florida or California.
We never started off with enough money to make the trip, which meant my father also packed boxes of antique china, silverware, and jewelry that he had purchased at local family auctions, which he sold to roadside shops along the way. We proceeded slowly from one trailer park to the next, until we arrived at some southern shore. There, my father hooked our trailer to the water and electricity of a rented spot overlooking the ocean, and my sister joined a local public school. I, however, was considered too young to bother enrolling, which meant that my education was haphazard.
My parents were good and loving people, but they could not have been more different. By the time I was 10 or so, they had separated, which wasn’t a cause of surprise or sadness. After my sister went off to college, my mother and I wound up in Toledo.
At first, we lived in a one-room basement apartment. We had to pass through a furnace room to reach it, and we slept on bunk beds. After a year we moved into my mother’s family’s old farmhouse in a poor neighborhood on the east side of Toledo. The house had a small gas stove and a rotting floor, and it teetered over a new four-lane highway that cut in front of its porch. For the first time in my life, I started going to school, but I didn’t invite any of my friends home to visit.
My mother was addicted to a tranquilizer called sodium pentothal. Without the tranquilizer, she might stay awake for days, full of fantasy and fear. I often had to stay home from school to help her if her hands were too shaky. She once imagined that soldiers were fighting a war in the street outside our house and, in an effort to escape, cut herself while smashing her hand through a window. Though I hated to see her addicted, her source of relief was also a relief to me. We subsisted on the money that came from illegally renting out the rooms on the first floor to a young married couple who worked in a local factory and spent their nights in loud domestic battles.
I know now that being a small person looking after a big person is far from a unique childhood experience. Many people are forced to grow up too fast. Many people pretend to the outside world that all is well at home, even when it definitely is not.
Still, I made friends at school, went to dances, and dreamed of a different future. Sometimes I managed to escape into the fantasy of a Saturday-afternoon movie. I also fell in love for the first time, predictably with a boy in hand-me-down clothes who seemed like a loner. I walked to school and to my after-school job as a salesgirl in a dress shop. I had other jobs as well, dancing at supermarket openings and on Saturdays at the Eagles Club, where I could earn $10 a night. I learned that I could support myself, even as I knew that my mediocre skills at ballet and tap dancing would never provide me with a path out of East Toledo. I pretended that I wasn’t jealous of girlfriends with sane mothers and warm, neat kitchens.
For much of my childhood, my mother and I slept in the same bed—to stay warm in winter and to share the only cooling fan in summer. One very hot summer night while my mother and I slept, my hand must have trailed down to the floor on my side of the bed. I awoke to feel something slippery and wet. When I switched on the light, I saw blood dripping from my fingers into a pool on the floor. I knew rats were a danger, as they are in most poor neighborhoods, yet I had assumed they were confined to back alleys and garbage cans.
My mother was awakened by my movements. At this moment, she became lucid enough to tell me that I had to get dressed, that we had to find an emergency room to get a tetanus shot for my rat bite. Outside, we stood next to the busy highway, and waited almost an hour until we successfully waved down a passing truck.
At the hospital, we waited in line for an hour or so, then told our story to a nurse. She gave my mother a disapproving look, as if rat bites were a personal failing. Eventually, I got a tetanus shot and a bandage, and we were sent back into the street to find a ride home. We spent another hour waiting in the dark, until another truck driver saw us in his headlights and agreed to take us home. Now I wish that both of those drivers could know what a difference their kindness made in our lives. When we arrived back in our bedroom, I noticed that the small pool of blood on the floor had mostly disappeared. From the tiny footprints, I knew the rat had returned and licked the floor clean.
Only later in life would I realize that I was not the only one of my friends to hide what was going on at home. Some classmates were ashamed that their immigrant parents spoke only Polish or Hungarian at home. Others were quiet about the fact that their fathers worked in factories and their mothers as cleaning women. Some had violent fathers or alcoholic mothers. By unspoken agreement, my friends and I met on street corners or in lunch places where we could ignore our backgrounds. Though my mother sometimes wandered into the street in her nightgown and was brought home by neighbors or a random police car, I was convinced that she and I had succeeded at seeming normal. Years would pass before my friends and I really confided our insecurities to one another. I learned then that they had always known about my living conditions, and always worried about me.
