September 2nd was my mother’s birthday. She would have been 103. Of course I can’t help thinking of her on that day, with all my mixed feelings and memories. One of my more vivid ones, with lots of sensory memory, was stirring a big pot of cream of mushroom soup. She loved my mushroom soup and often requested it on her birthday. As it happened, on the same day in 2026, Gloria Steinem died. She was 92.
Steinem was a heroin and icon of the “new wave” of feminism in the 1970’s in the US and the world. She was never an important figure in my world, because I was much further left than she. I don’t think I have ever read or even touched an issue of Ms. Magazine, which was the legendary women’s magazine she founded in 1971. It was perhaps the first women’s magazine that was devoted to something other than recipes, home décor and how to “please your man.” The first real notice I gave to the magazine, was because of a story told by Betty Dodson.
Betty is on my “women of valor” short list, as she was a champion of women’s sexual pleasure, and spent 50 odd years teaching women about their bodies, that their own pleasure mattered, and she taught thousands of women how to have orgasms. She was also a voice for alternative sexualities, “sex for one,” and regular sexual activity with or without a partner as part of one’s regular health regimen until the end of life.
When Ms. Magazine came about Betty was a young, starving artist living in New York. She had the idea that perhaps it would be a forum for her to write an article about women’s orgasm. She seemed to know already, that countless American women did not even know that there was a category for sexual pleasure for women, believing that sex was an often-onerous duty that women owed to their men, and the way to produce offspring. Of course, it goes without saying that the world then was even more binary in its thinking than now!
Betty wrote what turned out to be an eighteen-page article about women’s sexual pleasure and orgasm, which she summoned her bountiful courage and humility to submit to Ms. It was certainly radical for the new magazine, and Steinem and her editorial staff agreed to publish it, but it would have to be edited. When the copy came back to Betty, she found to her dismay that it had been whittled down from its original 18 to 1.5 pages, with essentially 92% of it left on the cutting room floor. Not wanting to lose the opportunity completely, she agreed to letting the “lite” version go to press, with the following caveat: at the end of the article, they would include an asterisked “offer,” that those who wanted to receive the unedited text could send a self-addressed, stamped envelope with two dollars, to Betty’s PO box. Within a week, her mailbox was jammed with some $20,000.00 in one-dollar bills, which in 1971 was a small fortune, and most especially for a struggling young art student. Most importantly however, Betty shed light on a major need in the world of women (and again I feel I must apologize for a binary the binary perspective,) for information about their own very bodies and well-being. And Ms. Magazine was that first narrow portal, at least for Betty and the US to discover and begin to address this. That was enough for my limited association to Ms. and for Steinem, to be a positive one.
I often lament the way survivors of childhood neglect, have no one to tell and no one to ask about their own bodies, anything really, and most certainly about anything remotely sexual. Puberty sneaks up on the young child and is filled with often frightening mystery. When I started menstruating at age 9, I was terrified, I thought I was bleeding to death. And of course I was sure it was my fault, that I caused it probably by masturbating which I had long since discovered as a comforting, if shamefully secret way to get to sleep. I buried my dirty underwear in the bottom of the garbage can, and desperately worried that when I got up from my little fourth grade school desk, there would be a pool of blood on my chair. Finally, I told my sister, who taught me what to do. Neglect leaves a child in a lonely, scary world. And the wide and silent world of sexuality continues to be absent from our narrative in general.
Neglect and Caregiving
It turns out Gloria Steinem was a child of neglect as well. Her mother, whose name was Ruth, successfully worked as a journalist and educator when her older sister was born. By the time she was pregnant with Gloria, she had a full on “psychological break-down,” a vague term used loosely in those days in reference to a wide variety of symptoms, so I am not sure what that means, but she was in an out of hospitals, and Gloria, like many the child of neglect, discovered (and was saddled with) care-taking as the often only way to be connected to the primary other. By the time of her parent’s divorce when she was eight, Gloria was perhaps her mother’s main caregiver.
And from her mother’s example, Gloria observed and learned some decisive and significant lessons. While Ruth found injustice and conflict intolerably painful; she was simultaneously frozen in fear of speaking up against it. Young Gloria put two and two together and concluded that her mother’s muzzled silence was the cause of her depression and intuitively linked free voice with health and also inherited her mother’s deep concern about the world and passion for fighting injustice.
Gloria’s role as caregiver persisted throughout her childhood, as her mother grew increasingly unwell. Additionally, the young girl painfully observed the patronizing disrespect, judgement or utter blindness to her mother’s suffering. Hospitalizations and medications and steadily worsening mental health, made it impossible for Ruth to work, so in addition to the being thrust into caregiving adulthood from an early age, Gloria grew up in pervasive poverty as well. But her neglect experience, as with many of us, inspired a deep conviction and impetus to make a difference, to in some way ease pain and injustice in the larger world. Ruth lived until 1981, long enough to witness her legacy and her daughter’s contribution.
Gloria married for the first time at age 66. She had believed that marriage was a categorically sexist institution and rebelled against it until she had waged and helped to bring about improved legal and moral status for women. In a non-traditional wedding on the land of a Cherokee friend, she married David Bale, a South African born businessman and animal rights activist. Soon thereafter Gloria was again pitched into the caregiving role when her husband developed brain lymphoma. He died when they had been married only a brief but apparently harmonious three years.
Legacy
One of the advantages of having been alive as long as I have, is witnessing and being part of a lengthening history, and having the stories to share. I am moved and grateful when I see the young people coming behind us, who enjoy some of the hard-won victories, and are also participating in the ongoing fight to protect them. And I have lived to have seen and also lost some important historical figures. Even though Gloria Steinem was not on my short list, she certainly participated in making my life better, and I will remember her and Ms. that way.
A word about next week: I am off to Oxford for the Transform Trauma 2026 Conference. Our team will not be around to post my usual mailing. The team that produced Esther Perel’s May 2026 Sessions Live Conference, has announced that they would like to post my keynote from that conference on Esther’s podcast. I am hoping we will be able to send you that next week. So, stay tuned and have a good week, if I don’t see you there!
