Gloria Steinem At 60: Heading Into New Territory

As she settles comfortably into age 60, Gloria Steinem can only marvel at her wrongheadedness a decade ago. When she reached the half-century mark, she recalls, she vowed to keep right on doing everything she did at 30 or 40.

"(T)his was not progress," she admits in her new book. "I was refusing to change, and thus robbing myself of the future."

Well, the future is now. And one of the many things made clear in "Moving Beyond Words" (Simon & Schuster, $23) is that Steinem has embraced the notion of ongoing change with all the dedication and creativity that have marked her leadership in the women's movement for the past 25 years. It wasn't an easy embrace at first.

"The picture of age that is presented to us - especially for women - is so negative that it took me until at least 55 to realize that this was clinging to the past," said Steinem in a conversation at her Seattle hotel. She was here to give a reading from the new book and to speak Saturday at a benefit for the Aradia Women's Health Center, a nonprofit clinic on First Hill.

"My state of mind now bears a resemblance to a youthful state of mind - the sense of going into new territory - but it has the advantage of experience," she explained. She is just as fully engaged but "less trying to control things than seeing how they will turn out."

Steinem is, however, as committed as ever to influencing the social issues to which she's devoted half her years. The six essays in "Moving Beyond Words" show her at her provocative best.

"Doing Sixty" explores her new stage in life as well as "the false division of human nature into `feminine' and `masculine'." She also writes about bodybuilder Bev Francis and the "politics of muscle"; the advertising industry's suffocating effect on magazines; how class and inherited wealth control women born into that seemingly happy condition; and she offers a tough-minded look at economics as a reflection of values, with the resultant "invisibility" of much labor by females.

The longest essay, "What If Freud Were Phyllis? or, The Watergate of the Western World," is a tour de force that virtually dismantles the well-guarded monument of Freudian psychotherapy by reversing the genders of Freud and his psychiatric cohorts. The gender-bending irony that Steinem trowels onto the rubble of the Freudian edifice can make the piece difficult, yet it leaves the stunned reader with an unsettling question: Why have we allowed ourselves to be manipulated by this nonsense all these years?

The most reassuring aspect of Steinem's writing and conversation is that she is perfectly willing to use herself as an example of what not to do. She frequently charts her evolving consciousness, whether discovering she has paid less to women than men for comparable hourly help, or recalling how as a young woman she couldn't identify with the suffragists of an earlier era ("That just shows that we need better histories of social-justice movements").

She even recalls when she perpetuated a lie about her age. She had lowered it to get hired as a Playboy bunny in order to write her famous expose of that "glamorous" job.

"I learned that falsifying this one fact about my life made me feel phony, ridiculous, complicit, and, worst of all, undermined by my own hand," writes Steinem. When she turned 40, she did so publicly - "with enormous relief."

Problems with no name

Now, 20 years after that, what is she proudest of?

"As a writer, helping to find language for problems that had no name before - language that can empower individuals and bring people together," she said, noting how "reproductive freedom" has come to replace the authoritarian-sounding "population control."

Steinem also cited "the building of alternate institutions," such as Ms. magazine and the Ms. Foundation for Women ("the only national, multi-issue, multiracial public women's fund") and working for the political candidates she believes in.

Contributing to change

Finally, she said, she is proudest of "seeing individual people change - the feeling that you contributed to that in any way is endlessly rewarding."

Yet even at her more introspective 60, Steinem feels the press of the climate of violence that today's children grow up in.

"There are societies that aren't violent; it's not an intrinsic, necessary thing," she said, her face radiating a tender wisdom. "Their one shared characteristic is that they don't have polarized sex roles.

"We now raise our daughters more like our sons - but it takes a particular kind of courage to raise our sons more like our daughters."