Gloria Steinem: 'If Men Could Get Pregnant, Abortion Would Be a Sacrament'

Steinem talks about Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton – and the new threats to women’s rights.

The pope is in town the morning I visit Gloria Steinem, staying a few blocks from her on the east side of Manhattan, a fact that tickles the 81-year-old activist. She is, needless to say, unimpressed by the pontiff’s liberal window-dressing. “I’m very glad that he cares about the environment,” she says drily. “And poverty. And dogs.” He has also relaxed the language around abortion, urging “forgiveness”, as opposed to damnation. Steinem, who is the nearest thing we have to a grande dame of feminism – a mantle she abhors – laughs. “Excuse me? Are you kidding me? Forgiveness?”

It is not easy to be an old hand in a political movement the very nature of which is, to some extent, to interrogate and reject the assumptions of what came before. When Steinem came of political age, in the late 1960s and early 70s, Betty Friedanruled the roost, urging women to shuck off their domestic duties and grab the economic reins of power, something her feminist descendants praised even while deposing her for the reactionary scope of her interests. (As Bella Abzug said at the time, Friedan’s proposals were in danger of replacing “a white, male, middle-class elite with a white, female, middle-class elite”, a caution Steinem echoed: “We wanted to transform the system, not imitate it,” she says.)

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