Those early years of looking after my mother gave me an appreciation for human needs and family diversity. I learned that there is no one right way to nurture and be nurtured. Perhaps most important, I learned that I could survive almost anything, including a sad mother who was called the Crazy Lady of the neighborhood.
When I was a teenager, that house in Toledo was condemned by the city, and scheduled to be torn down. My sister, who was working as a jewelry buyer in a department store in Washington, D.C., rescued my mother and me. I moved into her bedroom in a rooming house she shared with three other young working women. For our mother, she found a residential hospital nearby where the doctors specialized in addictions to tranquilizers. In this way, I was able to finish my last year of high school in peace. My new classmates assumed that I must miss Toledo. Not wanting to expose my family, I didn’t explain that this was the happiest and most carefree time of my life.
On weekends, I visited my mother at that residential hospital and felt I was meeting her for the first time. After her difficult withdrawal from sodium pentothal, she began to pay more attention to the world around her. She loved books and kept a notebook of her days that was like a novel. She also had a whimsical sense of humor and could recite the poems of Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay by heart. I learned that she and a girlfriend had planned to move to New York and find jobs as journalists there, yet she had given that up in order to follow my father’s dreams. I suddenly realized how much her brown eyes were just like mine.
After I graduated from high school, I attended Smith College. I loved college. Like poor men who found a home in the Army, I had found the first place where I belonged. I understood that my background was not quite what the college’s admissions office had in mind. Yet I had so little exposure to the agonies of social difference that I didn’t worry about my own.
In fact I discovered that my experiences could be useful, precisely because they didn’t duplicate those of others. In my childhood, you just didn’t get into a bad or unhappy mood unless you had a good and tangible reason: unless your husband had just run off with the girl he met at the Elks Club dance, or a mortgage was about to be foreclosed and put you in the street, or your steady boyfriend had been beaten up after a Friday-night football game. Gradually, I discovered that a mood was a prerogative one could exercise from time to time, and no one would think worse of you. I was delighted. I immediately began to have moods.
There were two other life-shaping discoveries. First, you could take naps in the middle of the afternoon, even if you weren’t sick. Second, you could let someone know you were angry and still be friends again later. I had learned most of what I knew about human behavior from novels, and authors rarely introduce major quarrels into a narrative without some clear-cut effect on the plot. When one of my friends kindly asked me why I never got angry, I began to realize how nonsensical it was. I finally began to show anger when I felt it, and learned that such expressions most often led to greater understanding.
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I knew nothing about math, but I could write. As a child, reading had been my primary education. I loved Little Women, in which girls talked about the Civil War, coped with poverty, and lived on their own. It was my introduction to a society of women caring about the whole wide world. I got through exams and essay requirements by painting pictures with words, often with much less knowledge of the subject than my classmates had. This sometimes required me to invent quotes, which I attributed to some important male person. I depended on my fairly good writing style to make up for very bad study habits. I didn’t write for my school’s literary magazines or newspapers, I think out of some rather pushy conviction that one should write professionally or not at all.
After graduation I got a fellowship that allowed me to study in India, where I stayed for two years, auditing classes for free. I fell in love with that country for its ancient diversity as much as for its modern rebellion against colonialism. When I returned to the United States, I moved to New York and started a shaky career as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. After more than a few years, I joined other writers, and the talent-obsessed editor Clay Felker, in starting New York magazine. I’m still not sure how we managed to do it. I joined the likes of Jimmy Breslin, who became known for capturing the characters and local color of Manhattan’s neighborhoods and bars, and Tom Wolfe, always a master of narrative style and outrageous dress.
The magazine allowed me to write about everything from the first neighborhood gay bars to late-night discos. Finally, I could choose my own subjects and write about such disparate events as wounded veterans flown directly home to the United States from the battlefields of Vietnam, and Kwashiorkor in the Bronx, a protein-deficiency disease of the poor once thought to exist only in Africa.
I even tried to convince my editors to publish an article about the urban danger of rats, a story I knew well. My friend Paul Davis, the great artist and illustrator, even did an impressive painting of a rat, yet neither of us could convince our editors that this urban reality was a suitable topic for an upscale city magazine. It was too depressing.
