Everyday Rebellions...

Yours truly with Gloria Steinam

The event poster

Victor Navasky, Gloria Steinam, and Colum McCann signing books

Sue Leonard

So there was a book discussion at Barnes and Noble for John Leonard's Reading For My Life, which is a collection of essays by the late critic. I am slightly embarrassed to say that at the time I had no clue who John Leonard was; I am not at all embarrassed to say that I attended the event solely because I saw that Gloria Steinem would be on the panel, and that I just had to meet her. How often does one get to shake the hand of a feminist icon and tell her thank you? I'm beginning to grasp more and more the amazing opportunities this city presents. As a national spokeswoman for the Women’s Liberation Movement and for reproductive rights, and as the creator of leading feminist publication Ms. Magazine, and as a journalist who initiated her career by working as an undercover 'bunny' at the Playboy Club and writing a scorching exposé of her experience, and as a prominent figure at rallies for social justice and gender and racial equality, and as the leader of the Women’s Strike for Equality march, and as co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Ms. Foundation for Women, Choice USA, the Women’s Media Center and the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and as the author of several significant books, Ms. Steinem is without a doubt, one of the most influential people of the twentieth century. And there she was sitting before me, 77 years old, and still fighting the good fight. I couldn't take my eyes off of her throughout the entire discussion. I was lost in thoughts about her legacy, about  where my generation of women would be without Ms. Steinem and Susan B. Anthony and Betty Friedan and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth and the hundreds of other feminist activists, and I considered my place in this third wave of feminism. At one point in time towards the end of the evening,  when everyone was up and mingling, Ms. Steinem looked up past the person she was speaking with, looked directly at me, smiled, waved, and asked me how I was as if I was an old acquaintance she hadn't seen in a while. It was odd. I looked around and behind me to make sure that it was in fact directed at me, and it was. Maybe she thought she knew me. Or maybe she just felt my eyes burning holes into her skull and wanted to break the creepy tension. 

I waited patiently for the crowd to disperse. I had every intention of engaging Ms. Steinem in a conversation about the current state of war on women's rights, about the short term and long term feminist agenda, and about personal responsibility in feminism. I saw my window and began to walk towards her. Suddenly beads of sweat came over me, and I began to shake with nervousness. As I approached her, nothing even remotely intelligent came out of my mouth. I think I just told her that it was an honor to meet her and stared at her awkwardly. EPIC FAIL!

I can't think of many documentary films about feminism, which is quite sad really. I should get on that and make one myself! I did overhear Ms. Steinem say that she lived near Hunter College on the Upper East Side, which is only about two miles from my place. HBO produced a documentary last year entitled, Gloria: In Her Own Words. It's entertaining and informative, but it's only an hour long and really quite superficial in its 'exploration' of the woman, and of the movement.

Although I didn't know anything about Mr. Leonard prior to this event, I subsequently fell in love with the man.  His many achievements are too lengthy to detail here, but I will offer a brief introduction. He was known to have read over 13,000 books in his lifetime, he wrote for pretty much every major media outlet from newspapers and magazines to radio and tv shows, and he was co-literary editor of The Nation with his wife, Sue Leonard. He reviewed the most acclaimed writers of his time, including Salman Rushdie,Thomas Pynchon, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, all of whom held him in high esteem. The great Kurt Vonnegut even referred to him as "the smartest man who ever lived." There were several female authors in the audience who stood up and very emotionally credited him for their (successful) careers. He was a champion for women writers and for writers of color, promoting Maxine Hong Kingston and Mary Gordon amongst many others. Apparently, he championed Toni Morrison’s work so fervently that she requested he be present with her in Stockholm when she accepted her Nobel Prize. Ms. Steinem defined Leonard as a staunch feminist, but one that "you didn't have to ask or thank," which I think implied that his being an advocate for social justice and for the women's movement was not a choice he made, it was simply intrinsic to his being, and that he demonstrated that throughout his life and work without fanfare and without expectation of recognition.  I thought it was a wonderfully descriptive phrase that Ms. Steinem used, and incredibly complimentary.  His wife, Sue, and his children, who were all present at the event, humanized him with stories about how much he loved television, particularly VH1, and all things related to pop-culture. He was not only a prolific literary critic, he was a passionate reviewer of films and tv shows, as well as a social and political commentator. As you'll see in this obituary, John Leonard had a reverence for, and a mastery of language:

Ms. Steinem relayed a charming story about her first experience with Leonard, which occurred in 1968, while they were both members of the War Resisters League. In protest of the Vietnam war, the group refrained from paying the part of their taxes that went to the war effort. She described how rebellious, idealistic, and empowered they felt, how they were certain that this plan would help instigate radical change, and how they were certain that their action would pose such a threat that the government would come after them and cart them off to prison. The punch line of course being that absolutely nothing happened; the government had simply taken the remaining debt directly from their bank accounts.

"And since we all came from a woman/ Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman/ I wonder why we take from our women/ Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?/ I think it's time to kill for our women/ Time to heal our women, be real to our women/ And if we don't we'll have a race of babies/ That will hate the ladies, that make the babies/ And since a man can't make one/ He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one / So will the real men get up/ I know you're fed up ladies, but keep your head up" --Tupac Shakur, Keep Ya Head Up