Then, in 1972, thanks to Clay’s generosity in creating a sample issue inside New York magazine, a group of us were also able to found Ms. magazine, the first national magazine for women that was edited, owned, and controlled by women. Our title indicated female without the marital status of Miss or Mrs. We didn’t want to be supported by ads for detergent and makeup; we wanted ads for cars and insurance, “serious” products. We were naive enough to think this would be easy—after all, women bought these products just as much as men—but it wasn’t. Ms. did not have an easy time financially.
After I became a freelance writer, I discovered that the instability of my upbringing had prepared me very well for a grown-up life of insecurity. Though I managed to support myself, I didn’t save money until I was past 50. I always worried that I’d end up as a bag lady, like women I saw sleeping in subway stations. I used to handle that fear by thinking, It’s a life like any other. I’ll organize the other bag ladies.
Now I’m in my 90s, and can probably support myself if I live to 100, which I plan to do. I am still doing political and journalistic work, and paying the mortgage for an apartment in an old Manhattan brownstone. After decades of traveling to campuses and rarely spending a consecutive night at home, I am enjoying staying put in New York City. This gives me time to pause and reflect back on what is now a long life.
I’ve come to know that we all learn from diversity, not from sameness. To be with people of different ages, races, and experiences is a gift. The first half of my life I spent being the youngest in any group. Then I gradually transitioned into the oldest. Now even my jeans are much older than many people I work with. No matter my own age, I have found that spending time across age groups always sparks learning. Young and old can learn from each other, not as mentors and mentees, but as equals.
As I got older, I started taking note of how different things had become, though not different enough. As I write this, it feels like the world is in a tailspin—yet it has been worse. We once had legal racial segregation. We once lived in a world where the care of children was consigned only to women.
Back then, the main way women got into high political office was to marry a man who had a Senate seat or governorship. Those who made such marriages lived out their duties as wives and mothers, and only if their husband died might they take over his seat. To paraphrase Margaret Mead, in a patriarchy, the only women who have authority are widows. Now women can have political power on their own. Still, we are nowhere near achieving fair political representation for women and people of all races.
Then when students of the so-called opposite sex were together in a room or discussion, the tension and the self-consciousness were palpable. Some professors even said it was unnatural and impossible to learn with such sexual tension in the room, and coeducation might not work. Now it’s possible for women and men to actually be friends, whether or not there is any sexual or romantic vibe between them. That is a huge step toward full humanity for all.
Then being a battered woman was just called “life,” and the term domestic violence did not exist. It wasn’t until 1976 that Ms. had a cover story on domestic violence, and the term was just entering more mainstream language. Some “wife beating” was even described as inevitable, and deserved. Since wives were supposed to obey their husbands, men might be justified in physically disciplining them. I’m sad to say that some women even saw such abuse as a sign of how much a husband cared. Now we have language, laws, and shelters for women who have experienced domestic violence. We are finally beginning to understand that home can be the most dangerous place for women. Still, domestic violence remains widespread. We need to challenge any definition of masculinity that depends on aggression toward women.
Then rape victims were deemed not to be credible on the grounds of having “asked for it”—whether they wore revealing clothes or had been a virgin. Now we have research on the men who rape, and some studies have discovered that the majority of rapists are repeat offenders. Rape is not an inevitable part of human nature, but as long as a compulsion to be “masculine” and to prove superiority is sold by the culture, rape will persist.
Then American women were earning, on average, 59 cents on each dollar earned by men. Now they typically earn about 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. At the going rate, it will be 50 years before women reach parity, and 75 years before African American women do so. For Indigenous women in the United States, the numbers are even worse. I once had a man approach me on the street and tell me that he paid the “30 girls” in his office half of what he paid the men. He said, “If I had to pay them more, I’d fire them all.” I asked for his name to report him.
My role as an older person is to remind people how far we have come. Among the many things I have learned is that there is no one right way to achieve peace, equality, or justice. Everything we do matters—how we behave in an elevator, how we raise our children, how we treat our partners, how we participate in our government.
But with age also comes the responsibility to keep learning. As Robert Browning wrote: “The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made.”
This essay was adapted from Gloria Steinem’s forthcoming memoir An Unexpected Life.